Mediocrity

I used to have a poster on my refrigerator which read, “To be mediocre scares the hell out of me.” When I put that poster on my fridge, I thought only that I would enjoy the quirkiness of it.  At the time, I knew nothing about the vibration and energy that words have.  And so, I didn’t consider the impact that seeing those words every day (and sometimes more than once a day) would have on me.

What I remember is how increasingly uncomfortable I felt each time I read those words – how emotionally down I got. And I remember the poster not being there one day and wondering where it had gone.  (In hindsight, I think it got knocked off when my old fridge was replaced with a new one.)  And I remember the relief I felt when it was no longer there as a daily reminder.

What did mediocre mean to me? Doing a complex equivalence [NLP] extrapolation of that word, I know that, for me, it meant being shoddy and unfinished, imperfect, a waste of someone else’s time and energy, and, in my case, fat and ugly.

So what did that mean to me about me? That I was a mediocre singer and writer and presenter; that I was a mediocre teacher; that I was mediocre in everything I did and in who I was then; that I was a mediocre human being.  I look back over my choices and know that I worked damned hard to be the best at everything I did.  Yet, while striving not to be mediocre led me to work hard at what interested me and to excel at a lot of it, it also meant that I was unwilling to try something new for fear that it would be just something else at which I would be mediocre.

When I consider how I’ve held that word, I know that everything’s been about someone else’s opinion of me. I abdicated my right to just be me pursuing what interested me to the degree I chose and in the way I chose.  I, literally, let mySelf go.  I gave mySelf away.

Gotta’ love those BSI® sessions. I didn’t know I was still carrying the energy of all this around inside until it all came out at my last BSI® session with Sheila Winter Wallace.

And what I own now is that what I do and who I AM are not mediocre. I believe the words I always said to my students, “Whatever you do, give it your best effort (meaning, for me, being fully engaged).  That’s all you ever need to do.”  I own now that nothing I have done and nothing that I AM has been or ever can be mediocre.  They are a reflection of my truth and my truth is the only truth that matters.

I used to wonder why I never took that sign down. And now I know that I truly have.