Two posts in my blogroll made me ask myself this question today. The first one, provides the following quote from Sylvia Plath:
“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
The second one tells a story of two kids who were stellar students in high school, whom everybody considered super promising, but who didn’t manage to make it through college despite all the promise:
The scholarship offers rolled in, and he took the one from the school that accepted his AA degree and promised to fund his first two years in law school. He was a college junior at 18. His cousin from another state—which at the time promised free tuition at state schools for any resident who had earned a specific high school rank and grade point average—had one burning ambition: to get a “free ride.” And he did. Predictably, both flunked out. The golden boy didn’t survive the first year.
We all know those people who, in their youth, are described by everybody as rising stars. “Watch this kid,” people say. “He will go far.” “She is so full of promise.” “They have such a bright future ahead of them.”
More often than not, the bright future remains just that, a future, and the promise never gets fulfilled. The brilliant kids reap admiration, rewards, and applause for years as they glide slowly into their thirties. And this is where (maybe a little earlier or a little later) the applause and the admiration stop. Nobody celebrates their promise any more because the time for promising is long gone by this time. The former golden kids (a term suggested to me by the third great post I read today) are left feeling confused and anxious.
“Why was everybody celebrating my every little achievement yesterday and now suddenly nobody seems to care?” they ask themselves. “Why am I suddenly not everybody’s precious prodigy any more? How did I suddenly find myself in the role of an ordinary, nondescript adult?”
It is all the more difficult for such people to settle into middle age comfortably since their teens and their twenties were so filled with admiration and adoration that it becomes impossible for them to accept that all this cheering has suddenly gone away.
So where do these Full of Promise Rising Stars (FPRS, for short) come from and, if one happens to be a FPRS, what can one do to escape from the seemingly inevitable disillusionment of growing older without having achieved anything all that great? Why is it so hard to transform a promising youth into a happy adulthood and a brilliant middle age?
I’ll tell you all these things in my next post.
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