why being average can feel like failure.

Personal reflection on how ordinary achievement can become entangled with visibility, self-worth, and the pressure to stand out.

If I had to tattoo one word on my forehead, it’d be average. Everything I did felt average, and more often than not I felt like I was moving without getting anywhere. I treated “average” like a verdict instead of a description, like proof I’d failed to become someone worth noticing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was mistaking average for failure.

I watched Severance, a psychological thriller about employees whose work and personal memories are surgically separated. Their outie steps into a work elevator and leaves eight hours later with no memory of what happened inside. Their innie exists only at work, stuck in sterile hallways and handed a sense of purpose by the company. One character, Dylan, stuck with me. In the second season, his wife is allowed to spend time each week with his innie. Through those conversations, the innie learns that Dylan struggles in his life outside of work. He also sees the relationship differently because he doesn’t carry the same history and pressures as Dylan’s outie. It made me think about how having a lot going on can get in the way of seeing what’s actually happening in your own life.

Most of my twenties have been spent trying to figure out where I’m doing well, or if I’m doing well at all. During a period when my mental health was at its lowest, I found out my ex was calling me a loser online. Hearing that didn’t create a new fear. It confirmed one I already had. At a point where my self-worth was barely holding together, hearing that made everything feel decided. I was also dealing with medical issues that hadn’t been diagnosed yet, and I didn’t have the energy to defend myself against that kind of judgment.

I was exhausted all the time. I was gaining weight and watching my self-esteem drop as my health declined. Because I didn’t know what was wrong physically, I treated the symptoms like personal failure. Most days felt like something to get through, not evidence that I was moving forward. I changed how I dressed to avoid noticing my body. I shut down emotionally. I pulled back from people. After a while, it stopped feeling possible to imagine myself succeeding at anything.

Eventually, it felt like people didn’t want me in their lives. Whether that was fully true mattered less than how it changed the way I showed up. I’ve always struggled socially, and fitting cleanly into groups has never come easily. A lot of my life has been spent trying to prove I was at least competent enough to belong somewhere in the middle. I felt average as a pianist, as a writer, as a student, as a worker, as a friend, and as a person.

There were still moments that mattered, even then. Learning a difficult song, getting a genuine compliment on something I wrote, hitting an achievement at work. None of these made me exceptional, but they were real. They took effort. For a long time, I brushed them off because they didn’t add up to some larger transformation, as if effort only counted when it led somewhere obvious. Eventually, I started to see that something could still matter without making me exceptional.

I accepted that I’d never be the best at anything, and I was fine with that. Being the best was never the goal. I also became more aware of how much the world rewards visibility and self-promotion, and how little that comes naturally to me. I’d started to connect being average with being unnoticed, as if standing out were proof that what I was doing mattered more. I often feel outside a culture that treats being noticed like it’s the same thing as being valuable.

Creating this website was never about attention. It was about having a place to think clearly and work through ideas without performing them. If someone reads my writing and feels a little less alone because of it, that matters more to me than being recognized. Sharing my work publicly means being seen, but I don’t feel any pull toward visibility for its own sake. I want the work to reach someone who recognizes themselves in it and feels steadier as a result.

There are billions of people in the world, and my ideas aren’t rare. That doesn’t make individual effort meaningless. I may not stand out in the way I once thought I needed to, but I’m learning how to show up honestly in my own life.

Being average isn’t a failure. It’s a position most people occupy, and the problem was never that I was average. It was that I’d started treating being noticed as proof that what I did mattered. I don’t need to be exceptional for what I do to matter.

Written in April 2025. Edited August 2026.