Do you ever wonder what happened to all those supposedly “smart” children in grade school? The ones who were told that they could accomplish anything because they showed great potential. Who needed to study when you could get all the material easily? Well, I was one of those kids.

Why did I need to work hard when it all came to me so easily? Of course, this would set me up for failure later in life. I never developed those fundamental habits of working towards a solution by studying and looking at problems through a different scope simply because there was no need to. In my eyes, it was simply a waste of time when I could be doing something that I enjoyed.

I cruised through high school and even university. By the time I was in university, I was no longer an honours student, but I still managed to pull above average grades, and that was good enough for me. I was never looking to be a scholar, I only wanted to find time to do things that could fuel my adrenaline deprived brain.

University came and went, and I ended up in a typical corporate 9-5. Now, with an abundance of time on my hands, I found myself itching to find new projects to utilize my mind even just a little bit. I picked up coding, tried to start a store, made a pitiful attempt at learning the violin, and now here I am blogging.

Whilst all those things are seemingly unconnected, the common denominator of all of them is that they are all unfinished projects. As I sit here and write about how I have a mountain of unfinished projects and look at them with dejection in my eyes, I know that this could potentially be my last post ever to this blog.

This goes back to the curse of being a “gifted” child who never needed to learn the fundamentals of studying and hard work. Now that I need to apply myself to a hobby, I find my mind wandering. I know that I need to write consistently to improve, but when I look at the writing that I’ve already done, I can’t help but feel that my writing capabilities are far from sufficient.

As someone who was always good at things from the very beginning, I find myself averse to trying anything new for fear that I won’t be good enough at it. My entire identity has been built around being good, being smart, and being above average. But… what if I’m not? If I am not the person everyone told me I was, then who am I?

All my unfinished projects signal the same thing to me. I am not the person that I thought I was. I cruised through the first quarter of my life out of sheer luck and now, I need to apply myself to make use of myself. I have to learn how to learn, how to work, and how to study. The lessons that I was supposed to learn as a child have now come back to haunt me in the form of anxiety from fear of not being good enough, depression as none of my projects reached their completion, and low self worth from not being able to apply myself to appropriate applications.

The only highlight of this situation is that I am self aware, and I am now making an active effort to apply those early childhood lessons into my life. I am banishing the anxiety, fighting the depression, and raising my self worth. It is a battle every day to distance myself from the gifted child title, but I am working towards a better title. A person who works with integrity and is proud of their accomplishments achieved through hard work rather than sheer luck.

If this is you, or any semblance of this post resonates with you at all, I wish you the best in your journey as well.