When Did Ordinary Become the New Failure?
Stop feeling ashamed for not being superior to the rest of humanity.
This story starts with resurrection and ends with death.
The resurrection started with a few TED talks, running a marathon, and The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown.
Before this awakening, I had been given a steady diet of conservative Christian literature. I read a lot of fiction, the classics, things required in school, and the talks I heard were sermons from the pulpit. Anything self-helpy had a Christian bent to it.
I remember the angst I felt as a young twenty something, knowing that there was more out there to learn, and I had to get my hands on it. After an angry outburst of frustration one day, my mother asked me, “What is it you want?!” and all I could think to say was “mentorship” and start crying in sadness. The church had reached its max for me, I didn’t know why I felt suffocated, I just knew that I needed some guidance.
It is not an exaggeration for me to say, Youtube has changed my life.
It was there I watched TED talks by people spreading ideas about dreaming big, the psychology of changing your mind to change your life, philosophies on happiness. I learned how to train for a marathon, and I took up running as a hobby that kept me sane for 3 years. YouTube opened up portals, eventually taking me around the world and on a pilgrimage of discovering my creativity through writing, video, and music.
On a trip in South America, a friend let me borrow The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, and the voracious reader in me took off into the world of self-help and self-improvement. I was mind blown and staggered as I grew self-aware, and lights began to brighten the blind spots that had been unseen.
Then the deconstruction of faith started.
Because when you’re going to ask questions about yourself and the way you see the world, nothing is out of bounds. In the pursuit of growth, it is inevitable that the religious formation I was put through would be questioned. And that’s what brought the “Revival” or resurrection.
In the churches that I grew up in, we had these yearly “revival meetings” where people are encouraged to rededicate their lives to God. In the olden days, revival meetings were services held to gain new converts and make people repent from their old sinful ways; they were held in tents, churches, and town halls. I grew up learning about the “Great Awakening” a religious revival movement during the 1730s and 1740s that brought a renewed dedication toward religion. These preachers came through the towns and used fear, guilt, and shame to get people to change their lives.
The beautiful irony is that my own revival and awakening happened as a movement away from religion, with less dogma and rigidness. My small cosmos exploded and my world expanded. I wanted to be kinder and more compassionate, less judgmental and more inclusive. I saw God in a different light, I felt more clear about myself and other humans around me, I felt more alive than ever.
I felt resurrected.
Dug up from a deep hole.
But, I was about to enter a new deep and dark hole.
There was a dark storm cloud brewing in the distant horizon, and the winds of paradox were speeding up its approach.
What the self-help industry won’t tell you is: you know self-improvement has worked when you don’t need it anymore. The dark side of these resources is the perpetuation of making people feel like there’s something you always need to improve. Just as nothing is ever good enough in religion, my new religion of self-awareness and growth also had no satiation.
A few months ago I was looking online for a 12 step AA group, wondering if it might help me with my addiction to self-improvement. It’s such a meta moment when you’re looking for help for your problem with self-help.
Somehow continuing on the self-help road was less painful than admitting that maybe nothing is wrong. That I am enough. That I’m ok enough.
But who wants to be just OK? I want to be extraordinary!
EXTRA-ordinary.
The storm finally came over me, and I was rained on with a two year (and still counting) stint with depression.
Everything I made: a written piece, a video, a podcast I started, nothing was good enough. In fact, I was ashamed of everything I made, because it wasn’t GREAT. It wasn’t extraordinary or superior. The self-awareness I had gained in my quest for self-improvement had turned into deep judgment and shame for not being “successful/fit/rich/pretty/smart/spiritual/intellectual” beyond average.
I’m tired.
Depression has a way of taking all the filters, rose-colored glasses, and bullshit away.
The girl who wanted to do an Ironman triathlon, write a couple books, film a docuseries, learn a few more languages, travel to Antartica, give a TED talk, do all these crazy inspirational things that people will LOVE … that girl is dying a slow death. She’s getting buried underneath the dirt of reality; the reality that most people will be average and ordinary.
And I am most people, even if my ego and vanity do not like this fact.
But since when did ordinary become the new failure?
I’ve carried around this deep fear of not being exceptional, a burden of expectations to be above average, a sickness to be remarkable.
Even in the church culture I grew up in, I was told that I should surrender to the “higher calling of God” so I could live a worthwhile life. In church there were regular lay people who just lived ordinary lives worried about mundane things, and then there were people chosen by God to be spiritual leaders, the ones living with a “higher purpose”.
This sounds very similar to a lot of the self-help stuff you read in books, blogs, hear on podcasts, and see on Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter. It creates this fear that you’re somehow wasting your life, that you’re not maximizing your potential, that you’re not doing and achieving enough because you have an ordinary life. And so creeps in the dangerous thought that maybe a life is not truly worthwhile unless it is notable and great.
Could this be true? Is the average human worthless? Must we all strive to be superior to the rest of humanity?
Of course not, no one would say this out loud, but we say it in our acceptance of striving to be extraordinary and punishing ourselves when we keep landing in ordinary spaces. Since when does “maximizing potential” have to look flashy, have influence, be rich, and be loud and in your face?
I believe my mom maximized her potential as a nurturing mother. After years of deep work, I’ve come to the understanding that she literally had no more to give us emotionally and psychologically. She truly was maxed out.
We don’t talk about maximizing our potential to be loving and kind humans, and since when did you explore your potentials and capacity for compassion?
Potential is more than your talents, making money, and having influence, but this seems to be the narrative of living an “extraordinary” life, as defined by most of our culture. If you can’t measure it against the values society has conditioned us to accept, then it doesn’t count as something special.
I hear these aspirational, inspirational people say things like: “it’s lonely at the top” and I think this is ironic and shows what we value. Because, are you truly at the top, is it a true summit of life if you’re lonely? Why would the pinnacle be the place where you accept being alone? I don’t think this sounds like a great goal, or something exceptional. We forget that where so many over-achievers achieve certain successes, they fail at other aspects of life. Many have ruined health, broken relationships, a non-existent spiritual life, and emotional distress. It really boils down to what you value, and sometimes you have to achieve things in order to find what you truly value and do not value after all. What do you really want? What do our hearts yearn for? Maybe the “top” is a place where we find belonging, connection, and no longer feel cold, isolated, and alone. Maybe that’s a better place.
There’s this quote from J.D. Salinger’s book, Franny and Zooey that nails this values conundrum:
“Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
If I had this courage to be a nobody, then I could freely and authentically choose what I truly value.
And maybe I’d be able to surrender my vanity and ego driven need for exceptionalism.
This season of wrestling with depression and the mental breakdown of the past few months are finally putting the tyranny of proving my worthiness to death.
There’s an underlying fear that if I accept mediocrity, then I’ll never want to improve, I’ll have no motivation or ambition, or desire to do something great. What if I’m one of the rare few that was truly destined for exceptionalism? But as a child of immigrants, and as a recovering workaholic and over-achiever, I’ll never be short on ambition, the true task is to curb it and live a satisfied life, a life of enough. And this will be a daily battle. I know myself. Nothing has ever been enough in the past 30 years, and it isn’t going to change overnight.
I’m laying to rest the idea that we are failures for not beating statistical odds.
I want to take back the right to be ordinary, so I can be free to actually do my best and not be ashamed of it not being the next greatest hit.
I’m grieving the death of my need for maximizing transcendent experiences, the desire for every moment of my life to be extraordinary, and I want to make room to be present.
To experience presence in the here and now, the ordinariness of everyday, and surrender to the beauty I find in it.
The paradox of it all is, the more I observe, the more I listen to my heart that pumps the life in me, consider the lungs that do their thing, and think about how everyone else around me has things inside them that keeps them alive, and how it is all improbable for us to be here in the first place… well, then everything is kind of miraculous in its own way, and nothing is really quite ordinary when you learn to see.
I don’t want to rest in peace only when I’m six feet under the ground, I want experience resting peaceably in my own skin, while I’m still alive and breathing. To stop stressing, striving, shaming and punishing myself for not being superior to the rest of humanity, and rest…
Rest in the peace of the ordinary.
