Once upon a time I was a girl with a bright future. In elementary school, the one who was almost always placed in the gifted or accelerated programs; in junior high, consistently achieving Honor Roll status; high school, top 15% of my graduating class, 31 on the ACT, being recruited by such prestigious institutions as Barnard College and Rutgers University. [Alleged athletic talent existed as well, but today I'm focusing on academic and vocational issues.] And yet here I am today, twenty-three years old, no degree beyond a high school diploma, seemingly light years away from a bachelor's degree, still living at home, working part time answering phones at an insurance company -- an insurance company! --with no real plan for the future. (There are a few pipe dreams, sure, but what are the odds of them actually happening?) I am frequently told that I am not living up to my "potential," that I'm wasting my "talents." At times I scoff at the idea that this alleged "potential" or "talent" exists in the first place. Oh, you might think I'm smart when you see my test scores, but really, I'm just good at taking tests; this has no bearing on my actual intelligence. If I were truly intelligent, I would never have let myself be taken over by figure skating, or the eating disorder, or mental illness, et cetera ad nauseam.

This might be the time to remember that I've always been somewhat of an "underachiever." Papers and major projects were always completed in my pre-college days, and I was good about reading assigned chapters, but as far as the regular daily written homework, well, let's just say I was somewhat inconsistent about turning it in. Sometimes I'd do it and forget it at home, other times I just plain didn't do it. I still earned very good grades -- exams and class participation weren't an issue -- but it drove many of my instructors batty. My high school accelerated biology teacher was all too happy to point out the one B I ever got on one of her chapter tests (plant physiology, if you care to know), and she practically gloated that I'd probably have earned an A had I bothered to do any of the worksheets on the subject. Needless to say, my parents weren't so thrilled about any of this, either. On the surface I can see why everyone else was baffled; in most other ways I was stickler for perfection. 99% on a spelling test was enough to leave me in tears, but in recognition of the fact that most teachers took off grade points for not turning in assignments, I was okay with a 90% grade overall in the class. After all, an A was an A. (Mathematics lay safely outside the realm of this perfectionism; good thing, I suppose, because had I extended this extremist attitude to the realm of arithmetic, I literally might have killed myself.) It all made perfect sense to me at the time, even if I'd be hard-pressed to offer a coherent or eloquent explanation.

Yet if a certain subject really struck my interests, even if I didn't do the homework, I would -- and still will -- follow up with independent study on my own time. Heck, the vast majority of what I know about nutrition, anthropology, philosophy, and environmental issues is from independent research. Obviously I put forth the effort where my interests lie. So I guess one could ask if this was/is merely selective laziness. But at the same time, between years of formal psychotherapy and some subsequent self-analysis, it's also become clear that the underachievement is often a function of the underlying perfectionism. And yes, it ties in with fear of failure/rejection/et cetera. What if I did try my absolute best, and it wasn't good enough? No, the thought of that happening was too much to bear. Better play it safe and not really give a hundred percent of myself. If I don't actually put forth every possible effort, and the results aren't as good as one would hope, I could plausibly rationalize this as, "Well, if I had tried hard, I could've done better. But now I guess we'll never know." (Admittedly this legacy continues even today, to a certain extent. You would think by now that I'd be accustomed to so-called failure.) Still, there's more to it than that.

Potential comes from the Latin potentia, or power. What is it, theoretically, in my power to do, based on a few standardized test scores and grades from elementary and secondary school? Not everyone with the same "potential" goes on to do the same things. In some cases it is truly not living up to one's potential.

But maybe in some instances the measure of this so-called potential is flawed. Maybe everyone else is misgauging my abilities and I'm not nearly as capable as people make me out to be.

Maybe this is yet another realm of life where my lack of self-confidence gets in the way of things.

Or maybe I am capable of everything that everyone else seems to believe I am capable of... but have, at least perhaps in the back of my head, vastly different plans for myself than what conventional society would have be doing based on this supposed potential.

If only I could articulate precisely what that "something else" is.

Such is the story of my life these past two years.