{"id":3809,"date":"2018-09-27T09:36:29","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T14:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/?p=3809"},"modified":"2018-09-27T09:36:29","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T14:36:29","slug":"celebrating-mediocrity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/2018\/09\/27\/celebrating-mediocrity\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Mediocrity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m mediocre. I wear mediocre clothes. My face is mediocre. I make mediocre grades. I don&#8217;t really do anything that makes me rise above the crowd. I&#8217;m just mediocre.<\/p>\n<p>For a long time, I had high standards for myself. I wanted to be one of the best. I wanted to dress nice. I wanted to look the best. I wanted to make the best grades. I wanted to be one of the best.<\/p>\n<p>As I got older, I found myself not wanting to be the best. I found that it didn&#8217;t matter as much to me as I had always thought it would be. I felt myself getting more and more satisfied with my mediocrity.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if it was because I simply started to get lazy, or if I was getting more and more of a sense of apathy. But I think that, in the long run, being complacent with my mediocrity helped me through some hard times. I didn&#8217;t push myself to try to be the best when I was too tired. I didn&#8217;t try to push myself ahead when others were ahead of me. I didn&#8217;t want to be the best.<\/p>\n<p>Being the best comes with it&#8217;s expectations. When you become the best, you&#8217;re expected to always be the best, no matter what. And do you know how hard of an expectation that is to live up to? I know it caused me a lot of negative thoughts when I was younger. As I grew up, I realized that maybe I just wasn&#8217;t meant to be the best. I was just meant to be mediocre.<\/p>\n<p>As a society, I feel like we celebrate greatness too often. There&#8217;s so many people we see as &#8220;the best&#8221; at whatever they do. Those people are always expected to do their best, no matter what. I would never be able to live with that sort of pressure.<\/p>\n<p>Why don&#8217;t we celebrate mediocrity? We don&#8217;t all have to be the best. I&#8217;m not saying to not try to do your best, but if your personal best is mediocre for the world, be proud of what you&#8217;ve done. You did your best, and even if everyone doesn&#8217;t think it&#8217;s the best they&#8217;ve ever seen, you can be happy in knowing that you tried the hardest that you could, and you should celebrate that.<\/p>\n<p>So I guess what I&#8217;m trying to say is, I feel like we put too much focus on trying to rise above everyone else. The world can be more than just a &#8220;dog eat dog&#8221; world. It can be more than everyone pushing themselves to always do more than that next person. I think it can, at least. And I wish more people had this feeling about the world.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s celebrate mediocrity, for all the people who always feel like they&#8217;re inferior because their best isn&#8217;t perfect. But that&#8217;s okay, because there&#8217;s hundreds of people like you out there. And I am one of them. So maybe we can all celebrate our mediocrity together, and though this, we can show the world that there can be more than perfection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m mediocre. I wear mediocre clothes. My face is mediocre. I make mediocre grades. I don&#8217;t really do anything that makes me rise above the crowd. I&#8217;m just mediocre. For a long time, I had high standards for myself. I wanted to be one of the best. I wanted to dress nice. I wanted to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/2018\/09\/27\/celebrating-mediocrity\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Celebrating Mediocrity&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3812,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809\/revisions\/3812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}