mediocrity is a knife

it's a knife when you don't know if you'll ever amount to anything spectacular

I’m standing in the shower, lost in a trance of my own making, when it finds me again. My brain, a never-ending vortex of questions, abruptly stills as the fear I’ve silently and secretly reckoned with creeps out of the bottomless pit it’s been fruitlessly tethered to. The steam rises around me as I blankly stare at nothing, wholly consumed by the simple yet painful question, the one I refuse to think about for too long at the risk of making myself sick: am I mediocre?

The chains that held that feeling back have loosened; the links clank as I try to shove that fear back down, finish my shower in peace and move on with my day. I am special, I repeat over and over like a mantra. I will create something I am proud of, I’m on that path, and it might take some time, but I will get there. I say it until the words blend together, iwillcreatesomethingiamproudof, and lose all meaning. I need to stop this, shut it down before I spiral and sta— it’s too late, the door is open.

Is it greedy to want this so desperately? To ache with the need to contribute a tangible piece of myself to the world, give them something to remember me by? Please let me create something special; let me leave this monotony behind and evolve into something greater. I don’t care if it’s greedy, my hunger is too strong.

There’s an unpleasant, ever-present dichotomy within me: a part of me longs to create something everlasting and wonderful, achieve the effortlessly cool name-dropped-into-casual-conversation-status, remain “relevant,” and find myself satiated with the knowledge that I’ve become something spectacular, yet that side is constantly warring with the piece of me, the realistic one, that simultaneously craves and fears a quiet life that lacks any true stand-out “wow” factor. I puzzle it out over and over, trying to shove pieces in places they don’t go, edges folding over and losing shape as I continuously try to force something into being. How can I turn myself into the prototypical, perfect blend of spectacular and plain, can’t both exist together?

How to describe mediocrity—it goes beyond being average, ordinariness, all of the bland, soulless words Miriam and Webster use. It’s the ticking time bomb in your ear, counting down how long you have in your lifetime to create something special. It’s waking up in a cold sweat after a nightmare where you’re forgotten again and again, every bit of what makes you special and unique fading into oblivion. I cannot just be mediocre, there has to be something there, a lifeline for me to grab and pull myself to the shores of success. I tell myself that my writing is my creative project, but isn’t the reason I publish online to fulfill that dream of being spontaneously discovered, like the singers who would go to local karaoke nights with producers magically in the audience, ready to sign them to a record label and change their life? Or is that the stuff of myth?

Even though I pretend I don’t, I constantly compare myself and my work to my peers, to people with more followers than students in my high school, to writers with New York Times bestsellers, to people my age with book deals and shelves full of published novels in Barnes and Noble. I reflect on my ordinary, perfectly adequate life, and I crave something bigger. I have to be destined for greatness; isn’t that what my teachers, mentors, and relatives, told me as a child? I’m 23 now, practically middle-aged by internet standards, and what do I have to show for it? I can follow trends for you, silently pose, show off the lines of my body in the TikTok-popular clothes, or cook with my face perfectly angled to preserve the illusion of nonchalance, the beautiful lines of my face aligning with the sharp sleeves of my vintage dress, if that’s what you want. I’ll rebuild myself over and over to become the most palatable version, the one you see, and immediately click “follow.”

Sympathy is a knife, maybe Charli was onto something. That podcast host or blogger or former Tumblr girl or lifestyle tiktoker has a perfectly curated Instagram with tens of thousands of followers. She’s partnering with fashion brands I’ll never be able to afford, her followers brand her a“niche internet micro-celebrity.” She’s someone creating something— a brand, a product, a legacy for herself —and I want that so badly that the sharp edges of the comparison and the “you should still be proud of yourself” comments cut me. I couldn’t even be her if I tried. Everyone is “relatable” until they aren’t. The lifestyle content is based around a budget, until suddenly she’s signing six-figure brand deals, and that budget now involves caviar and champagne for self-care days. There’s a point, always, where the mediocrity that tethers the rest of us to the ground is surpassed; suddenly she’s floating above us, transformed into a beautiful butterfly, her “best self,” her final form, the picture of success and perfection, and we are still mere caterpillars.

lady bird, 2017 (my all-time favorite movie)

I remember the day I downloaded Instagram—2013, I think. My friends were already on it and would brag about how many comments, likes, and followers they had. I immediately had to play catch-up, pick the perfect profile picture (maybe one without my glasses on) start posting, and follow everyone I knew would quickly follow me back; the need to prove popularity with a number, a solid metric of coolness instantly snapped into place. Reach 500 followers to assert dominance over the rest of the middle schoolers, let them know you’re someone to be looked at in awe. Too many followers, they think you’re a slut; too few, they think you’re weird, socially irrelevant. Today I hit 427 followers, I would say during lunch hour, and my friends would recite their numbers off the top of their heads: 356, 503, 468, 294—but their last post received almost 100 likes. we had no idea we were preparing ourselves for 11 years of the same never-ending cycle: proving our relevance to those around us, secretly harboring hopes of virality, internet fame, something bigger than the monotony of being wholly mundane.

I’m in a cage of my own making, straining at the iron bars and fighting to escape. I want to be special, but I fear what comes with that; I fear that I’ll never “make it;” I fear becoming something spectacular and losing myself; I fear the girl who does the same thing as me but better; I fear you forgetting me; I fear a life I can’t predict; I fear the polite smiles when you tell me I’m a good writer, that I should be published someday; I fear being published, writing that novel because then what? Then I reckon with the fact that even if I achieved this ambiguous “something,” maybe it’s not good enough, there’s never perfection, the follower count doesn’t match up with the effort put in. I keep comparing myself to the ambiguous, perfect, forever-known, her.

Mediocrity pulls me through the bars of the cage. It lets me escape, returns me to the side of the bars where I am perfectly ordinary—writing and minding my business and squashing the dreams of grandeur. I can worry about real-world problems like, I don’t know, taxes and finishing the book that’s been on my nightstand for months, what to have for dinner, where to go on a date, clean, easy problems for a perfectly normal girl. I want to want that, to be perfectly satisfied with the life I do have, to accept the path of standard and easy happiness, and every time I think I’m there, that I no longer crave being your dream girl’s dream girl— or perhaps more accurately, your favorite writer’s favorite writer—in a heartbeat, the fear finds me again. I can always count on the buried longing for greatness to resurface, call me mediocre, and slowly but surely jump back into the dark pit of my emotions, chain pulling tight once more—an endless cycle of will I or won’t I be great—and I’m right back in the cage.

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thank you for reading, thank you for supporting people’s princess, and thank you for letting this dream slowly happen.

with love,

sarah 💌

p.s.: weekly favorites

• my new dress

• brat and it’s completely different but also still brat (specifically “everything is romantic ft. caroline polachek)

• the date paul and i had on sunday

• the squirrel that lives on my balcony (paul and i named him count spookula)

• candle that my mom got for me when i moved

• she’s always hungry by eliza clark

• this playlist