#18 Potential Isn't Destiny.
Our obsession with potential, and how it obscures the importance of agency.
Hi friend,
I started playing the piano when I was three. My older brother got lessons at home and after the teacher left every week, I’d ask him to show me what he learned. When I was school age, I started taking lessons myself and quickly ascended on to the competitive music festival scene in Canada. I won competitions and I remember receiving checks for hundreds and even thousands of dollars in prize money, as early as age seven.
The most common refrain I heard from people who saw me play was that I had so much potential. Judging by all my success and talents exhibited from such a young age, the potential they saw in me was my future as a concert pianist — perhaps going on to study at Juilliard or Curtis, and building a career as a professional musician performing on prestigious stages around the world.
That did not happen. My “potential” as a pianist wasn’t fully realized. I chose to go to regular high school instead of the local arts magnet program that allowed for more hours in the day to practice. I chose to go to a liberal arts college. I chose to pursue other interests. Most people I have met from college through present day have no real sense of this musical “potential” that I relinquished.
My potential to become a renowned classical pianist didn’t determine my future… or my present. I made choices away from the directional pull of my musical talents. Because I was ultimately the one — not my potential — that had agency over my destiny.
Potential Isn’t Destiny
In America, we are intoxicated by the promise of potential because it is a warmer place to dwell than the acridity of the actual. But potential can be a dangerous drug.
First, it inflates the value of what is yet to be, while deflating the value of what is.
And second, it tricks us into believing that it is more powerful than our agency. It makes us at times despondent, and at times complacent.
Potential for Life
There is no discussion of potential more topical right now than the potential for life. The rollback of Roe v. Wade has the country spiraling. And at the bottom of this well of despair is our feeling, as women, that our actual lives as human beings matter less than the potential for new life in a fetus. While I am keenly aware that there is a movement to legally change the definition of “life” to begin at conception, the fact is that especially before the point of viability, fetal life is potential life. It cannot exist independently. And many “pro-life” advocates assign so much value to this potential, that when it abuts the actual life of the mother (not just life as the opposite of death, but life as in the autonomous and free life of a human being), they seem to prioritize protecting the former above the latter.
It feels noble to protect the defenseless potential life of a fetus. It’s a warm, fuzzy place to be. It’s better than the thorny work of supporting and bettering the actual lives of human beings who, despite having agency, tend to exercise it with flaws and imperfections.
Pro-choice advocates often fall into the same trap and counter with campaigns about young teenage girls who had so much potential that, but for an unexpected pregnancy that they wished to have aborted, could have been realized. I find this line of reasoning to be similarly problematic in that it inflates the value of our society’s pre-ordained definition of success, and deflates the value of being a teenage girl who was learning to find her way, find her voice, and exercise her agency. As a society, our interest in that teenage girl’s situation is to protect her current personhood. The rollback of reproductive rights is an affront to her as an autonomous human being right now, not an affront to whatever potential we want to ascribe to her future. To fight for her reproductive choice is to value her life, her autonomy, her triumphs, and also, her mistakes.
By carrying a uterus, women have the potential to carry and birth babies. But that potential is just that — potential. We can and should exercise our agency to determine what is and what becomes.
A couple of years ago, we finally got a piano for our home. And since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve found myself drawn to it. I’ve pulled out some Chopin Études to sight read when I have a rare quiet moment at home. And when I think back on my childhood, I see now that what I had was talent — talent that was rightly celebrated and enjoyed. But the romanticized promise of that potential to become something more was theoretical. I had the agency to determine what role the piano would play in my life. And today, that agency is what I celebrate and enjoy most of all.
#18 Potential Isn't Destiny.
This is a powerful thesis: “First, it inflates the value of what is yet to be, while deflating the value of what is.” -- this really resonated with me. Great writing!
Hi Sy,
So beautiful and eloquent! I forwarded this to several of the women in my family so they could read and be inspired by your writing.
Thank you! Keep making beautiful things and sharing them with the world:)