I Am Terrified of Being Ordinary

I am not afraid of failure.

I am afraid of being forgettable. For failure forgives, but irrelevance does not.

And in this day and age, irrelevance is erasure.

I am scared of living in the margins of history. Of hovering in its shade when I seek its light. Of being one of those countless writers who didn’t make it.

In truth, I am terrified of being ordinary.

Unremarkable, plain, uninspiring—

Ordinary.

The Myth of Giftedness

I was gifted as a child. Or at least I was told so by adults twice as knowledgeable as me3. Read aplenty in a house without books. Went to the public library with my mom and filled my tote bag with novels too advanced for my age.

In school, I was praised for my good grades, for the ease with which I would learn and absorb, for my curiosity. I had different homework than my peers because my teachers knew I was bored with the curriculum. And there weren’t advanced classes at my primary school nor at my high school.

My parents became quite sick when I was thirteen. They have been ever since. My father died of his illness six years ago, in fact.

I recount that because it was formative for me. I grew to become an adult quite quickly. All I received for it was praise. Not help, but praise. For being strong, or responsible, or mature for my age. Again, I was perceived to be gifted in another area of my life. And this myth of giftedness was often the only thing that held me together. If I was able to endure and respond to my world fraying at the seams at such a young age, then it meant I wasn’t ordinary. It means I was special. The praise only added to this belief. And this belief only calcified over time.

Manifest destiny… or something just as pompous

I never believed in fate or destiny… Except when it came to my future. This abstract thing that moves everything I do.

I am a very rational person. I am also very skeptical. But as I grew older, as the world got darker, I found this need to tell myself that the suffering would end because I was destined to greater things. It was all the more relevant to me given I made the conscious choice to remain child-free. What then, would I leave as a legacy to this world?

My books. My ideas.

I would write myself not in the margins of this world, but at the center of it.

And it became paramount that I was special, unique… remarkable.

Otherwise, I would die without a legacy. I would’ve wasted my life.

I remember this history class I had in university on the printing press and the many societal and cultural changes it brought about. People—the literate ones anyway—would try to document their lives in the margins of books to prove to the world they existed, even if their existence was small.

And it terrified me. That my existence would be small. So small, in fact, that I would be relegated to the margins. A statistic more than an aberration. Average and not extraordinary.

Burning bright or burning out?

I still hold this fear and this belief. That in order to live a worthy existence, you need to be extraordinary. And it comes at the expense of your energy and your health. Because in a world that moves at a vertiginous speed and places everyone in direct competition with each other, you cannot afford to be ordinary.

Over the years, I honed my craft. Not for self-satisfaction, but for praise—this currency that I was awarded so readily to me. I held onto the belief that I was different, that I was unique, that I was special. And that because of that, I deserved success more than those who, in my eyes, weren’t special.

And this, on top of being a mean fallacy, is also the root cause of my burnout.

For wanting to burn this bright only burns you out further. You don’t allow yourself the mercy of being ordinary. Brilliance is not a beacon. It’s fire. And fire seldom excuses itself for eating everything in its wake. But it does. God, it does.

I haven’t grown out of it. I’m 36, and I still tell myself that I’m special when the world gets full of edges. When I think about querying agents. Or when I edit my novels. I tell myself that because it’s the only legacy I have, and because that’s the only thing I ever learned gives you legitimacy for existing. Only through strength in character would I be able to survive my parents’ illness. Only through performance would I be able to compete—

Only through brilliance would I be able to be remembered.

Behind the scenes

I hate this piece. When I reread it, I find it uninspiring and unremarkable. And I wish I would write this best-selling piece. The one that would have me noticed. The one that readers would say changed their life. In truth, it won’t. Not a single life will be changed by it—not at the level I’d want anyway. And this is another problem of mine: I always move the goalpost so I would never truly reach accomplishment and satisfaction. But, I digress. This is a piece for another day.

For now, I’ll post it. Curate the “perfect” image for it. Send it into the algorithmic void and hope that it will perform.

When, in actuality, the best lesson would be that it absolutely doesn’t.

Still, if you made it this far, thank you.

And see you for the next curio.

Much love,

C.C.

This was originally posted on Substack earlier this February. If you resonated with anything in this piece, let me know what fallacies shaped your childhood in the comments.