Why am I afraid of being ordinary?
You see someone your age achieving something remarkable, and a cold thought follows: my life will be like everyone else’s. Work, friends, and quiet evenings are not wrong. Still, the prospect feels like a sentence. It is the sense that a life nobody points to has not counted.
A Saint Theresa of nothing
In the prelude to Middlemarch, George Eliot mentions Saint Theresa of Avila, whose passion found a great task. Then she describes women born with that same intensity but no matching outlet. “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing,” she writes. Longing breaks against small obstacles.
This is the fear in its sharpest form: possessing a large heart that leaves no visible mark.
Changing the measure
By the end of the novel, the heroine Dorothea has wanted a great life but lived an ordinary one. Eliot does not offer the usual consolation that an ordinary life is inherently beautiful. Instead, she writes:
“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch, “Finale”
The phrase “not widely visible” still means the issues were there, and Eliot describes the effect of Dorothea’s existence on those around her as “incalculably diffusive”. Influence spread in ways not displayed.
Two different counts
The fear of being ordinary often confuses two metrics: how many people see a life, and what that life changes in its immediate surroundings. The first is easy to count. The second mostly is not, which makes it easy to forget. Wanting fame is a separate matter with its own page. Here, the worry is the opposite: the absence of visibility. Eliot does not claim this is unimportant. She suggests the measure itself was wrong.
Where do I measure my life by the number of people who see it?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.