My Commonwealth Short Story That Didn’t Make the Cut.

The Weight of Being Special

It was 3 AM and the blue glow from my laptop was the only thing keeping me awake. My phone in my hand as the screen light shone with another TikTok video I was binge-watching.

My screen time last week was 6 hours daily and this week I planned to drop it to 3 hours daily. Yet here I was watching another video of another influencer living in a big home, with kids and a rich husband.

It is one of the slow-living content I consume that makes you pray “I will marry right oh.” Contents on having your garden, living off the grid, and abandoning corporate work.

The day was already into a promising Monday morning to try again. To succeed and achieve financial stability or generational wealth.  My eyes burned and my brain was fogged with sleep deprivation, but I couldn't stop scrolling. 

“You will become the greatest surgeon alive,” My papa said often while growing up.

“You’ll become an amazing mother,” Mama said, as I took care of my dolls.

I believed I could be anything I wanted to be because the world was open and limitless if I worked hard enough, studied hard enough, dreamt big, and stayed persistent to become the next Ben Carson.

I wanted to rise above the noise and limitations my parents faced. Every video I watched, every blog I read, every podcast I listened to was like a mantra being drilled into my brain: “You have to want it more than anyone else. Change the mindset, dream big, think outside the box!”

I tried hard, so hard each time, each year dreaming only to come crashing down the waves. Now at 25, I was tired of even trying. Uncertainty clung hard to me. Today I am not sure if any of us was made for greatness or that if we even tried with all our might we may only fall for the crumbs of it.

Some have cinched it but many only struggle.

What is even greatness?

I asked myself as I stood up from my bed to begin my day. 

I hated admitting that even if it may be hard, I want to be extraordinary. Who doesn’t dream of being the one everyone looked up to? But the longer I sat, scrolling through entrepreneurial advice and millionaire success stories, the more hollow it all felt.

Each headline the same: “Change your mindset, and you’ll make it. Or Work smarter and you’ll see results.” Does this mean we ought to push ourselves into exhaustion?

I dragged my fingers through my hair, pulling at my roots just enough to feel something. The numbness of routine, of ambition for ambition’s sake, had settled into my bones.

I glanced at the clock. 3:45 AM. Another sleepless night chasing after the idea of a future that looked shinier in theory than it felt in reality.

In the daylight, everything looked more bearable. I sit at brunch with friends, pretending like we have it all figured out. We'd laugh about our "plans"—moving to countries, starting businesses, traveling the world. But beneath the laughter an unspoken truth: none of us knew that perhaps we were just performing.

Jasmine, the one who always speaks about making her first million by 30, is the loudest of all. She’d lean back in her chair, toss her hair, and talk about the empire she was going to build. But after too many drinks, when we alone, she'd confess she is terrified of failing.

She doesn’t want to run a business—she just felt like she had to. Like that was the path she was supposed to take.

We anre all like that. Trapped in our own ideas of what success looked like, desperately trying to escape the reality of being ordinary. No one ever taught us that ordinary wasn’t bad. But being ordinary meant failing somehow. Maybe the idea of blending into the background, living a "normal" life, was what we feared the most.

My mother called me in the middle of one of those particularly gray mornings. “When are you thinking of settling down?” she asked, her voice almost too casual, like she hadn’t been waiting for months to drop that question on me.

I could hear the expectations, the quiet plea for grandchildren, for a life that looked more familiar to hers. I shifted uncomfortably on my chair, knowing I was about to disappoint her. Again.

“I’m... not sure that’s for me,” I replied, trying to keep my tone light.

There was a pause on the other end. “Oh,” she said quietly, the kind of ‘oh’ that carried all the judgment and sadness she'd never actually say aloud. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a family; the thought of that level of responsibility terrified me. What if I failed at that, too?

Children. Houses. Legacies. All these things that are supposed to be milestones of a successful life, only felt like shackles. And yet, the world around me cherished them.

“Everyone settles down eventually,” she'd say.

What does it mean to settle? When you begin a new life as a mother and wife? Is that settling? What if one just wanted... to be? To exist without having to check off every box of "adulting" society has laid out?

Time blurred by in a mix of anxious thoughts and half-hearted attempts at passion projects. I watch people around me get promoted, start families, launch startups. Social media was a constantly reminded you that you were not being loud enough, or doing enough. You wasn’t grinding enough 24/7.

At some point, the pressure keep you awake at night wondering if you was doing life wrong, if there are some secret to success you haven’t figured out yet.

Everyone made it look so easy—like if you were a smart kid, all you had to do was dream big, get good grades, work hard, and everything would fall into place.

No one wanted to admit that we couldn’t all be special. That some of us would be the background characters in the stories of other people's lives. And that’s where the real terror creep in. The thought that after all the striving and suffering, you are ordinary at the end of the day.

I met Anthony at a bar one weekend. He was a couple of years older than me, a financial analyst who’d “done everything right.” Good school, good job, nice apartment in the city. The kind of guy everyone told me I should want to be like. We got to talking, and before I knew it, we were both spilling our insecurities like secrets.

“Do you ever feel like you’re just… pretending?” He asked, swirling the ice in his drink.

I laughed. “Everyday.”

“Do you?” I asked.

He looked down at his glass. “No. I feel lost.”

Maybe none of us will ever feel like we’ve “made it,” because we have things we want that define “made it,” in our books. Maybe the finish line we are all racing toward doesn’t exist.

Months passed. Life continued its relentless forward march. I drifted from job to job, project to project, always searching for that one thing that would make me feel like I was enough. But the more I searched, the more I began to realize something: maybe I’d never find it.

Maybe that was okay.

I looked at the people around me: friends getting married, buying houses, having kids, and instead of feeling left behind, I started to feel something else. Peace. Contentment. They were doing what made sense to them, and I was doing what made sense to me. And maybe that wasn’t special or groundbreaking, but it was real.

I didn’t have to be extraordinary. I didn’t have to leave a legacy or build an empire. I could just live my life: simple, quiet, and full of small joys. Like the way sunlight filtered through my apartment window in the mornings, or the way the air smelled just before it rained. I didn’t have to chase after greatness. I could let it go. But even writing this seemed like an attempt to chase greatness for a moment. An attempt to get my name in a book that mattered.

One night, Jasmine and I sat together on her balcony, the city lights twinkling beneath us. She was quiet, lost in thought, until she finally spoke.

“Do you ever wonder if we’re just… wasting our time?” she asked softly.

I thought about it for a moment, the weight of her words sinking in. “Maybe. But that’s okay.” She turned to look at me, confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe we are just ordinary people living ordinary lives. And that’s enough.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, just stared out at the skyline, lost in her thoughts. And I sat beside her, feeling the weight lift from my chest, knowing that for the first time in a long time, I was okay with being exactly who I was.

Maybe we wouldn’t change the world. Maybe we wouldn’t build empires or leave behind legacies that people would talk about for centuries. But we would live. And we would love. And we would matter, in the quiet way that most people do.

The End.

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Thank you for reading.