The Negative Side of Having “Potential”

Summer is stretching its long arms out in a near mind-crushing expanse of potential. Classes are over, the days are longer, and I have a summer stipend which means I have nothing but time and sunshine in which to write. I have no deadlines and no one expects me to show up for work at 9am. I don’t have any reading or writing assignments, which means that I ultimately get to choose what I read and what I write. I am absolutely free of constraints.

This sounds nice, I know, but really it is crushing. There is nothing as depressing as having “potential”. If I were to die tomorrow, my epitaph would most certainly be, “Here lies Theresa Marie MacPhail. She had so much potential.”

po·ten·tial (pə-těn’shəl)
adj.

1. Capable of being but not yet in existence; latent: a potential problem.
2. Having possibility, capability, or power.

n.

1. The inherent ability or capacity for growth, development, or coming into being.
2. Something possessing the capacity for growth or development.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the quality collectively known as “potential”. I believe it was my second grade teacher, Mrs. White, that first officially labeled me as “having potential”, and she was quickly followed by my mother and other various members of my family. Teachers, it was true, loved me. I was (and this is taken directly from my report cards, which my mother saved in a special folder): bright, eager to learn, a good reader, above grade-level, a pleasure to teach, and perhaps a bit too talkative. I was good in math, science and English. In sixth grade, I was the first girl to win the math award (which is, surprisingly, not as cool as it sounds for a gawky 11-year-old). My first year in high school, I was the only freshman in a sophomore geometry class (again, they didn’t think I was half as kick-ass as my father did for this accomplishment). I got placed in an advanced English class my senior year – there were only 10 of us. Unsurprisingly, I was ranked 9th in my class (and I went to a high school with a campus – so you can do your own math here). My chemistry teacher tried to convince me to become a plastics engineer (seriously), and I wanted to be a journalist (past English teachers were all-too ready with the “potential” comments). I was a geek. Better yet, I was a geek with potential.

I still am. Clearly, since I am a graduate student with a summer reading list that includes Kant and Baudelaire. But, that damned potential keeps lingering over me like a dark cloud, ready to burst open. And yet it doesn’t. Down here, at my computer, it remains the Gobi desert. Each year, the potential encroaches, taking more space and reducing visibility. Some days, I can’t even see one week into the future, it’s that thick with potential disaster.

While at Stanford the other day (a place brimming with potential), I picked up a copy of a book by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, called “Stumbling on Happiness”. I was feeling depressed because I was in a bookstore filled with literally tens of thousand of books and I was thinking about my own stalled writing career. I was in the China section, reading the back cover of a book about China by a journalist who was at least five years younger than me and it was his SECOND book. In addition, he was the China correspondent for the New Yorker. Did I mention he was five years younger than me? I felt like crying. Here I was, with all of my POTENTIAL, and there he was, out there in the world, with all of his fulfilled book contracts.

It is Mr. Gilbert’s interesting opinion that we are, and have always been, bad predictors of what will make us happy. We also, interestingly enough, think about our futures for approximately 12% of our waking hours. This is not the future as in “What will I have for lunch, tuna or chicken salad?”, but the future as in our potentials. Will we have enough money for retirement? Can we afford a house in two years? Should we have a baby? Will we be fat and wrinkled at 60 unless we go to the gym today? Potential, it seems, is something that human beings are programmed to bear. Potential is, however, not what we think it will be.

Now, I am only on chapter one of this book, so I can’t claim to know the end or explain the details of Gilbert’s point. However, I have already felt a bit relieved to know that I am not in this “future” boat alone. Misery really does love company. I worry. All the time. About everything. So does everyone else, it seems. Even that guy in China who has published two successful books. Right now, he’s in Beijing wondering if he’ll ever fulfill his potential. The potential that his 8th grade English teacher told him about; the potential that his wife is always bragging to her friends about; the potential that he knows he has inside of him, sitting there like a flame ready to ignite.