Ordinary's just not good enough

It's a strange feeling; sort of realising that you're too afraid of failure, or too plagued by self-doubt, or just too damn lazy to ever really succeed at anything. I get intensely frustrated by feelings -- not of inadequacy, but of mediocrity. But I'm not going to go back over old ground again, or rehash that same post where I ranted before.

For a short while I ran with a tagline on my blog that quoted an Our Lady Peace song, "An ordinary boy, an ordinary name, but ordinary's just not good enough today" -- I deleted it later, for various reasons. Partly because it wasn't displaying how I wanted, but also partly because I felt it had been said before. Now I read it again and I see an underlying positivity. There's a certain subtle positivity in a lot of OLP's music, it just might not be easy to spot at first.

I could delete it because on one reading it isn't the positive message I need. I don't need to be telling myself I am ordinary and "not good enough", I need to be thinking of myself as amazing, as someone with extraordinary ability. I read somewhere how a belief is just a thought you keep having, and I have recently begun to appreciate fully quite how much I can control. I am learning techniques to control the release of endorphins, I am creating and encouraging new neural pathways -- I can and will believe anything I tell myself.

Just the same, it's all very well for me to be able to say I can take back control of my beliefs and my moods from there, but I can't assume it is the same for everyone. When I have been depressed before there were analogies of water. It feels a lot like drowning, and people have told me not to try and swim against the riptide of it. It would be like comparing someone treading water in a swimming pool, to someone struggling out at sea. One can not say they are in the same position.

The point of this post has evolved, while writing. I can't tell myself I am a failure, or any of the negative things I started with, if I ever want to be anything more. Although I might feel it. And I shouldn't project on to others, in any various contexts.