I’ve been flip-flopping all over the place this week. Maybe you can blame it on our May, which threatens to leave my freshly planted cucumber seeds to rot in soil that’s too cold and damp for growth.

I should have checked the Farmer’s Almanac, I know. Amateur gardener alert.

In actuality, my capricious mind owes its uncertainty not to the weather but to all this stuff I’ve been reading and seeing lately.

Nothing I write here truly comes from me. I am the lens through which you might glimpse something much more remarkable or affecting than what I’ve got to say. This lens is concave. My only hope is that after peeking through it you’ll lower it to look at the thing itself and then dive into the conversation with your own convex counterpoint.

This week, I reached both extremes of the emotional continuum of my experiment in growing up. I now feel lost somewhere in the middle, unsure of where along the line I should land.

First, I read a refreshingly terse advice column to a recent graduate looking for direction. It lacked the tender encouragement found in many commencement speeches this weekend. She placated her petitioner’s fear with a revelation: most of us are just destined to be average.

She believes, wholeheartedly, that the problem is not our mediocrity, which is inherent, but our addiction to the belief that we’re capable of accomplishing something great. While it seems defeatist, it rang startlingly true.

I’ve been a teacher’s pet all of my life. I learned to equate every “A” I waved at Mom and Dad with some mysterious cache of potential that only grew with each achievement. But weren’t these shared by others in my class, on my soccer team, in my dance troupe?

Maybe I’m not so special. Maybe my happiness can only be secured with the acceptance that I’m just alright, that I’ll spend my life as a member of the rank and file, applauding the work of the few, the fortunate, the gifted.

I was wading in a sea of minor depression. After all, here I was coming to terms with my addiction to self-admiration. It was awful.

A few days later, I was swooped into the arms of giddy optimism. This time, the culprit was a documentary laden with intellectual and cultural heavyweights who were all coming to the same conclusions: we’re all connected! And everything we do, regardless of how small, has the power to affect the world around us.

I’m glad the theater was dark because I spent the film smiling, giggling to myself, bursting into fits of relieved weeping. I saw it clearly, profoundly: I was immeasurably powerful. I was changing the world around me simply through my giggling and tears.

Such outbursts of unchecked elation have always been tempered by critical reflection. Later, I began to recall my earlier brush with what seemed like an empty but clear truth. I prefer the fullness of optimism, but is it really more valid than the alternative?

The reality must lie somewhere in the middle. I just can’t seem to settle on where that middle is

[via.]