'I'm Too Lazy and Mediocre to Deserve the Life I Want!'

Cultivate faith in exactly who you are - hesitation, doubt, self-hatred, and all.

L'Imposteur Mérovingien (1956) by Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly,

I have been a long-time reader of your column, and I love your deeply embodied knowledge of living and life, and I absolutely bow to the delivery of such wisdom with your unmatchable wit. I hope you know that your tales woven with genuine suggestions have carried me through some dark nights. I have devoured your books too, which I keep coming back to! They are a testament to honest, hilarious, and genuine writing. Thank you for everything you write and do.

I'm really not a good writer like so many wonderful letters I've had the privilege to read but today, I have a question for you. I'm writing this lying in bed — after a deeply disappointing day, week, month, and year.

I'm 24 and I have exactly 8 months to get into a reputed and extremely difficult to get into institute (of my dreams). Since your sister is a surgeon (my deepest respect to her for the work she does), you know intimately the life she has on a daily basis. I have kept my next degree in medicine on hold for this one year to change streams and go into public service. I want a different life than what I chose at 18. I want to switch roles and change directions. But I'm deeply concerned that I do not deserve the life and the position I want.

Four months ago, after completing my degree, I moved back into my parent’s apartment. I have started studying for this new degree, but I'm losing steam. Over the course of the last two years, I have also gained a lot of weight (the irony), and now my stalled career and my body going wayward are making me hate myself, my life, and everything I do! Staying at home and hearing about my other friends making leaps in their careers doesn't help. It's like I'm doing this routine of misery every day, hoping to shine when finally the spotlight falls on me, but I am not ready for anything.

Since I was a kid, I have always hated not being good enough. I remember being 10, standing in front of the TV, which had kids my age playing the violin and doing gymnastics, and I recoiled in deep shame because I was not doing what they were with discipline and proficiency. The only redeeming point was that I never had envy for the people doing good; it was always directed towards my own lack.

In school and college, I focused solely on academics, as it meant I could be good if I tried hard enough and studied hard enough. I also never dated and only had like three good girlfriends. Now it seems such a disadvantage that I have, at maximum, 50% book smarts and almost zero street smarts. (Which I love to marvel at in your newsletter — it is blooming always with revelations, thank you!)

Last week, my school best friend got married. It made me think about my own life —this gorgeous and spirited friend was never ambitious, she dated a lot, she had fun, and most importantly, she never stressed about the little stuff in life. Yet she has everything now. She's the leading lady—she has the choicest lines and the most the most beautiful reasons to be in the world—and all that she really desires. And I'm her exact opposite. (It makes me look bad, but I had to tell you this.)

Three years ago, post-COVID, I had a bad mental health issue with anxiety and an eating disorder diagnosis and I was started on medication. I had to drop out of school for one year to work from home since I was spiraling every day in my dorm alone. But I got out of it somehow.

I still have a huge pile of shame about that, but here's the catch: the weight I was, the way I was so neurotic about success, was almost envied. This is the unhealthy me speaking—I was barely a shell of myself then. I was unkind and cruel and suicidal, but everyone complimented me about everything. I was finally wanted in the show. I could be the next big thing.

Polly, it’s all different and the same now. I'm back to square one. I'm not being picked for anything. I'm not a good jester or a knight. Hell, I'm not even a good curtain puller. Polly, I spend so many evenings listening to Ms. Maya Angelou, Mr. James Baldwin, Ms. Nikki Giovanni, Mr. Nick Cage, and most importantly, YOU and so many more writers, speakers, and imminent personalities — those who changed the world with their presence despite their circumstances, and I cannot help but hate myself so much.

There is a quote I have pasted on the corner of my laptop desk, saying "I am not afraid; I was born to do it,” from the Joan of Arc, and over the few months I have staggered in my belief about it.

I don't think I have it in me to do anything at all, despite what I believed. I'm mediocre, I'm moody, I'm envious, I'm worthless, and I'm also very lazy and unspecial. I wonder if it would have been better if I had no dreams, if I had no ambitions, if I could be easygoing, if I could just be anybody but me — good for nothing, talentless me! I wonder how people who have everything going for them function. I wonder if there is any redemption for me at all.

Thank you, Polly, if you read this. You are a light in this world for young women like me, and it was very selfish of me to keep nagging at the world for giving me these parts in the play. But I hope I can find a way forward to live better. I hope you have a great day ahead. With much love and regard!

The Spare Role

Dear TSR,

Last night I had dinner at a friend’s house with some other friends. We talked about so much and I was feeling confident and happy. Yet every single time a friend brought up a work challenge of hers, I found myself saying, “Wow, I could never do that, I’m overwhelmed just thinking about it,” and “Jesus, that sounds so exhausting.”  

Then, when I was asked about my own challenges, I said, “I don’t know. I feel good overall but I can’t get motivated. I love writing, but why should anyone read my words? It’s just the same self-involved drivel molded into different shapes.”

This statement is 100% accurate: I write what I feel and that’s all. Surrendering to the process and believing in what I do is hard in part because it’s not really about discipline and proficiency. In fact, most of my writing is like being carried down a rushing river made of overwhelming emotions, clinging to the random stumps and trees and bushes of concepts and ideas like they’ll save me. I try to crawl up the tree but sometimes I slip and it’s back to the rushing river.

And if I wake up too late or put off writing for too long, there is no river, there’s just a dry creek bed. That’s when I sit down in the silt and think about my friends who cook amazing food and run great restaurants and manage people, or they write music and perform internationally, or they write novels and teach college and win big awards. Compared to them, what am I doing? I'm mediocre, I'm moody, I'm envious, I'm worthless, and I'm also very lazy and unspecial.

You think I’m just using your words out of convenience, to persuade you of our similarity, but I absolutely believe these things about myself when I’m in a bad mood and I can’t write. And the more I let myself sit in that low place, the more I believe that the writers I know who are productive and upbeat on Instagram must share something essential and important that I’m missing, some easygoing ability to forge ahead, some core belief in their specialness that I doubt way too often. But how can I feel special? Because for fuck’s sake, what’s so good about molding the same self-involved drivel into different shapes every day?

Then one of my friends brought up another writer, and I said something about how their writing was overrated. Then I said, “I have to be an asshole about other writers sometimes, in order to keep believing in my own work.”

I’m embarrassed to admit that I made those sounds. But honestly? It’s not that strange to be competitive with other writers. It’s not sinful to dislike someone else’s work. I feel embarrassed that I can be so petty. But also, who cares? I’m a weak little sniveling rat like every other human alive. I’m moody. I’m envious. I feel mediocre and worthless whenever I’m not writing enough. I feel lazy and unspecial.

Anyway, then I drove home and slept like a rock. And when I woke up, I went on a run through my mother’s neighborhood, up and down hills, listening to Dostoyevksy’s The Brothers Karamazov. I have to focus in order to enjoy it, which is good because the book takes my mind off my own suffering. I don’t think, “Do I need to rest? Can I really do this today? Am I too much of a lazy piece of shit to keep this up?” I don’t consider how quickly and easily my surgeon sister could run those four miles. (She won first place in her age group in a half-marathon yesterday!). I don’t think about how I should be writing instead of running.

Instead, I focus on Dostoyevsky’s words:

“Young man, do not forget to pray. Each time you pray, if you do so sincerely, there will be the flash of a new feeling in it, and a new thought as well, one you did not know before, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is education.”

I heard those words this morning and I thought, “Writing my column is like praying for me. I don’t know where I’m headed. I just jump in and go wherever the rushing river takes me. When I trust the river, it brings me to interesting places. I have new feelings and new thoughts I didn’t have before, and they give me fresh courage.”

When you’re as lazy and unspecial as I am, it takes a lot of courage to just jump into the river. When you doubt yourself as much as I do, it requires a lot of audacity to drop to your knees and pray. When you’re as moody as I am, it takes serious determination to go outside and run, even though you’re slow and you’ll never win any races. When you feel worthless a lot of the time, it takes a lot of greed and selfishness to keep nagging at the world to give you the best parts in the play.

Yes, greed and selfishness. Sometimes these dark, grabby feelings are just as important as courage and determination. Sometimes you need to be restless and impatient in order to become audacious. Do you recognize yourself in these words? Switching to a public service focus was brave and audacious. Writing to me was courageous and greedy and selfish. You are a very brave, very special person, and what you do and feel matters.

Likewise, when I’m tired and I force myself to put on my running clothes and turn on The Brothers Karamazov again and again, that matters. The words matter. My body moving over the hills, slogging along, matters. The bright October sky matters.

You read these words and you think, “But this isn’t about me at all. This is about you. You actually ARE special and not lazy and not mediocre.” When you think this, you’re describing you and me, both of us. And when you think, “I am not special,” you’re also describing both of us. Everyone who walks the face of the earth is described by these words. We are all greedy and awful and lazy and we’re also very special, and we matter, each and every one of us.

And our self-involved drivel is also wisdom. Our prayers are also education. Our love is transformative. You tell me about how you feel, and I jump into the river and start writing, and my compassion for you is like a prayer, and your kind words to me are also a prayer, and we’re connected and we bring strength to each other and it matters.

Dostoyevsky suffered a lot in his lifetime, and it turned him into someone who knew how to pray, how to work hard, how to believe, how to spread his wisdom and even his love with his words. I always thought of Dostoyevsky as this bleak, broken Russian dude who hated everything and everyone. I read Crime and Punishment when I was young and I didn’t feel that it had anything to offer me. I refused the gift. I ignored the river. I turned my back on the connection there. I wasn’t ready yet.

What I see in you is someone who doesn’t refuse the gifts she’s given. You welcome everything bright and lovely into your heart and treasure it, and you’re humbled by it. This is a rare and wonderful quality in someone who’s young and also unsure and afraid. Here’s how Dostoyevsky describes it:

“Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creatures, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love each leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.”

This sounds like standard Christian blather if you were raised in the church. I knelt in churches repeatedly as a child and mostly refused the gift, which almost sounded like self-involved drivel to my prematurely jaded Catholic-school ears. But when you believe in this perfect world — not in God, necessarily, but in the crushing beauty of every tiny leaf, every little shimmer of sunshine on water, every faint breeze drifting through the air — you connect with your capacity for love, with your uncanny ability to form new connections and discover new ideas, with your unbelievable strength and resilience in the face of suffering.  

When you accept the gift of this day, and believe in the gift, and hurl yourself into your own river of emotions and dare to believe that those emotions are divine and pure and worthy, even when they’re also selfish and mediocre, you will feel good. And when you feel good, you can do literally anything.

You need to feel good. That’s all. In order to feel good, you need to try.

So this is my advice to you: Do anything. Just try. Failure isn’t important. It doesn’t even matter exactly what you do. The more you do, the better you’ll feel. The better you feel, the more you’ll try. Happiness is just about TRYING.

Right now you don’t feel good, so you’re struggling to do anything at all. You’re letting your shame rule you. You hold yourself to impossible standards, and believe that you are rotten. This is just not true. You believe that you are unique in your awfulness and your self-doubt. You believe that there is something peculiar and wretched and wrong about you IN PARTICULAR and it prevents you from doing the basic things you need to do to thrive.

I understand that state of mind. Last night, I slipped back into that belief myself now and then. But then I thought: “All of these doubts are accurate but they’re also an illusion. Because I am the same as Dostoyevsky and I’m the same as every lost person who writes to me and I’m the same as every stranger on the planet. I have to start, that’s all. I have to get up early and try. That’s all I’ve ever really done. And it’s always hard. It’s hard to try every single time.”

I need to pray. That is all. I need to go through the motions and pray, again and again, in spite of my fears. I need to leap into the river, day after day, and cling to stumps and trees and bushes and climb upwards, believing in each idea, believing in every weird notion. I have to keep the faith, that’s all.

You and I are the same. We don’t need to compare the weird ways we learn and discover new paths with the ways other people do these things. We are effusive and inefficient animals, but every prayer is an education, and we do know how to pray, don’t we? When we get awed by the discipline and proficiency we observe in others, it incites a kind of shame that doesn’t do justice to our deeply felt forms of faith and our resilience and our worship of every tiny leaf.

I want you to learn to honor yourself. Taking a step out the door in the morning, to go for a walk, is a way to honor your body. Forgiving the efficient, pragmatic humans around you is a way to honor your effusive, inefficient, creative animal self. Writing down your shame can be a way to honor your resilience, as long as you follow every confession with a kind of prayer, one that reminds you:

I am selfish because I have a huge heart. My greed reflects my unbearable love for every small leaf drifting down from the sky. My longing is a manifestation of my love of the beauty of this world. I am singularly good at welcoming the gifts of this life, I am uniquely attuned to the wisdom of this day, which so often disguises itself in mediocre distractions, in petty jealousies, in self-involved drivel.

I am special and I will find my special place in this world. I deserve a leading role. So do you and you and you. So do you. And you. And you.

Keep nagging at the world, to give you the best part in the play. You’re a bright star. Honor your brilliance. Cultivate your faith. Stand up for what you deserve. And spread that love to everyone you know. The more you love, the more you’ll recognize your enormous power.

Yes, you are powerful. It’s time to manifest that power on the outside. It’s time to own it without apology for a change. It’s time to be a tiny bit selfish. It’s the most generous thing you can do.

But in order to do that, you have to loosen your grip on this core belief of yours, that you have to remain small and constantly confess your laziness and selfishness in order to be humble and good and less awful. Who taught you that? You’re going to teach yourself that the opposite is true: Being bigger, daring for more, is what will give you the capacity to spread love in this world, which is something you were born to do.

You are so much more courageous and bold than you realize. Courage is not selfish. You’ll recognize that eventually. Your Joan of Arc quote is a reflection of the deep wisdom that lives inside you: You were born to be remarkable. This difficult time isn’t a useless delay of what you should become, what you should achieve, what you should be doing instead. This difficult time is your body waking up to what suffering feels like. You’re learning about the different shapes that sadness can take in someone’s life. This is an important phase for you. You’re not breezing over this lesson. You’re soaking in what’s here, because it’s preparing you for what comes next.

That’s a talent. So honor it. Breathe in this difficult moment. Believe in where you are, and respect exactly who you are. Feel this as deeply as you can. This prayer is an education.  

Polly

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