Average: The Stories That Don’t Get Told

I’ve been thinking about this word “average,” and how quickly it gets dismissed without anyone really saying it out loud, like we all understand what it means but don’t quite pause to question what we’re doing with it.

You see it everywhere, especially when you are younger. There are the ones who stand out, the ones everyone notices, the ones who are either doing exceptionally well or visibly struggling, and they are easy to identify because they give you something clear to react to. And then there’s everyone else, moving along somewhere in between, not drawing attention, not raising concern, just… there.

You’re not failing, so no one steps in.
You’re not exceptional, so no one steps back to watch.

And that middle space just… continues, without interruption, without commentary, almost like it doesn’t require anything from anyone watching it.

The top ones get glory.
The bottom ones get sympathy.

Everything else sits in between, without really being called anything, and maybe that’s part of the problem because if you don’t name something, you don’t really see it. And on the surface, it looks fine. Nothing is going wrong. Life is moving. Things are happening the way they should, at least from the outside, where everything looks stable enough to not require attention.

But the more you think about it, the more you realise that this space is not empty. It just doesn’t get named, and because it doesn’t get named, it doesn’t get examined either.

It still takes decisions. It still takes adjustment. It still takes effort to hold things together, even when nothing dramatic is forcing you to.

Maybe a little less than the overachiever who pushes themselves to the edge.
And definitely less than the struggler who is barely making it.

It is effort nonetheless, just less visible, less urgent, easier to overlook if you’re not paying attention to it. Just because there is no visible struggle doesn’t make the effort any less real. And that is why it never sounds like something that needs to be told, because we’ve quietly decided that only certain kinds of effort qualify as stories.

There is no language built for this space. No celebration. No concern.

It just gets treated like the default setting, something you move through rather than something you pause to look at. You move from one phase to another without anyone pausing long enough to ask what it took, and over time, even you stop asking yourself that question. You show up, you adjust, you figure things out, and then you move on, because that’s what this space expects of you. There is no moment that marks it as something significant, no clear turning point that tells you this mattered, this changed something. And yet, all of it is being lived, in real time, with real effort, even if it doesn’t look like much from the outside.

Lived experiences are stories to tell. There are lessons learnt, even if they don’t arrive in ways that feel obvious or dramatic.

And you know what, these average lives, with their average experiences and their average lessons, are more relatable to the average audience, because this is where most of us are, whether we admit it or not.

After all, only a small percentage sits at the top, and just as few at the bottom, and everything else, which is most of us, sits somewhere in between trying to make sense of things that don’t look dramatic enough to matter, but still shape how we think, how we respond, how we move forward.

We can all learn from everyday stories and even apply them to our lives, because they are closer to what we are actually living.

But these never get told, and over time that starts to feel normal.

We don’t find them interesting enough, and because we don’t find them interesting enough, we don’t even try to tell them.

And after a while, you start to believe that yourself, that unless something stands out, it isn’t worth saying, and unless it looks like a story, it isn’t one. But that’s not really true, and the more you sit with it, the more that starts to become obvious.

Most of what we understand about life doesn’t come from the extremes. It comes from the middle. From the choices that don’t look like turning points. From the effort that doesn’t get recognised. From the days that don’t stand out, but still move everything forward.

These are stories too. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t stand out easily. They sit in that space we keep calling average.

And maybe that’s the mistake. How we’ve decided to look at them or rather, overlook them. These are average lives. These are average experiences.

And they are worth telling.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.