mistaking average for failure.

If I had to tattoo one word on my forehead, it’d be average. Everything I did felt average. I wasn’t thriving, and more often than not it 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 hasn’t found a place where he feels settled or where he’s doing particularly well, and without being told directly, the innie comes to his own conclusion about who he is in the real world.

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, it made everything feel decided. I was 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. I was watching my self-esteem drop alongside my health. Because I didn’t know what was wrong physically, I treated the symptoms like personal failure. Each day became something to get through instead of something to move through. 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. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t point to a role or skill that felt like mine. 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, like effort only counted if it led somewhere obvious.

I accepted that I’d never be the best at anything, and I was fine with that. Being the best was never the goal. What stuck with me was how much the world rewards visibility and self-promotion, and how little I naturally align with that. 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 does mean being seen, but I don’t feel any pull toward visibility for its own sake. I’m uncomfortable with my appearance, and if it were possible to exist without a physical body, I’d choose that. What I want is simpler than attention. 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. Most ideas already exist in some form. Stories recycle themes. That doesn’t make individual effort meaningless. I may not stand out in the way I once thought I needed to, but I’m still learning how to show up honestly in my own life.

Being average isn’t a failure. It’s a position most people occupy, even if few are taught how to live inside it without shame. The problem was never that I was average. It was that I was taught to treat visibility as value and obscurity as loss. I’m here, paying attention, and continuing without needing to be exceptional to justify it.

Written in April 2025.