Episode 1 — The Decline : How I Accidentally Became (below) Average

Episode 1: How I Accidentally Became Average

I was always confident.

Not loud. Not attention-seeking. But certain.

I always knew what I was and who I wanted to be — as you’ll soon find out. Even now, I’ve probably only lived 20% of my life — maybe less — but that 20% has not been gentle. Some people fight quietly just to exist. I did. I fought as a girl. I fought as a middle child. I fought as someone carrying things no child should have had to carry.

And fighting does something to you. It either shrinks you — or it forges you.

It forged me.

I knew I was intelligent. I grasped concepts before most of my peers. I understood dynamics before they were explained. I was hyper-aware of rooms, of tone shifts, of what people meant without them saying it. I knew exactly where I stood.

And more than that — I cared.

I felt empathy I never received. I held love for people who would never know my name. I cared about the overlooked, the ones quietly drowning while everyone else applauded the surface.

That kind of empathy isn’t weakness. It’s depth.

Maybe it came from searching for a kind of love I was never going to receive. When you grow up negotiating for emotional oxygen, you become fluent in other people’s suffocation.

I always cared. About the homeless. About the forgotten. About the ones labelled “too much” or “not enough.” And I noticed something early: most systems are built on self-interest. Wealth. Status. Even love can become transactional.

That wasn’t the world I expected.

Puberty didn’t just change my body. It unveiled hierarchy. Stigma. The invisible rules of social survival. Suddenly, the world had edges. And no one hands you a manual.

I adapted. I always do.

I moved countries more times than I can count. Reinvention became muscle memory.

But I was adapting to things I never should have had to understand. Exposed to realities my brain wasn’t ready to process. And somewhere in that constant recalibration, something subtle shifted.

I started listening.

Listening to people who secretly wanted to be where I was. Listening to people who didn’t believe in me. Listening to ceilings disguised as advice. I was told to be “normal.” Told I was strange for not fitting neatly into a conventional box.

So I tried to shrink.

When my days grew heavy and my grades slipped, people called it burnout.

I don’t believe in burnout the way it’s sold to us.

Burnout implies you tried too hard.

What I experienced wasn’t exhaustion from effort. It was erosion from environment. It was constant comparison. Constant noise. Constant subtle messaging telling me I wasn’t enough — not smart enough, not pretty enough, not normal enough.

You can’t “self-care” your way out of that.

And I didn’t collapse dramatically. I didn’t fail overnight.

It happened through doubt.

Tiny, repeated doubt.

The kind that sounds rational. The kind that calls itself realism. The kind that tells you to lower your expectations “for your own good.”

I was told I had to look a certain way — the kind of beauty engineered by filters, money, and impossible standards. I developed insecurities I didn’t even recognise as foreign. The noise of my weaknesses grew louder than the evidence of my strengths.

The intelligence. The awareness. The natural ability. The body I once loved. Even the love I had for myself — it all began to sour.

Identity doesn’t collapse overnight. It erodes. Slowly. Politely. Quietly.

And before I realised it, I wasn’t chasing potential anymore.

I was negotiating with average.

Barely thriving in it. Barely existing inside myself.

I thought the only solution was to remove the people who fed those narratives — even if that meant starting over alone.

So a year later, I did.

This is the story of how I lost myself — and how I’m rebuilding.

And in Episode 2, you’ll understand something I didn’t at the time:

It wasn’t random.

It wasn’t weakness.

It wasn’t “just burnout.”

There were systems amplifying it. Algorithms feeding it. Structures rewarding it. People who wanted me to stay there. 

You’ll see.

Because average was never my identity.

It was contamination.

And this is where the reconstruction begins.