Corrosion of a Prodigy

I'm not old.

In fact, I'm pretty young. 18 years and a half learning new talents, and most of those years spent doing nothing of value with any of that knowledge.

When you're a child prodigy, it is VERY easy to become attached and even dependent on others' praise; whether you grew to become the smartest kid of your class or if you were born a natural athlete, soon you realize that the more you grow, the harder it is to keep up with other prodigies such as yourself, and the less valuable your skills become.

A small child's talent; their whole WORLD and sometimes even their own personality, torn apart by the advantages other people had that they didn't; or by the effort and hard work they didn't even realize they had to put in from one second to the next. Rapidly, they find out that in life, having a talent that you want to show off to the world becomes a race against others, to see just how capable you are of keeping up with the scaling expectations of people.

And what does any of that have to do with me? Well, simply put that I lost this race.

Quoting Lin-Manuel Miranda's film adaptation of Tick, Tick... BOOM!, "By the time my parents were 30, they already had two kids, they had careers, with steady paychecks, a mortgage...— And what exactly do I have to show for myself?"

That fragment is a dramatic take on Jonathan Larson's frustration over not having accomplished a satisfactory milestone in the theater industry by age 30. So in contrast, what is a toddler like me doing by having the same mental breakdown? Where does all this concern and despair even come from, with a whole life ahead of me?

Is it just the natural feelings of anxiety that a melodramatic teenager might feel at this age? Maybe.

Is it the depression caused by a progressively more pessimistic world that's slowly corroding with the passing years? Probably.

But I think that the answer for me, and for any other prodigies struggling with the same battle, will always be the need to do things differently from others, the need of feeling special.

And just what is special if not doing things from a young age, before anyone even expects something out of you, surprising them with your talent; THAT is special. That is everything a kid needs to keep going because they know they are special. But what happens when suddenly someone else is more special than you are? What happens when everyone else around you is just as special because you've all grown so much that they've just caught up with your talents.

That's not special, is it? That just becomes normal, common; and everyone can be common, right?

So where does that fire inside of you go when your uniqueness has drifted away? Does it just go off? Then why don't you light it up again?

And that's why I'm writing this; because by addressing it, not only am I starting to light the flint for my fire again, but I might just end up lighting someone else's.

Because being special and talented just doesn't work when you scale it up against others. And I think that what most of us corroded prodigies realize, but are too scared to confront is that we're just as special as we set out to be. So it's not other's fault for "reaching" us; it is ours for fooling ourselves into thinking that we were ever reached in the first place.

So go ahead, forever-young prodigy that might never fully grow up; go ahead and make yourself proud because when you have a gift in you, you're the most important person that should be satisfied with it. There's no such thing as corrosion on talents, there's only improvement and conformism.

(This was written completely over my mediocre writing skills, and no AI was used on the redaction of this post. Support the effort of other writers.)