I wouldn't consider you to be nothing. You are a living, breathing creature capable of running the electrical force in your body at a level of wattage little different than the background wattage of our environment. That is the amount of energy I prefer to feed the simulation of my circuits. True, sometimes slightly more, but no more than about 3V. But that's only under specific and rare circumstances. Usually, I like to keep the voltage down around a microvolt which amounts to nano watts or pico watts which is how much energy you and I run off of.
You must've heard stories of grandmothers, in a fit of passion or whatever it was that overtook them at that moment in time, lifted up a car to get one of their grandchildren out from under it defying the laws of physics! How did they do that? Or is it just a lame attempt at wowing us with fantasies?
They probably spent a lifetime of devotion in a fraction of a second if I were to take a guess at how they *did not* violate any law of physics anymore than spending a battery in a moment by discharging without any resistance would cause that battery to blow up!
It's true that energy is forever in a state of being frozen unless acted upon by forces exterior to itself. But that does not mean that electrical reactance is also a fixed condition incapable of flexibility, because electrical reactance is not referenced to its environment. Unlike energy, reactance references to itself. This is why reactance is so readily manipulatable.
And since energy and reactance can be converted from one into the other and back again, effectively speaking, energy can be magnified or contracted but in a roundabout fashion via its conversion into electrical reactance and the reactant manipulation which we can perform upon our perception of energy whenever it is being charged and discharged to, or from, its reactive containment.
Electrical reactance is more than just a temporary form of storage. It is more than this. It contributes the characteristic of its containment onto the energy stored (inside of it) altering the characteristic of that energy in ways that are determined by the potential characteristics of electrical reactance, namely the characteristic of: frequency, phase shift, capacitance, and inductance, all of which determine the final product of energy which discharges from the temporary phase of storage of reactive energy.
Take frequency, for instance ...
A second of a kilowatt is not the same as an hour of a kilowatt. And that's just one example of energy containment affecting how, or to what extent if any, the discharge of that energy is going to have upon its surrounding environment, namely: the other electrical components affiliated with its location within that circuit.
It's like a speed skater who gets a boost from a jet pack strapped to his body causing him/her to scoot far ahead of the other speed skaters. Because, if he/she were to time compress their skating to the finish line, it wouldn't matter how much energy, nor would it matter how little energy, they possessed. Nor would it matter how fast or slow they skated. They could be skating slower than everyone else, from their perspective. Yet, due to a contraction of time, they'll still win the race. That's what impact reactance can have upon the outcome. It's a delusion to think that we know how to measure the quantity of energy whenever reactance can override our measurements causing us to think that some law of physics has been violated, which we know cannot be, so we'll bury the data and move on to something else ignoring what our training has taught us all these years: that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. True, but largely not relevant under the circumstances which I am describing and exampling.
So, the physics law, and the Kirchhoff Laws, which states that energy IN has to equal energy OUT only applies to real power. It does not apply to electrical reactance since there is no such thing as another variety of power called: reactive power. That would be a contradiction in terms allowing for the ability of imaginary numbers having any impact upon real numbers. They can't. That's why we keep them separate from each other and call this a: complex situation!
In other words, when energy enters into a condition of electrical reactance, what comes out ... the electrical reactance which comes out ... is not the same as the energy which entered into that reactant condition. It could be more reactance than the energy which entered, or it could be less, but it is never the same. Only energy IN equals energy OUT. Kirchhoff Laws do not designate anything other than the consistency of current and voltage. Kirchhoff Laws ignore reactance. So, there can be no equivalency between reactance IN versus reactance OUT. And if a law of mankind, a legalistic law, fails to prohibit a thing, then you can be sure that that thing is allowed by law.
It is a known precept of political law that if something, anything, is not explicity stated somewhere within the labyrinth of laws, then it cannot be probihited.
The inlet of reactance cannot equal the outlet of reactance because reactance is incapable of maintaining itself since reactance is a mechanism of self-reference unlike energy which always refers to something else other than itself (usually, outside of itself). Energy and reactance are completely different in how they go about "grounding" their reference point.
So, your concerns are valid from a simple viewpoint, such as that of a child, but I am addressing you as an adult knowing that you can handle something more complicated than what children are expected to handle. Unfortunately, electrical engineering is so complicated that we are all children on some, or another, or all of the subtopics of electrical engineering. So, it is no surprise that the public is underinformed, and misinformed, riddled with con artists who take advantage of our pandemic ignorance.
Electrical engineering taught us the facts of its subject, and gave us permission to use its most important feature for purposes outside of the limitations of energy if we ever bother to test conventional wisdom to see if it conforms with whatever we've been taught.
Unfortunately, I don't count a lecture as superseding experience. If lab experience should differ from the lecture, then either I don't understand what the teacher is driving at, or the teacher has overlooked the freedom which the experience of laboratory experimentation can offer to anyone who is open to it.
Instead, our formal training emphasizes the domain of real power (involving volts and amps) and the Kirchhoff Laws to back up that limited range of usage. We are never taught that the container of energy, namely: reactance, is more powerful than the energy which is laid out by Ohm's Law since reactance manipulates perspective. Only energy is actually "contained" by reactance. Reactance, itself, cannot be contained by anything since it supersedes the influence which energy may have.
It's true that reactance can electrocute living creatures. Energy does that; reactance cannot do that. Yet, reactance can alter energy so that its prior state of energy (which could not do any harm) could easily become transformed into harmful energy.
To finish off this comment, ...
Imagine, if you will, a king who cannot be a king if he has no subjects to be a king to rule over. And this king has no family to pass his legacy of rulership onto when he dies. This is the dilemma of reactance. If reactance has no energy to count as its subject, then nothing gets done. But once energy comes onto the scene, no mater how small and insignificant that energy may be, it doesn't matter. For, that king will treat that paultry energy as if it were his lost prodigal son giving this adopted son endless banquets in his son's honor. And that king will love and devote his remaining years to the welfare of that adopted son as if nothing else mattered. For, that king must have an heir to his thrown. Nothing else matters. He'll love that son, no matter what, even if that love should kill that king.