Underachiever?
Well, I guess I’ll just die.
I’m Tired, by Labyrinth and Zendaya, extended version for your reading benefit. Without this song, I would never have completed this post. If you’re tired but trying, then you’re welcome for the recommendation lol.
Writing this took a lot longer than I would have liked to admit. And if I’m publishing this, then this means that I’ve overcome enough conditioned and ingrained shame to talk about it. That would probably be because I recently admitted to myself that I’ve probably been coping with very bad mental health for a very long time, and I validated that admission is worth acknowledging for what it is, especially when I still can’t access help. When I have and continue to deal with it by myself. Therapy is expensive, so we dye our hair and pierce our ears and get ripped at the gym.
It took me two and a half years to be able to talk about being bullied in my secondary school years, and opening up about this is just as… ugh, capable of bringing me to a vulnerable place. As a matter of principle, I tend to barrel into my fears like a blindly raging bull. So here we go.
Trigger Warning: There Be Dead Men Walking Here (mentions of suicide, insinuations of depression, turbulent adolescence etc)
“You’re so smart” is a compliment I have a very strained relationship with. I feel a ridiculously complex influx of emotions when I hear these words, or phrases that sound like this one. Sometimes I let it feed my ego — the ravenous bastard that she is. Sometimes I laugh and sneer. Other times I’m gracious enough to smile as I immediately tell myself that it is not true. On occasion, I shrug and roll my eyes as I tell them that’s not true.
Some would say I should learn to take a compliment and they’d be half right. It’s not like I have much to show for it, so if people think there’s something between my head despite an absence of documented proof? I should be glad, or something.
It’s just hard to take what feels like a backhanded compliment. I mean if you have any ideas on how to gracefully respond to something along the lines of “you’re so smart but you’re lazy too” or maybe “if only you applied yourself and potential more” then please drop it in the comments. Because I don’t really know what is expected of me when people call me an underachiever.
Like, I guess I’ll just die lol.
I’ve been smart. Top of the class. Highest scoring in the room. The whole shindig. Personally, I am glad I never finished grade school as valedictorian. My parents are convinced that my woes and villain origins started from there (or was it when I came in second place primary four lol?) I would have just made myself more miserable in high school. One day we’ll talk about high school. cue thousand-yard stare into the cosmos
I honestly don’t know what to tell people who told me I wasn’t maxing out my potential in university. That I’m underachieving. Like how do I explain to them that the fact I made it into university at all still felt like a miracle at times? Or that I long since was disillusioned with the reward system of excelling academically and I was more inclined to finally learn to be in my own skin and love myself for it? Do I go into detail explaining the uniqueness of my home life as a kid and how that domino effect creates a person who could not be bothered out of inaction to excel?
Honestly, when randoms and peers ask me about it I don’t get too bothered. I mean there are exceptions, such as individuals with a predisposition to be bullies or mean (God knows how much I loathe people like this), or privileged contemporaries. I range anywhere from thinly veiled disgust to exasperated eye rolls. But for the most part, I don’t feel jarred by it.
What really got me jaded were teachers. I swear, some teachers should really take a long hike and jump off a cliff. I find myself often in retrospective reflection, devoting precious time and mental strength to wishing some of my high school teachers inexplicable suffering for their audacity to ask me why I apparently was wasting away.
I mean do I really want to go into the details of my realizing that academic excellence was just another response to the reward system that dictated expression of familial affection? My perchance to shutdown at any appearance of conditionals? The cruel reality that academic intelligence did not prepare me for the culture shock of secondary school, or the turbulence of grappling with the nuances of my familial affairs as an adolescent. What do I tell my high school teachers, who ought to be trained in adolescent education enough to have seen the signs that SOMETHING WAS HORRIBLY HORRIBLY WRONG WITH M- deep breaths
I remember reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower recently, and as I read the book I realised that I really will never be thankful for my teachers. I cried seeing Mr Anderson becoming such a positive influence in Charlie’s life. I was like “must be nice”. And I mean. Wow. thirteen-year-old me would have killed to have a teacher like him in my life. To be fair, present me still would. I needed a Todd Anderson at thirteen. But I got women who sucked the dick of patriarchy and the institution of catholicism instead. I have no problem with women who don’t know any better about patriarchy, or Catholics. Except when it gets in the way of them being better adults in my life. The difference between them and a total stranger is that they’re paid to be present in my life after all.
Some of my lecturers also asked once I got to university. But I mean, they weren’t there to see my core developmental years. And they aren’t exactly expected to be more than lecturers to young adults. That extra touch was expected to be applied in high school. To them, if the young adult is still not well-adjusted by the time they are in university then it’s out of their hands. They’ll focus on the ones that have already been saved. To be real, any lecturer asking me that question was definitely a tier above the rest because they genuinely seemed as frustrated as I was, and not just in a well “this one’s a lost cause and not my problem” way. When they asked why I was the way I was I felt bad I couldn’t give them an answer.
A lot of people still consider that mental health is an excuse to be lazy. I used to think so too, even as I was actively and obviously (to anyone who knew the signs) suffering from it. That mindset compounded my problems. (Imagine literally being suicidal and in the same breath criticising yourself for making excuses for your best not being good enough. It’s crazy.)
After unlearning that, I’ll be damned if anyone can guilt trip me into hating myself for being so average again. Then again, explaining why I am the way I am involves a lot of opening up I that don’t see myself capable of doing. I have friends for that.
When people ask me why I don’t try, sometimes I wish I could tell them I try very hard. That all roads and dead ends in the map of rationality that is my mind? They lead to death. Death is the easiest way out. Even when I was a conventional Christian, not even the fear of hell could chase me from the lucrativeness that is just ceasing to be.
But I never had the courage to do it. I’ve stared at Sniper too long as a teenager and held a knife to my wrist willing myself to stop being so damn vain about the fact I’ll scar in death and bloody do it. Many times I’ve considered myself a failure because I fell from the pedestal of grace that was academic excellence, and don’t have the balls to pick poison and just do it.
Sometimes I laugh at myself. I can’t pull myself together to be functional, and yet I couldn’t have an addiction problem if I tried. And I have. It would be so easy to just lose myself and not have to live with the incessant little bitch that is “my mind”, laughing at the walking contradiction that is me.
My mind still brings it up. That death really is an answer, a damn good one at that. But I no longer hate myself for not wanting to choose it. My mind still ridicules how I can’t pick a vice and let it bring me some peace, damn the consequences. But I am thankful that addiction is one more sickness that I don’t have to deal with.
It’s the littlest things that have held me back I guess. A constellation of very simple pleasures (and spite, a lot of spite) that gets me out of bed. I’m too busy chasing that to see the bigger picture of my fully realised potential, and the reward society will give me because of it. Some day I’ll be in a position to get help so that maybe I can marry the image of my fully realised potential to a source of my happiness.
But yeah. If you ask me why I’m an underachiever, I’ll probably tell you it’s because I just want to live.
If you’re really concerned, maybe you should probably just ask me how I am doing. But you probably don’t actually want to know the hows and whys, so try minding your damn bloody business and wish me the best of luck, yeah? Lol.
(Do people really want to know how long I’ve written ballads that sound like odes to death? I once read out a vivid poem in my literature class on a girl spiralling into a place where mental health is like a fractured mirror, where death is the friend that saves her from the spiral. My literature teacher didn’t bat an eye at that. Do people want to know what? Sometimes I wonder if I should tell them that its’ probably the same thing that kept me from letting the knife slash my wrist. That’s not the answer, plus I don’t really know why I always held back the pressure of the knife.)
