In my last post I asked myself the question if I’m doomed to live a life of struggling for mediocrity. It’s something I want to dive into a bit deeper, so that’s what we’re going to do! Fun, right?
Table Of Content
What is mediocrity?
To know if I’m indeed destined for it, I first have to define mediocrity. It is, first of all, a very subjective term. What may be mediocre to me might be either great or far below mediocrity for someone else. But to me, mediocrity is a life without any excitement. A life of dull, monotonous routine that repeats every day, every week, every month of every year, pretty much until death.
I’m glad that he won’t read this blog when I say that it is the life of my dad, at least when I was a kid. He got up early, listened to the same radio show, got on his bike or in his car to drive to the one single job he had his entire life, returned, ate whatever my mom made (which was always mediocre), napped on the couch, watched the same TV shows and went to bed.
This did not make him happy. I don’t think it made him sad either. It just made him flat. He barely showed emotion most of the time. That, to me, is the definition of mediocrity. It is also how a large portion of humanity lives their life.
How to not become my dad
So my biggest objective in life is kind of to not become my dad. Which sucks because lately I feel more and more like I’m becoming my dad. I’m slowly sinking into a dull routine where I do the same things each day despite those things not making me happy. I go to my job that I hate, get home and do things I don’t especially enjoy just to pass the time and because I lack energy and then I go to sleep to repeat it again the next day. My life is mediocre.
The real painful part is that achieving this mediocrity has taken me so much pain and suffering because of my AvPD. Just getting this job, let alone keeping it for years, was so hard. Going in every day is so fucking taxing on my mental health. I want to run and escape every single day, but I’m paralyzed by fear and self-doubt.
Most people stay in their life of mediocrity because it’s comfortable. My dad probably did it because he’s very likely autistic and didn’t like or even desire change. But I’m not autistic. I desire change and novelty and excitement. I get stuck in mediocrity because I have no energy to escape it. Because the mediocrity itself drains me of every bit of energy.
The vicious circle
I know this isn’t unique. I know a lot of people get stuck in this vicious circle of wanting change but having no energy to achieve it. I’m not saying my suffering is special. The painful thing is that I’m probably barely alive to them. Most of the time these people have kids, lots of social activity, perhaps even multiple jobs or at least a full-time job, sports, family they actually see… They have a good reason to be exhausted and stuck.
I get drained by one part-time job to the point I can barely do my housework. To feel alive and ever find some sort of happiness and freedom in life I need to build a business, work out, make social connections, write, make art, live. But I can’t do my laundry or cook dinner because my brain is fried from my 5 hour workday where I obsessively think about how my coworkers want me dead because I’m a despicable human being.
So am I doomed?
Am I then? Doomed to mediocrity? Or even worse: doomed to suffer and struggle to barely keep up mediocrity?
I really really want to know because if I am, I’m not sure I can take 34 more years of this before I can retire. Lately I’ve been having heart palpitations so maybe I won’t have to suffer for much longer, but this is not it. If there is no escape for this, I might not want to live anymore. There needs to be something else out there, even for me. I need to get out from this trap.
But I don’t do anything. I just freeze and sit there and avoid my misery until the next day comes along. I come home and while I should be working on ways to create income to escape my job or work out to help my mental and physical health along, I just doomscroll on Reddit or I play videogames. I avoid everything that might actually help me on my path out of mediocrity.
It might be laziness. It might be the disorder. It might be something else. But it happens again and again and no matter how many inspirational books or podcasts I consume, I keep falling back into the same fucking patterns of avoiding what needs done. And then I complain about the outcome. I’ve done this for 15 years now since I left school.
15 years. It’s mind-boggling. I could’ve achieved so much. I did achieve a lot, but it feels like because of my disorder my “a lot” will always be the world’s “very very little”. And it will always be my “not enough”.
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