Why Potential Eventually Becomes an Insult

Somewhere in your twenties, if you're the kind of person people expect things from, "you have so much potential" quietly stops being a compliment. It starts to sound like a bill coming due. Not because the people saying it mean any harm — most of them are being kind, or trying to be — but because the word itself is future tense, and you can only live in the future tense for so long before it starts to feel like a place you're not allowed to leave.

Potential is a strange thing to be praised for, if you think about it. It's not a compliment about what you've done. It's a compliment about what you haven't done yet, delivered as if it were already yours. And the longer you carry it without cashing it in, the more it curdles — for other people, who start to wonder what's taking so long, and for you, who starts to wonder the same thing at 2 a.m.

Nobody warns you that being told you're capable of something is not the same as being told what it will cost.

I spent years mistaking potential for a promise the universe owed me, rather than a raw material I still had to do something with. That's a comfortable mistake to make, because it lets you keep being the person with promise instead of becoming the person who actually made something — and making something is where you find out you're not as good as the compliment implied, at least not yet, and that's a harder thing to sit with than the compliment itself.

What eventually changed it for me wasn't a burst of confidence. It was smaller and less dramatic than that: I started finishing things that weren't impressive. Unglamorous, unremarkable, unshareable things. Not because finishing them proved anything to anyone else, but because it quietly retired the identity of "the one who could." You can't be the one who could, once you've actually done it — you just become the one who did, which is a smaller, sturdier, less flattering thing to be. I recommend it.

If potential has started to sound like an insult to you too, it might not mean you've failed to live up to it. It might mean you're finally close enough to using it that it's stopped being theoretical — and theory was always the more comfortable place to live.