The epitome of blatant mediocrity
As an illustration of my germinating contempt for this book, I offer a memory, one of those fleeting moments involving a random person, completely insignificant in the scheme of my life, but absurdly burned into my brain forever.
The summer after freshman year in high school I spent eight weeks at a prestigious music camp in Michigan. It was my first time on an airplane and my first time spending this much time away from home.
I knew that I was not the most worldly kid, but I lacked any frame of reference. I was a big fish with no sense of just how small my pond was. I believed I was some kind of musical prodigy; this was the summer when I would find out I am not. I fancied myself brilliant, capable of anything, going places, able to hack it with the best of the best; the moment I am about to describe knocked over that house of cards.
My initial impression of RJ was as a future husband, but that in itself is hardly notable. From approximately ages eight to 29, I devoted the majority of my conscious thinking to boys. “Boy,” really, as most of the time it was just one at a time. My mind was a living room, a giant picture frame above the fireplace that all the furniture pointed at. If at a given moment the frame happened to be empty, the first priority was always to fill it. Music camp was a brand new environment; the frame was empty. RJ was within my “type”: skinny, pale, dark hair (think David Krumholtz, one of my early celebrity crushes).
I need to be clear: my crushes reflected only my lack of self-regard. On some level I think I even knew that I was using these boys, or the idea of them. I was running on fumes and pursued their attraction and romantic interest as fuel; if a boy I could maybe want wanted me, I was worth something. And in the absence of that, I could at least daydream about that prospect all day every day.
Alright, that’s quite the windup. Back to RJ.
A few of us were in some kind of atrium: Me, RJ, two or three girls from Japan, maybe some others? I think RJ was the only boy. We must have been in a class together, or near one another, and between classes. We had been biding time, chatting awkwardly in our blue polo shirts and knee socks, the camp’s distinctive uniform. I indulged in my early crush energy and the dopamine hit it brought me.
At some point in the conversation RJ began proffering descriptions of everyone. It had an air of fortune telling. What does RJ think of you, after having just met you?
The first couple of phrases he threw out about others seemed flattering enough, intriguing but benign. Then he came to me, and pronounced me:
The epitome of blatant mediocrity.
He smiled wryly saying it. Though I didn’t know what “epitome” or “mediocrity” meant, I received this glib title as possible flirtation. In the moment, I was not put off or embarrassed at my lack of understanding. My self-perception was one of a smart person so if I didn’t know a word, it wasn’t a word that I would be expected to know. I might have even assumed these weren’t real words.
In any case, I asked him what the words meant and he refused to tell me. We teased each other about it. My budding crush was still intact.
At some point, it must have been later, in a library? I got my hands on a dictionary and looked up the words.
Mediocrity—Average. Ordinary.
Epitome—the perfect example of something.
Blatant (though I didn’t need to look up this word)—obvious.
Crash! The frame shattered before RJ’s photo even came into focus.
I was a lot of things… ugly, acne-prone, bony, flat-chested, socially incompetent, clumsy, uncool, unpopular, emotional, a crybaby. But ordinary? Not merely vanilla, but so average, so lacking in anything interesting, as to epitomize uninteresting? And my boringness was so obvious that it could be discerned within a half hour of meeting me?
On some level, though, wasn’t “mediocrity” kind of a compliment? If I am average, I’m not hideous. If I’m average, I’m not unloveable. If I’m average, people aren’t immediately repulsed by me. I do recall feeling a little twinge of relief mixed in, but the reaction was at bottom shame, abject horror.
I did not at the time understand why. Thanks to Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, now I do.
Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve. When a culture’s standard of success is to “be extraordinary,” it then becomes better to be at the extreme end of the bell curve than to be in the middle, because at least there you’re still special and deserve attention. Many people choose this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miserable, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized.
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter.
That’s right; I had grown up in a culture in which the middle of the pack is the worst thing I could be. While I regarded myself as the extreme low end of the bell curve of appearance, attractiveness, desirability to boys, all the things that my gender uses to measure success … what comforted me was my knowledge that I was an extraordinary talent, an extraordinary mind.
Then RJ told me that I wasn’t, using words that embodied that truth (I didn’t even know the words, so my mind clearly wasn’t extraordinary).
In that moment I became no longer just the awful things I think about myself as a girl (these toxic messages are so intrusive and pervasive to an adolescent girl who doesn’t check the beauty boxes that no inflation to “average” could soothe them). Now I’m ugly, acne-prone, socially incompetent, and the very definition of not special and not deserving attention.
Over the rest of the summer, I recall seeing RJ around. I don’t think I ever really interacted with him after that. My crush was gone. I began looking at him with an eye to tearing him down in my mind the way he had torn me down. I noticed that he walked with a slight limp, that his eyes were small and beady, his nose was pointy, hair greasy, arms and legs gangly. How could I have been drawn to him?
As I repeatedly destroyed him in my own mind to cope, the most destroyed was of course me: how awful must I be for this person to have rejected me?
Well that was wrenching. Notwithstanding my penchant for graphic emotional pontification, I do not consciously dwell on this moment in which some teenage boy called teenage-girl me unremarkable. I can CBT my RJ experience in a way that my 14-year-old self couldn’t; I look back and immediately see RJ’s insecurities. Maybe he did like me and was negging me. Maybe he was projecting his own shadow. Maybe he just couldn’t think of anything at the moment and wanted to sound fancy. In any event why should I care about a five-word characterization from a 16-year-old I barely know? My 44-year-old mind truly doesn’t.
But isn’t this blog supposed to be about the 5AM club?
Chapter 4: “Letting Go of Mediocrity and All That’s Ordinary.”
Oh.
More soon.