nothing.

If you met me a week ago, you would be aware of how terrified I was of the word 'nothing'. If you think this is an article about how I conquered this highly irrational fear, then I suggest you stop reading now. This is not about how I overcame it, it is about how I came to terms with it. 

This story starts exactly how every young adult novel starts, with a girl who is horrible at being able to live a normal life because she is extraordinary, only exception is that the girl is me and I am not extraordinary. I am as ordinary as I can be. In fact I might have put 'ordinary' to shame with my 'ordinary-ness'.
I have this insecurity that haunts me every waking moment of my life, 'what if I am not good enough? smart enough? below average?' That fear is totally valid, I have never in my life been an over achiever, to be completely honest, I have never been an achiever in general. I dreaded what any other super average human would, academics. Unlike most average humans, I unfortunately have an affinity for smart people. So while I drowned in the complete and utter failure that my life is, I also had to witness all my peers succeed in life, achieve fantastic results and all the while like a sad little rock I kept sinking to the bottom. 

If you think that being with my friends would have motivated me in anyway to try harder then you are wrong again. I quite frankly enjoyed the view from down below. I felt content being 'nothing', in fact seeing my friends achieve wonderful things made me feel exactly what I would feel looking up at stars at night. Satisfied. This is one of the worst mistakes I have ever made because as soon as I accepted that I am just not that kind of kid, I gave up altogether. 

NO! Not talking about suicide attempts when I say that I gave up. I gave up on trying to better myself. I became indifferent to everything around me. If I didn't care about my future earlier, then I don't know how I will express what went through my mind about my future then, because quite frankly, I stopped considering a future career or life altogether. I became that bimbo who lives in the moment, as fun as that was, it wasn't meant for me. 
As established earlier, I could not afford to do that because I don't have the universe looking out for me, I am just ordinary. 

While living my party of a life, I was slapped in the face with the realization that people around me think I am a nothing. I am not valued by my 'oh-so smart' peers because I can't score like they do. I hated this thought. I knew for a fact that I was not stupid. Yes, I was bad at academics, yes I never woke up with the idea for an invention that might potentially save the planet to compensate for my inability to score according to the terms of a common assessment, but that did not mean I was stupid. I was simply a nothing. Neither a brilliant kid, nor a dull one. Not talented in any art, but I wasn't bad at studies, I just wasn't excellent. I was just a nothing. 

Not being taken seriously was what woke me up from the lovely lie I was living in. If I was a nothing, I would redefine 'nothing' altogether, be the best version of nothing. Who ever said 'hard work is the key to success' was a very good conman. 
One can work themselves numb, but their success can not be defined. In my boards, I scored the most that I have in my entire existence of 15 years on this planet and yet somehow I was still unhappy. I found my success to be nothing compared to what my peers scored. I forgot this minor detail that they have always been good at their academics. It was forbidden for me to dream of achieving as much as them, being a nothing does not give me the privilege to dream so high.

Being a nothing, I should know that a 90% cannot define me, neither can a 99% for that matter. I can be defined as a zero (having nothing) or a 100% (having nothing more to achieve.) 
I was way to far from zero, it would be to much work to reach that number. However, the same cannot be said about the hundred. Seeming like the easier alternative, I picked the latter. 

I would like to conclude by saying that, if only this realization came to me earlier I would have been much better at being nothing. So, this article goes out to all those people who are a nothing like me, who are so terrified of being a nothing and those who don't know how to be a nothing.