wanderlust

Why Mediocrity Is Underrated And Needs To Be Embraced

Watercolour by Agnes Cecile

Mediocrity is underrated.
We’ve grown up in an age that makes it almost criminal to be normal. We idolize perfection, we think it is the only way we can ever be loved.
Think of the last time you made a memory that warms you up on cold winter nights.  Was it watching Sex and the City reruns with your best friend? Binge eating ice-cream with your mother? Chatting up a stranger on the train to work?
Isn’t it wonderful how ordinary things seem extraordinary when you quit trying so hard?

Mediocrity is underrated.
Perfection is such a relative term, and yet we let others make the norms. They teach us not to yell at girls who call you bastards because that’s what perfect boys do; they teach us not to swear too much and drink too much and smoke too much and show too much cleavage, because that’s what perfect girls do. But we must be perfectly dressed and made up, waxed and shaved and curled and straightened, polished and painted, and marketable. Isn’t it exhausting to constantly adhere to the rules made by a society that thrives on anxiety and sorrows, on success that is directly proportional to putting others down?
Leave your hair untied, or bunch it up with an ugly scrunchie – or shave it off. If you don’t care, no one else should either. Jump on the trampoline, wear mismatched socks and grandma underpants, and your favourite owlish glasses – if you think they’re pretty damn perfect, then they are. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.

Mediocrity is underrated.
Perfection might be the order of the day, but it’s an incredibly lonely place to be. Rid yourself of surface flaws, and you’ll instantly become the person everyone loves to hate. They’ll find other ways to put you down, because people talk. People talk, irrespective of how fat your paycheck is or how thin your waistline. So you might as well eat that last bag of chips and revel in your extraordinary ability to walk straight after six large vodkas.
Isn’t it wonderful how ordinary things seem extraordinary when you set yourself free?

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Tanvi Deshmukh is a nineteen year old girl from Pune, India, with an affinity for words and books, cats and coffee, Nepalese food and hippie music, and the colour green (along with Oxford commas). Currently pursuing her undergraduate degree in English, she loves poetry, volunteers at an NGO and plays the keyboard in her free time. Along with devouring books of all kinds, unless of course, she’s in the middle of heated discussions on feminism, patriarchy, gay rights, or what to name the neighbour’s new dog.

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