By Iñigo Lelis
Wrong key again. The sun has already set, creating a warm yet awkward glow in our living room, its last ray striking the piano. I’ve already spent half my day drifting my fingers across the keys. The white keys are now slowly plunging into the black frame of the instrument, and I’m just realizing now that I am wasting my time learning something that I will never be good at. Seven years have passed since I received this piano from my parents when I graduated from elementary school.
Seven years passed of staring at the piano, not having the urge to play it. My sweaty palms still rest on my lap, for fear of playing the wrong key and disappointing myself again. And I am left with the realization that I will forever be mediocre at playing this black-and-white instrument.
There it goes again. The undeniable symptom of being mediocre: the disappointment that consumes me long before I even take action. The exasperated sigh I let out before I even have time to breathe in air. There is nothing more painful than having the epiphany of being capable of starting many things, but never having the obsession and the quality of being good enough to actually master them.
This feeling is not new to me. My eyes roamed the room. I noticed the multicolored yarns kept in the Tupperware I stole from my grandmother, with strings climbing their way out of containment. I remembered how I used to have this undying enthusiasm to learn how to crochet and create cute flower bouquets out of it, spending the last three crumpled one-hundred-peso bills I had saved up in my wallet to purchase a set online. In the following two months, countless YouTube tutorials echoed in this same living room, with me sitting in the corner trying so hard to pull the working yarn to tighten the loop I had made. Before the dust could even settle, I convinced myself that maybe crocheting wasn’t for me.
Then there’s the guitar hanging on the wall by the stairs, the scattered papers with poems that trail off after the first sentence, and the beginner cooking set that had been thrown away after quietly accumulating rust over time. It was as if I’ve been collecting candles that I lit using the burning fire within me, but the moment the wind blows too strong, I suddenly lack the strength to light them once again.
I have become used to being a bystander to someone else’s success. To watch them ace something I tried so hard to master is a unique kind of pain I learned at a young age. Mediocrity hurts not because I won’t achieve similar things, but because it’s close enough to excellence without ever truly sharing the limelight. My high school friend who made a business out of crochet, my brother who played in his campus bands, and a close friend who made it into their school’s publishing organization. It frustrates me that I am intelligent enough to perform well academically, but not intelligent enough to pursue the things I truly want. It frustrates me that I cannot ever grasp what is considered “good enough” in crafts, in instruments, or in writing.
And I blame it all on my disease of being mediocre. But can this really be called a disease? Or is it my way of quietly assuring myself that by never fully committing, I will only disappoint myself and spare the people around me? A safety net that I can fall into so those things I tried to pursue don’t feel like failures?
Maybe mediocrity really is a safety net disguised as a disease, because knowing that I am never good enough to be excellent might just be destiny’s way of preventing me from falling twice as hard. It is the soft and liberating acceptance that because we are not an ace at something, we avoid the pressure that comes with it. We avoid the glares given to us by those we love, and we avoid the cold water that suddenly washes over us when we fail. That acceptance comes with the realization that we might just be amateurs at the things we try—not because it implies we aren’t the best, but because being an amateur means walking forward with just enough strength for it to not feel like the end of the world when we end up unsuccessful.
Maybe I will start a new hobby next week and abandon it the week after—who knows? I might endure this condition for the rest of eternity, but I will not try to cure it. Never. Because there is an accommodating, warm beauty in doing something out of pure love, away from the unreachable expectations of the people around us.
Being mediocre at something does not mean the end of the world. Maybe it is just the universe’s way of saying that there are too many beautiful things out there for us to try, rather than fitting ourselves into a box that was never meant to suit us.
