So you've wasted your potential

Learning to live with failure while everyone else succeeds

Celebrating my 8th Birthday, the autumn of 2000

“I’m sorry. I just can’t watch you get everything I always wanted.”

That was the DM an older, cooler, more accomplished friend of mine had just received.

It was circa 2013, when we were both ‘bloggers’ in the fever pitch of the HBO Girls, Buzzfeed News, Rookie Mag era of cyberspace. She had a book deal and a blue tick, and I was one of many who looked up to her, surprised and humbled to be her frequent +1.

We were at some glittering nameless event when she first showed me, and I was gobsmacked to find the messages had come from a friend we both knew - a journalist-turned-blogger from our ‘scene’ who’d evidently been cooking up a manuscript of her own.

“I can’t be happy for you.” She’d signed off, before blocking her on everything. And for many hours we dissected and unpacked it from every angle that we could, before eventually settling on a satisfying declaration:

Success will never find a person like that.

With all the moral superiority of my 20 year-old self, I remember thinking: that could never be me.

But now a decade on at the age of 32, I’m feeling remarkably less smug about it all.

The funny thing about potential is that it meets you as a compliment and leaves you as a wound.

As children we’re praised for how full of it we are, brought irreversibly to our attention from a very early age. We’re pushed, prompted, and shaped around it, this natural-born magic we somehow harbour, which everyone seems to have an opinion on how should be best put to use.

“Children tend to think they can do anything because on a spiritual, energetic and quantum level they are still in superposition, their infinite nature.

But the moment you start interacting with the outside world: opinions, noise, trauma, expectations, influence - this is when infinite potential starts to collapse.” - @itsgurubenny

In quantum physics this as known as decoherence, the transmutation of something infinite into a singular, binary state as a result of measurement. Which is precisely how we begin to lose everything we were promised we could be.

Because learning all that you have to offer, you learn also what you have to lose.

If we’re lucky, the way the world dents us in our younger years goes largely unseen. Our lives are held together by invisible forces - parents, teachers, schooling. And we are protected by our innocence, to operate on impulse and curiosity without risk.

But outside the sanctity of childhood, the future begins to hold you hostage.

Where once your potential filled you with promise, it slowly starts to fill you with demands. Every decision seems to either shrink or enhance it somehow, but you’ll never know which until way after the fact. All you know is you teeter a fine line of destiny, one side facing everything you ‘could be’ and the other, a terrifying dropoff where everything you ‘could’ve been’ goes to die.

Many people do it well, riding their potential all the way through to great success and triumph. The only trouble is, you’ll be able to see it. All of it. And I’ve been inundated with a hell of a lot of people doing that lately.

From the same seed and soil of which you came, many different plants will begin to grow, some which are simply impossible to ignore. Comparison becomes inevitable, and one of the harshest ways our potential begins to diminish.

In truth, I think I chased potential out of fear. Fear of being left behind, fear of failure, fear of missing anything that could lead to a better life for me. Fear took the power out of me and gave it home in other people. And so I neglected to water any flower of my own, knowing it could never be as good as one better I might be able to attract in someone else that might take me where I needed to be.

But with nothing of our own to back ourselves up, we lose vision. We begin looking for ourselves in other people, seeking information that might tell us about ourselves in turn. What becomes of other people directly impacts what becomes of us. Allowing any successes of other people to define us, in contrast, as failures.

Eventually, wasted potential dies out a battle scar.

A collection of excuses to explain the worst parts of your life. The guy you didn’t date who could’ve opened doors for you. The job you passed up because you thought you could do better. The competition you came third in when you knew you could’ve tried harder. The person who got the book deal that was supposed to be for you.

We’re left as victims of our own inaction, witnesses to our own decoherence.

At 32, there’s now an ache to my everyday that I am guilty of blaming on my youth.

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are the most disagreeable clients,” says psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz. “There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”

And I don’t know if she’s right, but I do know Olivia Rodrigo was really on one when she said, comparison is killing me slowly.

I refer back to the girl I once was with a kind of latent hostility, that I know isn’t totally fair. It’s a hard pill to swallow to realise the choices you thought were in your best interest were perhaps just the ones that spared you from the most shame.

I’ve spent my whole life on the run, flitting from one vague pursuit to another, starving my soul of the chance to actually start investing in myself out of the shame that I never did before.

To free myself from this this hell of my own making is to finally advocate for my potential. But to do so I must first acknowledge the lifelong commitment to self-abandonment that got me here. And then I am struck by such violating sadness, assaulted with a powerful longing to just be her again.

It’s the kind of sorrow that has you bent over on the bathroom floor at 2 in the afternoon, howling with a pain you’re not quite sure is appropriate. Then it shakes its last breath out of you and you pick yourself back up, brush yourself off and go about the rest of your day, as alien in your own skin as you were before.

Adulthood has begun to feel increasingly like a hostile simulation that I don’t want to play anymore. I feel desperately homesick for a place that I can never return. Lonely in a way that no amount of hanging out with friends or family can ever seem to cure.

The only thing I have with which to console myself is:

This is what it must feels like to stop running.

Partying aged 19, the summer of 2012

As for the friend of mine who received that catty DM all those years ago, it didn’t hold her back.

She went on to become an incredibly successful award-winning podcaster, multi-novelist and creator of one of Substack’s most-read newsletters. She remains to be someone I admire hugely, whose successes are a testament to her dedication and good character. We even managed to reconnect recently, after I heard her interviewed on my favourite podcast, and she invited me to her latest book launch.

As for her detractor, that former friend of hers - I never really followed what became of her. It wasn’t long after their friend breakup that I left the blogging world for good, and she gradually slipped my mind entirely.

That was until one sunny morning at the start of last week, as I strolled around the garden feeling particularly obliterated by my own former friend’s latest achievement, and she popped into my mind once more.

I was instantly curious as to what had become of her and so decided to look her up.

Had she ended up like me? Had she, too, been consumed by the pressure to achieve so much that it had always remained out of reach?

Had she leapt from one circumstance to another, searching for some place to hang the weight of her soul in a world where it felt there was none?

Had her jealousy destroyed her from the inside out, preventing her from achieving anything meaningful of her own because she could not be happy for others?

I smiled weakly before slipping my phone back into my pocket.

Of course not - She’d gone on to publish 14 books.