Just Plain Ordinary

 I've spent my whole life trying to live up to the ideal of special, extraordinary. It is all I've ever known; I saw it in the protagonist of the books I have been reading since I discovered the library; these amazing men and women who were instantly recognized as something more by just being themselves.  It came from my teachers and peers who treated me like something more because I got the highest grades in my class "She will do great things." They said. 
My pastors/spiritual leaders said I had a gift. I was a natural born leader. God created only one of me and there was a destiny only I could fulfil. It didn't hurt that I was pretty good at everything I tried.

I got the complex from being the only girl growing up among boys and my parents' favourite child.  Everyone told me I was something and I believed them. That is until I hit my early twenties; I stopped doing all those things that people said made me special, I quit school, social circles, stopped being active in ministry. 

I was still me though, wasn't I? I was told I was inherently special but now it seemed I wasn't because I wasn't performing. Am I still all those things they said I was? I was not the only one asking these questions. Even one of my closest friend whom I've known my whole life began asking questions which seemed to me begging my inherent value, not as a human being but as a part of that rare breed of special I was told I belong to.  
It was a lot of pressure to live up to, people just had to see that extra something in me that set me apart from everyone else, they just had to.  Who am I if they don't? 

I have come to realise I am just plain ordinary, there's nothing special about me and that is liberating! There's no pressure (internal or screw external, live your own damn lives) to fulfil some higher standard of perfection because ordinary people do dumb sh*t. I don't have to be brilliant or wonderful; I just have to be me. And for those of you who expect more, I'm not sorry to say you'll be extremely disappointed. I'm done living up to the measure of special that's been imposed on me by myself and others. I've always just been the girl next door, I'm only realising it now. Ordinary. 

I met a guy (it's always a guy, isn't it?) the way he acts highlighted some things the change in the way I perceive myself. He didn't do handstands or go out of his way to impress me because I was that once or twice in a lifetime type girl( I was told I am, I believed myself to be). He treats me like a normal human being. He wants to be friends (someone say rejected) and see how things pan out. A normal, rational human thing, that's what (smart) ordinary people do isn't it? They don't jump into relationships because they have a gut instinct about people and are barely ever wrong.

This is my advice to all the little girls and boys being told how special they are, be yourself, whoever that is. You'll figure it out as you go along. It could just take a little longer for you, be patient with yourself.