Years ago. I always found it ridiculous every time I heard people or read somewhere that they killed their potential. I always found it ridiculous because how can you kill your potential? Is that even possible? And why would you kill your potential?
Yet, years later, I found myself in the same place as those people. Just like them, I also killed my potential. I stopped believing in myself and learned how to hide my potential.
Before, I didn’t understand why they would kill their potential. Now I understand as I’m going through the same phase as them.
Perhaps it wasn’t a conscious decision to kill my potential, but rather a gradual erosion of ambition, a slow decline into complacency. I lost sight of my dreams, my passions, and my purpose. I became adrift in a sea of mediocrity, content to simply exist rather than to truly live. I traded the fire of ambition for the ashes of apathy.
I killed my potential because of the constant self-doubt, fear of failure, negative self-talk, and lack of motivation. This wasn’t who I was before, but as time passed by, the weight of proving myself to others became too heavy. I grew weary of the constant struggle, the endless need to impress. I got tired of showing people that I could do it, that I was capable until I finally killed my own potential, exhausted and disillusioned.
I’m trapped in a cycle of self-sabotage, constantly setting myself up for failure. It’s like I’m deliberately choosing to stay small, to never reach my full potential.
Now, like a ghost haunting the ruins of my aspirations, I ask myself the same question: why? Why did I let myself become this shadow of who I could have been?
I look back on the years, a tapestry woven with threads of both triumph and regret. But the most painful thread of all is the one that represents the potential I killed, the dreams I let die. It’s a bittersweet reminder that sometimes, the greatest losses are the ones we inflict upon ourselves.
I killed my potential. And I’ll never truly know what might have been. But the regret, the ache of that lost possibility, will always be a part of me.
