Runner-Up | I may be useless in the real world, but boy, am I happy here

“We all want to believe we’re exceptional — whether it’s in health, sports, academics — and very few of us actually are.”

— High school English teacher

The classroom bristles; they (wealthy, predominantly white) are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the idea of being unremarkable.

Long ago, I’d all but abandoned the pursuit of being exceptional. I was a gifted kid gone sour: my potential had overripened in middle school, and the rot began creeping in my first year of high school. The few highs of academic validation I still received were no longer hitting — getting another poem published was exciting, but I’d done it before. An honorable mention in a national poetry contest was embarrassing, actually. And while we’re on this journey downhill, a math teacher accused me of doing cocaine and another made me cry. I was still smart, sure, but that intelligence was limited by my interest, which quickly faded to black with my mental health.

I am not claiming to be one of the few exceptional people out there; I’m good at things, sure, but not particularly so. I’m a bit too gloomy for remarkability. Too plump with deficiencies.

It’s not that I don’t want to be great — of course I do. I, like most, idealize exceptionalism. How can one be fulfilled without being impressive? But now that I’m in college, surrounded by other young, electric minds and on the cusp of the next decade of my life, I am now more than ever faced with the fact that I could not be further from extraordinary.

Mediocrity, however, does not mean failure. It might mean breaking down at the inability to write a perfectly articulate 300-word assignment or dense hesitations when introduced with a first-time task, but most of the time, completion and achievement are relatively synonymous. Recognizing this has, naturally, been viciously conflicting. Every part of my identity has somehow been tied to some triumph, some king-sized feat from the hands of a girl who couldn’t tell you a thing about herself save for the fact that she likes to read. (Which, until fairly recently, was an achievement in and of itself; a well-read teenager! Scarce, it seemed, at best.)

Even so, mediocrity certainly feels like failure. It warrants the same pitiful, patronizing response: “You’re almost there! With a little more practice/focus/discipline/innate talent, you could really be great.” In other words, you weren’t successful, but you can be — the caricatured binary of accomplishment.

Here, in college, everyone has different goals. Everyone is striving for so much more than just graduating, and that’s why I can’t be remarkable: I’m not meant to be. Not in the self-help, fatalistic way, but because comparing myself to those with marketing internships, art exhibitions, or medical fellowships is — generously — useless. As much as I have to come to terms with the fact that I can’t be good at everything anymore, I’m relieved of the pressure that I have to.

Desperate, I did the only thing I hadn’t yet tried to scrape back together some semblance of happiness: enjoy things. Rather than writing to win awards or painting to prove something or reading to reassert my scholarly hobby, I began doing so simply because it was something I loved doing. (I also finally abandoned the idea that I could ever redeem myself in mathematics.) Although this self-prescribed freedom is, of course, not a cure-all, it allowed me something invaluable: the ability to cope.

While some part of me still clings to the smarts that made me special, the rest of me has quietly, slowly laid them to rest. Like a snake shedding its skin that no longer fits, I relinquished my expectations to be forgotten underfoot by those who gave them to me in the first place, and I imagine what it feels like to walk toward the sun.