Ain’t Nothing Wrong With Being Average

When I first arrived at university, I was quiet, naive, and completely unprepared. My first semester, I failed Calculus, struggled through Spanish, and was drowning in Donne, Locke, Kant, Descartes, and Nietzsche. College was much harder than I had expected.

My parents prioritized their children’s education over all else, so my siblings and I attended Catholic school our entire lives. While our public school friends played outside, we spent all evening doing homework.

Throughout my childhood, I was always in the gifted, honors, dual-enrollment, or advanced placement class. I consistently scored in top 3% of my class. I loved all subjects, and everything seemed to come easily to me. On road trips, I asked my family Brain Quest trivia questions and had a blast working through puzzles in my Mensa kids workbooks. I loved learning, and I loved problem-solving.

In elementary school, we had to take the torturous Iowa test every year. In the national standardized test, I scored in the 99th percentile for nearly every category year-after-year. I was either smart, determined, or some blend of the two. In high school, my teachers nominated me as “student of the year” in Math, Science, and English across my four years. Then I was recognized for scoring in the top 1% in the nation on a standardized math test filled with incredibly fun and challenging logic puzzles.

My entire life, I had unknowingly benefited from being one of the smartest kids in the room. That ended when I left home.

I attended a competitive college, so the dozens of students surrounding me in each classroom were all above average. We had all been the smartest kids in our high schools, and now the threshold for “average” in our university freshmen cohort had risen drastically. And I was in over my head. I was no longer better than the average.

That was one of the most challenging adjustments of my life, trumped only by chronic illness.

After a lifetime of others asking me for help, I now had to humble myself and admit that I didn’t understand. I had to learn to ask for help. For the first year or two, my pride got in the way. I studied late into the night, but refused to go to tutoring or study groups. I didn’t want others to think I was dumb, and I didn’t want to admit to myself that I still had much to learn.

I did well in college, graduated with above average grades and a worthless degree, and then went on to stumble into a decent career. The greatest lesson I learned in college — and it was a hard pill for me to swallow — was that it’s okay to be average, and it’s okay to ask for help.

When faced with chronic illness, this lesson came to light once more. I long ago accepted that I’m perhaps not cut out to be a neurosurgeon or astrophysicist, but how does one face the loss of the basic abilities, and perhaps even falling below average?

With time, I’m learning that there’s nothing wrong with being ordinary or average. Go check out my post on the Heart of the Matter to join in on the conversation.