It’s a common feeling. Hundreds of people on a busy street and every move you make matters. How you hold yourself. How you take that next step. Suddenly you make eye contact with someone. A crack in the path trips you up slightly. All eyes are on you.

It’s something ingrained in us from an early age and solidified in our teens. At any moment that small trip could cause laughter, silent judgement, embarrassment. Many people bury that feeling while for others, avoiding going outside or long term social anxiety are all harsh realities.

Only in the last few years I've begun to imagine the people in those busy crowds as the tip of a thousand icebergs. The depth of which I cannot see. The weight of which I cannot fathom. The friends they must have. The lives they would lead. The amazing and the mundane.

I also began to realize that like me, sitting and staring at the countless, faceless beings passing me by, my own anonymity to them must also be true. How many of those strangers would I remember tomorrow? How many have I already forgotten?

How much impact would you ever hope to have on their lives…

…in which you might appear only once.

As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of traffic passing on the highway. As a lighted window at dusk.

It was only when I came across the term sonder in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that I found a way to describe this feeling. This shift of self awareness to one of increased comfort among my peers on this tiny planet.

John Koenig can describe sonder far more elegantly than I.

While Koenig describes sonder as the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, the realization that you are just a blur in the background is one that resonates just as strongly.

Suddenly you’re not the punchline to every joke. The focus of ridicule. The shaking body in the spotlight. The dropped cup of coffee in the cafe. The parent with a screaming child. You’re nothing.

And it’s absolutely liberating.

You will be forgotten in moments. Those crowds of people won’t know your name. Hell they won’t even remember your face. No matter how unique, how different, how socially awkward you are. You will pass across the stage of their lives like tumbleweed.

Sonder isn't just the realization that everyone has a story. It’s the freedom to be yourself, a single extra of billions just like you, in a story you’ll never read.