The moment you realize you can't be good at everything

Elementary school is great. It's the time where you haven't yet realized that you have limits, bounds past which your raw talent won't take you. When it's time for PE, everyone goes out and has a blast playing kickball or dodgeball, and as long as you had at least average physical grace, you're good enough to be the hottest thing on the playground for at least a few days sometime. Music is the same way: everyone is handed a recorder when they hit fifth grade, and everyone learns to play a scale on the thing. In all things, you could be good enough to be good at all things simultaneously, with minimal effort. There are no decisions to be made.

It's a curious feeling, that first day when you observe someone doing something you can't do, not even with a few minutes of experimentation and practice. It kind of turns the world upside-down, because now a line is drawn between that person and you, and you're left to wonder how you can go about distinguishing yourself.

It's with a tinge of sadness that I watch masterful artists, whether the art be playing an instrument, coloring a canvas, or rolling a mosaic of words from the tip of their tongue, and realize that I will never accomplish their level of mastery they posess. In response, I pursue the things that I hope will become my own unique voice, my verse in life's poem. And I am contented.

When humans lived in small groups, everyone knew everybody else well and had few if any encounters with outsiders. And I don't just mean hunter-gatherer societies; most of us lived this way until the Industrial Revolution. This meant that while you may not have been at all the strongest or fastest or handsomest in your group, the pool of talent/character/skill among the group was still small enough that you had a good chance of excelling at something: if not hunting then singing, or perhaps finding truffles.

It is important for a healthy psyche to have confidence in your ability at something, anything, WRT other people you know.

Chandler: You don't have to be good at everything.
Monica: Oh my god, you don't know me at all!

I've always had such a diverse base of interests that there was always someone better than me at each of them. Either that, or the things I was good at/knew about, no one wanted to hear (just try telling someone eating a stir-fry how soy sauce is made).

But the moment that really drove home the point that there are some things I shouldn't even be trying was very recent.

I was at a party with some friends. Some of them had started drinking very early and were hammered by 9 PM. By about 1 AM, one of them was holed up in a side room, surrounded by her six closest friends who were trying to keep her from committing suicide. Finally, they called in someone who wasn't at the party to talk her down.

Now, there are those who doubt the sanity and competence of the person they called, and in fact, I sat there grumbling to the others not in the side room, "Why can't I help?" But this other person had training on a crisis line, and in fact, was able to help.

It took me a day or so to realize that crisis intervention is just not my area. After all, I switched out of a psychology major before even a year of study.

My dad always said I could do anything if I put my mind to it. I agree. What's harder to realize is that for some things, "putting your mind to it" means a lot of training and study. So what I had to do was actually choose the thing I want to put my mind to. That's been the biggest thing holding me back in life.