15 Struggles Only People Who Are Average At Everything Understand

1. The concept of “doing what you love” in life isn’t as simple as people make it out to be. “Following your dreams” also has to coincide with you being… you know… good at them. Usually exceptionally good at them. This is a constant internal disappointment only perpetually average people understand.

2. You know the struggles of not quite being fat, but not quite being thin either.

3. You never took advanced classes in school, and that had you convinced you were overall just “stupid.” There’s an unspoken stigma there, and it’s that if you’re not exceptional at everything, you’re not good at anything.

4. So you shocked everybody who expected nothing of you when you got that luxe job or cool internship or graduated with honors. (There’s a trend I’ve noticed, and it’s that a lot of successful people are the ones who you’d least expect — and I think there’s a correlation there.)

5. You were always the kid whose name the teacher would always get wrong.

6. You don’t always get the recognition you deserve. Even when you worked just as hard or harder than someone else, because your output didn’t align, you didn’t get the credit that they did. You were never the example, even though you put in just as much effort (and it’s an unfair truth about the universe you’ve had to learn to accept).

7. You’ve come to realize that “average” often doesn’t mean the median, but rather, “what’s considered not good enough.”

8. Your social anxiety never came from drama and people speaking ill of you, but mostly from the fear of not being noticed, from not knowing what to say or when, from feeling subpar in any given situation, etc.

9. You always feel as though you’re being overlooked by your romantic interest of choice for that one person who’s just a little bit better in all these random, little ways. 

10. In fact, dating in general is a stressful task because you never saw anything about yourself that was incredibly alluring… though as many people can attest, everybody finds someone who sees something much more than average in them (usually once they see it in themselves first.)

11. You were never known as “that person.” As in: you were never “the funny one,” or “the smart one,” or “the pretty one.” You never had any one defining characteristic. You just kind of… are.

12. You never had the issue of “fitting in with the crowd,” but you’re pretty sure that the issue of “just wanting to be noticed enough to not be completely nobody in this world” is just as bad, if not worse.

13. You spend half your life wondering how all these people who are so clearly talented and beautiful and special and distinct in one way or another could possibly have anything to complain about…

14. … And the other half realizing that their evident talents don’t actually make their lives that much easier. If beauty and ability correlated with overall happiness, we’d be living in a very different world.

15. “Average people are the most special people in the world, that’s why God made so many of them” is most likely something your mom told you growing up. (It’s fine, me too.)