Being special sounds good, but it usually doesn’t feel that way. It usually starts with the kind of attention you received in childhood. If your parents pampered and overprotected you, you probably weren’t adequately prepared for taking on responsibility. It wasn’t that your parents gave you too much but that they also didn’t insist on giving you what you needed.
On the other hand, if you were singled out for negative attention, you got an entirely different sense of being special . If your parents weren’t adequately prepared to accept you as a person in your own right, they probably protected themselves from taking responsibility for who you were. Your parents may have given a great deal to you, but most often they gave what they needed to give rather than what you needed to receive.
Now you have the chance to take charge of your own feelings. There’s still time to give up the old belief of being special (“ terminal uniqueness” one AA old-timer called it) and enjoy the comforting reality of being both good and bad like the rest of us.
Accepting that we are ordinary is an unexpected gift.