I’ve spent most of my life being naturally good at things. Not necessarily the best, but good enough that I’ve rarely had to work particularly hard to feel capable.
I love being talented. I love being told I’m smart. I love when someone tells me I have a good eye or that something I’ve created is impressive. Every compliment gives me the same little thrill, no matter how many times I’ve heard it before. Even when I’m looking at my own work and thinking, wow, this is really good, I get excited.
I think this has given me a very unrealistic relationship with my own potential.
I’m not particularly competitive. I don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, and I don’t spend much time worrying about whether someone else is doing better than me. But I do expect to be good at whatever I decide to do. Competence is my baseline, and anything less feels like an extreme failure.
The problem is that being naturally good at things has made it very easy to underestimate how much effort they actually require. I am constantly overcommitting because I’m convinced I can get something done in half the time it realistically takes. And because I don’t always push myself as hard as I could, I sometimes end up performing below the standard I’ve set for myself.
It’s frustrating because I know I’m capable of more.
Actually, I think that’s the source of most of my dissatisfaction. I have a really difficult time feeling satisfied with where I am because I’m constantly thinking about how much further along I could be.
Not because I don’t have the ability, but because I’m not willing to make all the sacrifices.
I like going out. I like dating. I like traveling and making new friends and having entirely unnecessary adventures. I like making things just because I think they’re cool. I like the sillier parts of myself. I have a lot of interests, and very few of them have anything to do with becoming professionally successful.
And I know that if I were willing to give some of those things up, I could probably accomplish a lot more.
My ambition is sometimes killed by my joy.
The frustrating part is that it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I don’t want to spend my twenties doing nothing but building a résumé. I don’t want to look back on my life and realize I was so concerned with becoming somebody that I forgot to actually be somebody.
But I still resent it.
I resent the idea that there’s probably a version of me who stayed home more, studied longer, took herself more seriously, and accomplished more by now. I don’t think she’d necessarily be happier than me. I don’t even think she’d be more interesting. But I do think she’d be more impressive, and apparently some part of me still cares about that.
I think I’ve been carrying around a very specific idea of what an accomplished woman is supposed to look like.
She has an amazing career. She’s ambitious, disciplined, financially successful, and probably married. She’s the kind of woman people describe as having it all together. It’s this strange, antiquated idea of womanhood that isn’t even particularly traditional. She’s somehow supposed to be both an exceptionally successful career woman and someone who has reached all the conventional milestones of adulthood.
And the funny thing is that I don’t actually want her life.
At 25, my biggest priorities are my friendships and growing as a creative. I care about my career, of course, but I don’t care about it more than the people in my life. If I had to choose between being an amazing friend and having an amazing job, I’d choose the former without much hesitation.
Yet for some reason, I still think having an amazing job is more admirable.
I can recognize that this doesn’t make much sense. I don’t think being more professionally successful would make me a better person. I don’t think it would automatically make me happier, more intriguing, or improve my social standing enough to meaningfully change my life. I just have this persistent feeling that it’s who I should be.
Or maybe it’s who I thought I’d be.
When I was in high school, I wanted to be married by 26. I’m 25 now, and I genuinely cannot believe I ever wanted that. I don’t even know what I thought marriage was going to add to my life at that age. I had this entire timeline planned out without any real understanding of what adulthood would feel like or what would actually make me happy.
And yet, I still find myself measuring my life against expectations I made when I knew significantly less about myself.
I think that’s the strangest part of growing up. My definition of success keeps changing, and it’s made it increasingly difficult to trust what I want.
How am I supposed to make decisions about my future when I know how drastically my priorities might change? What if the things I’m working toward now are things I’ll look back on in ten years and wonder why I ever cared about? What if I sacrifice the things that make me happy for a version of success I’ll eventually outgrow?
But then again, what if I don’t push myself enough now and regret that later?
The funny thing is, I think teenage Cori would actually be really proud of me.
I’m remarkably similar to the person I was in high school. I have a lot of the same interests, the same personality, and the same excitement about the world. I still want to go everywhere, try everything, and know everybody. I still love making things and finding new things to care about.
Which is interesting because I spent so much of my adolescence assuming that growing up would mean outgrowing the things that made me me.
I thought I’d eventually become more serious. That going out would stop sounding fun. That I’d naturally become less interested in adventures and more interested in settling down. I assumed the things that made me happy as a teenager would eventually be replaced by more mature interests.
But that hasn’t happened.
I’ve grown up, obviously. I have responsibilities, I’ve learned a lot, and I understand the world differently than I did at 16. But at my core, I’m still the same person.
And I didn’t need to change what brought me happiness in order to mature.
I think I’ve spent so much time worrying about whether I’m becoming the woman I was supposed to be that I haven’t given myself enough credit for becoming a woman I actually like.
There’s still a part of me that wishes I were more disciplined, more accomplished, and further along professionally. I don’t think that feeling is going away anytime soon. I still want to make something of my abilities, and I don’t want to use enjoying my life as an excuse for never challenging myself.
But I also don’t want to treat every night out, every trip, every friendship, and every creative project as time I stole from a more successful version of myself.
Because those things aren’t just what I do when I’m not working toward something important. They’re some of the most important parts of my life.
Maybe I could be further along if I were willing to give more of them up. I probably could.
I just don’t know if I’d like the person I’d have to become to get there.
And maybe the hardest part of realizing your potential is accepting that you don’t have to realize every bit of it.
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