Mediocrity

I suck at sports. All sports, for the most part. It’s a miracle in some ways that I can walk without tripping or ride a bicycle without falling over (which I have done plenty of times). When I grew up in Indiana I had a reputation as the kid who could walk into the gymnasium and (within seconds) have a stray basketball hit me right on top of the head almost every time.

Sports aside, I wanted more than anything to be an artist when I was growing up. And I was alright at drawing or painting or creating things, but I wasn’t anything spectacular. There wasn’t a drawing book in our small community library I hadn’t checked out to make myself learn a better technique, a new way to use my sketch pencils and paper, some mysterious muscle in my hands I should activate to suddenly become the amazing artist I wanted desperately to be. It never happened, and – this part is important – when I was considerably older and visiting with a younger cousin who has *actual* artistic talent, I saw and felt the difference between the mediocre kind of “art” I had created and the sort of stuff that just fell out of her fingers and graced the world with its presence. I was in awe of her innate talent, her eye for the right angle, the perfect color she could choose to make a simple watercolor just sing.

I tried carpentry. Similar outcome. Stable structures (most of the time), but rarely anything to write home about. Bicycle repair? Well my bikes ride just fine, thank you, but I’m no wheel master, that’s for sure. Professional driving? I mean, my bus hugged those curbs, and I never ran late on my schedule, but my customer service left a lot to be desired, and I was terribly unhappy in that role. Small business owner? Huge fail.

Okay, maybe I should focus on something with a more positive outcome. Small scale vegetable farming? Well, that comes with mixed results. Some years the harvests are amazing. Sometimes the onions fail, the bunnies eat the corn sprouts and the peas, and the garlic bulbs are so small you curse having to peel them for dinner. I’m never sure how much my success or failure in the garden is me versus the weather, rainfall, pest pressure, seed viability, or happenstance. But year after year I keep going back at it, results be damned. I’m in it for the process as much as the product – though really, you should try the fingerling potatoes I grow. They’re incredible.

Ugh. Musician. That’s a tangly series of life episodes to watch. I’m functional at a variety of instruments, I can sing alright, I can (barely) read music. Writing music, on the other hand, was a truly epic failure.

I am incredibly average at almost everything I do.

This isn’t some sad attempt at fishing for compliments. There are plenty of things I excel at that I’m not listing here, though that list is distinctly small and full of odd things that don’t have too many uses in mainstream life¹.

Doing things we are not good at shouldn’t be frowned upon. It shouldn’t be shunned or mocked. And if experience is required at a thing, then practice is a requirement, and most practice looks pretty dang mediocre.

This is a plea, a call to arms, to do the things we want to do, even especially if we are mediocre.

Writing this newsletter is one of those mediocre things. I have a folder full of half-starts, ideas, posts that I want to write and can’t seem to find the words to finish. There are many days when I stare at that list of documents and feel crushing defeat at how many of them will never get published here, how many contain some great snips of writing that simply aren’t on a topic I can work with enough to feel comfortable hitting the send button with them included. And maybe some of them are even good. They could be great. But in my eyes they don’t qualify, and so they sit in that folder collecting digital dust.

Somewhere at my midpoint in writing here I surprised myself by posting poetry.

Listen, my poetry is basic. It’s average. It’s boxed mac and cheese². I don’t even know how to make any of it rhyme.

But I posted it anyway.

And I held my breath.

And the world didn’t end. In fact, I think I felt better.

Maybe…

Maybe the world just needs a little more mediocrity in it. Maybe we could all let loose a notch and create things that aren’t perfect or great. Maybe we could just have fun. Maybe we could express ourselves with bad grammar and sloppy paintbrushes and a note played in the wrong key.

Maybe being mediocre isn’t just okay – it’s beautiful. It’s required.

I have sat with new poems for weeks and months now, examining them, fretting over word choice, wondering if the people who read the things I write will see another bit of poetry and sigh and roll their eyes at the clutter it creates in an otherwise relatively coherent blog/newsletter/community posting space about things that we can all understand or at least consider. I don’t go through this with my other writing the way I do with poetry because something about poetry cuts out the chatter. And when the work I put into it still results in a mediocre output, I feel the sharp intrusion of shame and humiliation at everything I have ever gotten wrong in front of another human.

And yet.

I can’t help but write it anyway.

Even if it’s lousy. Because maybe it won’t be.

Maybe it will just be mediocre = beautiful = present = real = free = and out there without any judgement at all.

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February is the start of my chunk-of-time-off-work for a host of reasons, not the least of which is to write that memoir I’ve been stewing over for two years now. In honor of the work I’ll be putting into that writing, my posts here may be a little more brief, a skosh more poetic, and some items might even hint at chapters-in-the-works for that book. This is my big thank you shout out to those of you who have subscribed recently, to the growing list of folks who think paying for my work has value, and to those of you who’ve personally reached out in encouraging ways. This has become a place that feels like home, where sharing my thoughts and my creativity are welcome and safe, and I’m grateful to all of you for making that happen.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

1. For instance, I’m pretty amazing at knitting bizarre things like octopus tentacles. It’s come in handy more than once.

2. The dry, powdered kind.