Prominent Queen est. 1995

“I am not even normal, not talented, nothing.”Growing up, I never thought about it that much. 

To be fair, I wanted to make a writing that came across as… fictional, magnificent. 

Yet, I found myself sitting in a public library in a faraway city that the childhood me wouldn’t even dare to imagine being in. Groningen. What is that?

I know I am risking my life to be ridiculed, given that those I am closely in contact with live here now. But, bear with me, okay. 

When I was 10 – or younger – because I started picking up English very quickly compared to everyone in my family combined, my mom told many tales about the United Kingdom. I wanted that. 

When I was 13, I remembered so dearly: I wanted to be in Japan. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be in Japan, to be far away from my family and everything I knew of.

When I was 15, I wanted to be in South Korea to be a K-pop trainee. 

When I was in my early 20s, as soon as I knew I never had a home, I fantasized about the world I wanted to be in.

Faraway, there… Europe. 

The world where I don’t have to explain to men, women, and all, all the fun time about why women are not the second sex. (To be fair, I didn’t even know Simone de Beauvoir then, so I didn’t know what the term even is).

At 21, I was the only one in my whole family who went into this “traditionally” called the “best” school in the country, graduated from among “the hardest majors” there was…. the only one who traveled to Africa, China, and India. And so on.

(As I wrote this, I felt cringe creeping up my spine. Like those shiny LinkedIn page personas, I felt like I made a big boast about it. Honestly, I am not cool at all). 

But at 21, when one of the most memorable illusions of men, love, pushed the “escape button” which I had been avoiding, I fled…

 I felt like I had chosen an endless loop of failing.

Well, it’s not entirely true. I am sitting 15000 km from home, feeling much more at home with myself… where people are actively dying.

I am in the Netherlands. “Far away in Europe, where I felt like I belong,” as what my younger self would regard. It is not true that I didn’t wholly achieve anything.

Still, I have been floating around for 270 days since I finished something without any purpose or job… spending hours without actually making anything “meaningful” (“just” hobbies, called dancing, they said); the terror wouldn’t leave me.

 I am indeed a failure. 

One of the regrets that would occasionally come back is this: why wouldn’t you be like everyone else to have a simple faith, graduate from a “promising” prominent, stay in the lane, be like everyone else, be normal…

“Where did the intelligent, persistent, and actually talented-at-something Lidya go? Let’s be honest: who are you now? You could be a better researcher, your strategy knowledge is easily searched on social media, and you dance, sing, and write like shit. If only you were still a pharmacist, grin and bear it like everyone else, you wouldn’t be in this deep shallow end!”

I know, right. I shouldn’t put it out for the social media to see.

I should pat myself on the back or share some motivation so the algorithm will favor me.

But I can’t bring myself to do that. I just can’t. 

Not when people occasionally remind me of the path I could have taken. 

“You could have been that: a pharmacist who actually makes money. Doing this and that while doing performing art as your hobby. Now, what are you? Not a worker, not an artist, jobless, no future prospect, and is always miserable.”

I lost count of how much energy I had to pour to restrict myself from shouting when people sh*t on my face like that. 

It is especially getting more painful as I held thousands of rejections in hand or when IQ tests would come back and say, “You have an average intellectual.” or “Sorry, you are not talented enough for us.”

I often wondered: What am I actually good at? Who am I?

Regretfully, I have always built myself around a specific persona: that I am smart, I know better, I read a lot, and I love my logic. 

But after taking a 24 test strength from “Via character,” I found my strongest trait is creativity… I honestly cried a little bit. 

I wish I hadn’t denied my love for creativity when I was young. I wished I weren’t only the science kid and the dancing, singing, acting, and writing kid, even though I was never the best at them. Even though I was never (physically) beautiful and talented enough for that. 

Perhaps I could have stood taller to even those whom I love as they said that my creativity is “just” a “hobby:” “They aren’t. I know I have long passed the life of being an ‘on-tract’ artist because I don’t look like the others, but it doesn’t mean that my devotion should be reduced to ‘just a side dish.”

However, I also regretted the life I could have taken to earn typically “like everyone else:” being the pharmacist. The scientist. The smart one.

Yet, like an idiot, I returned to my writing, to my own wonder, unlike other people, like everyone else. I hugged my books and (other people’s) cats and myself to sleep as I cried in tremendous fear. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about what an irony it was: the first in her bloodline, the promising intellect, the one who spoke many languages, the one who had poured hours of work and dedication… And she is still mediocre. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t have listened to “love,” that boy, that man. Still, to say that felt like all the other mistakes I have committed in my whole life: that I was supposed to be the one to blame.

Ultimately, I didn’t write this to make a final statement. There will be a day when I look back to this day and laugh about how ridiculous I sounded. (Hopefully, there will be). 

But for now, I should deal with the fact that I am 27, full of regrets, failures, and lost, and not even a protagonist in her own story.