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This grew out of discussions with other people and inside my head, dealing with that little voice that tells you you're mediocre, not living up to your potential, without value etc. I'm specifically coming at this from the point of view of someone who was "gifted" as a child then became increasingly unable to work or think very well, I'd be interested to hear from people with very different POVs.
Something I've been trying to get my head around since getting so ill is a broader understanding of what a person's "capabilities" really are. I am in many ways exactly as "clever" as I was when I was at uni, but I struggle to follow one or two lectures a week on Coursera because of my cfs related difficulty concentrating, and had to quit my really-not-that-challenging job because my brain just couldn't handle the work (neither could my body, but that's a different issue and in some ways was easier to accept)
As a kid I was physically weak, unpopular and unfashionable, but I was smart. I read lots, got good marks, got into PEAC a year early, got several scholarships etc. So I built my self esteem around being clever and good, a hard worker who did what she was told and filled in all the boxes. (Also a good, kind, moral person, but that's a whole other barrel of worms I will not get into here) I knew it was shallow, and tried really hard not to look down on anyone less intelligent/academic than me (and knew these were different things) but, well...I had to like something about myself.
That said: one reason I took so long to figure out that I had cfs is that I have always had intermittent trouble concentrating, and have always felt like I was overwhelmed by everything. I got good marks at school, but always did the minimum amount of homework, partly through laziness (though I now find myself trying to figure out what "laziness" really means, and when it makes sense to use the word) and partly because past a certain point it just became like pulling teeth and I saw no benefit. I found it impossible to keep up with after school activities and was happier hanging about doing nothing. I've always had trouble forcing myself to read and comprehend dense prose. Until my Phd none of these interfered with my "I'm the smartest" self esteem too much though my anxiety did make me overall pretty miserable.
Once I started my Phd this became a major issue: I had to read and comprehend lots of dense mathematical papers and I just couldn't. I needed extended mental breaks for my brain to function at a high enough level. And I had what I now realise were anxiety attacks thinking about how behind I was which of course just made me more behind. I spent my Phd feeling like I was bad: bad at reading, bad at maths, bad at following my supervisors' instructions, bad at getting the degree I needed to earn money for Cam and me. It was pretty horrible.
Eventually I decided: fine. I was a bad mathematician and a bad Phd student. Instead of self consciously slinking around the corridors blushing when people asked about my research, I unabashedly admitted to having done very little work and being super behind, with the logic that it would make everyone else feel better about themselves and help counteract what I saw as a toxic atmosphere of self hatred that made even the good students feel bad.
So: I was a crappy Phd student, but at least I was still smarter than most people. And I got my doctorate in the end, a great big medal saying "Smart!" Shallow, but it did make me feel a little better.
I then did jobs which were much less challenging and had a much less toxic atmosphere...and got so sick I couldn't do them either. I lost the ability to read anything more complex than romance novels, and found writing long thinky lj entries really difficult (most of the time ;)). I need to spend ENTIRE WEEKS resting and doing nothing to gather the mental and physical energy to do relatively minor things. I was earning no money, producing nothing of worth, able to do nothing remarkable or interesting.
Queue two years of despair and self hatred, hurrah! But I did come to some useful conclusions in the end.
It's silly to blame myself for my limitations now, so did it make sense to blame myself for them then? Should I feel "proud of myself" for being less overwhelmed than I was two years ago now that I am on anti anxiety meds? In some ways it's depressing to admit your limitations, and obviously you shouldn't give up on your dreams out of misplaced "realism", but it also makes no sense to despise yourself for being "inherently mediocre" AND feel guilty for having failed to live up to your "brilliant potential". Everyone has a mixture of gifts and weak points, and we shouldn't feel guilty for not maximising the former without feeling proud for not being totally overwhelmed by the latter.
And why do we have to "live up to our potential" anyway? Life isn't a competition, not with each other and not with our "potential". Personally, the things I aim for are to maximise (a)My happiness (b)Everyone else's happiness (both by being polite etc and working on social justice) (c) Seeking truth and expressing things noone else is expressing (though maybe that's a subset of (a)? These goals are always open to change, anyway :)). I used to think (c) meant I had to pursue Science but for now it means making art. Is it great, popular art? No. Am I really all that inherently "gifted" at art? No(*). But it gets the ideas out of my head. Of course finding a balance between maximising the things I value and not beating myself up about missed opportunities is still difficult, but at least I'm worrying about things that matter and not holding myself to impossible standards (except when I am. This post is aimed at myself as much as everyone else!)
endless_murmur made a good post about the danger of telling people to be extraordinary which in turn inspired this post. As I said in my comment: we are told to be "extraordinary", but also told not to be weird, and the difference between the two is incredibly subjective. And not everyone is drawn to be either, and that's fine. Pluralism=good, elitism=bad.
I would have a final conclusion but like I said, I'm not good at formal essay structures any more :)
(*)Seriously, I was middling ability as a kid. I just kept at it because my parents are artists, and even then didn't really get any good until my late 20s when I had literally nothing else to do.
Something I've been trying to get my head around since getting so ill is a broader understanding of what a person's "capabilities" really are. I am in many ways exactly as "clever" as I was when I was at uni, but I struggle to follow one or two lectures a week on Coursera because of my cfs related difficulty concentrating, and had to quit my really-not-that-challenging job because my brain just couldn't handle the work (neither could my body, but that's a different issue and in some ways was easier to accept)
As a kid I was physically weak, unpopular and unfashionable, but I was smart. I read lots, got good marks, got into PEAC a year early, got several scholarships etc. So I built my self esteem around being clever and good, a hard worker who did what she was told and filled in all the boxes. (Also a good, kind, moral person, but that's a whole other barrel of worms I will not get into here) I knew it was shallow, and tried really hard not to look down on anyone less intelligent/academic than me (and knew these were different things) but, well...I had to like something about myself.
That said: one reason I took so long to figure out that I had cfs is that I have always had intermittent trouble concentrating, and have always felt like I was overwhelmed by everything. I got good marks at school, but always did the minimum amount of homework, partly through laziness (though I now find myself trying to figure out what "laziness" really means, and when it makes sense to use the word) and partly because past a certain point it just became like pulling teeth and I saw no benefit. I found it impossible to keep up with after school activities and was happier hanging about doing nothing. I've always had trouble forcing myself to read and comprehend dense prose. Until my Phd none of these interfered with my "I'm the smartest" self esteem too much though my anxiety did make me overall pretty miserable.
Once I started my Phd this became a major issue: I had to read and comprehend lots of dense mathematical papers and I just couldn't. I needed extended mental breaks for my brain to function at a high enough level. And I had what I now realise were anxiety attacks thinking about how behind I was which of course just made me more behind. I spent my Phd feeling like I was bad: bad at reading, bad at maths, bad at following my supervisors' instructions, bad at getting the degree I needed to earn money for Cam and me. It was pretty horrible.
Eventually I decided: fine. I was a bad mathematician and a bad Phd student. Instead of self consciously slinking around the corridors blushing when people asked about my research, I unabashedly admitted to having done very little work and being super behind, with the logic that it would make everyone else feel better about themselves and help counteract what I saw as a toxic atmosphere of self hatred that made even the good students feel bad.
So: I was a crappy Phd student, but at least I was still smarter than most people. And I got my doctorate in the end, a great big medal saying "Smart!" Shallow, but it did make me feel a little better.
I then did jobs which were much less challenging and had a much less toxic atmosphere...and got so sick I couldn't do them either. I lost the ability to read anything more complex than romance novels, and found writing long thinky lj entries really difficult (most of the time ;)). I need to spend ENTIRE WEEKS resting and doing nothing to gather the mental and physical energy to do relatively minor things. I was earning no money, producing nothing of worth, able to do nothing remarkable or interesting.
Queue two years of despair and self hatred, hurrah! But I did come to some useful conclusions in the end.
It's silly to blame myself for my limitations now, so did it make sense to blame myself for them then? Should I feel "proud of myself" for being less overwhelmed than I was two years ago now that I am on anti anxiety meds? In some ways it's depressing to admit your limitations, and obviously you shouldn't give up on your dreams out of misplaced "realism", but it also makes no sense to despise yourself for being "inherently mediocre" AND feel guilty for having failed to live up to your "brilliant potential". Everyone has a mixture of gifts and weak points, and we shouldn't feel guilty for not maximising the former without feeling proud for not being totally overwhelmed by the latter.
And why do we have to "live up to our potential" anyway? Life isn't a competition, not with each other and not with our "potential". Personally, the things I aim for are to maximise (a)My happiness (b)Everyone else's happiness (both by being polite etc and working on social justice) (c) Seeking truth and expressing things noone else is expressing (though maybe that's a subset of (a)? These goals are always open to change, anyway :)). I used to think (c) meant I had to pursue Science but for now it means making art. Is it great, popular art? No. Am I really all that inherently "gifted" at art? No(*). But it gets the ideas out of my head. Of course finding a balance between maximising the things I value and not beating myself up about missed opportunities is still difficult, but at least I'm worrying about things that matter and not holding myself to impossible standards (except when I am. This post is aimed at myself as much as everyone else!)
endless_murmur made a good post about the danger of telling people to be extraordinary which in turn inspired this post. As I said in my comment: we are told to be "extraordinary", but also told not to be weird, and the difference between the two is incredibly subjective. And not everyone is drawn to be either, and that's fine. Pluralism=good, elitism=bad.
I would have a final conclusion but like I said, I'm not good at formal essay structures any more :)
(*)Seriously, I was middling ability as a kid. I just kept at it because my parents are artists, and even then didn't really get any good until my late 20s when I had literally nothing else to do.
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And, well, stuff.
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Me too! And hooray for redbubble, eh? I made nearly 50c in sticker sales this month, that has to be worth a few cubic feet of oxygen :)
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Yes, yes.
I went through a similar, though different, trajectory. I was very smart academically and did very well at university. My teachers/tutors all expected great things from me, but personal/health problems overwhelmed me as a graduate student (not to mention making me realise I no longer cared about what I was studying) and I muddled through the next 6 - 8 years doing various mediocre jobs to support myself and pay my medical expenses.
Now that I finally feel like those personal issues have been resolved, I've been looking around at my life and trying to figure out what I actually want to do with myself. Since I cut my academic career short I've felt vaguely guilty/ashamed of not living up to my intellectual potential. And in recent job interviews I've been explicitly asked why someone of my obvious intellectual ability is working in a such a dull field.
The main conclusion I've come to is: screw everyone else's opinions. Because that's what living up to our potential is all about. It's about other people's expectations for how your life was going to go. At least, it is once I changed my own expectations to be about being happy and doing what I can to make others happy. Because I realised that any other expectations were arbitrary and/or based on what I thought I should do because others expected of me. But screw that, I'm going to do what makes me happy and is good and right.
To your point c), I actually had to stop expressing things that no one else was expressing because I didn't enjoy doing it and found it draining. So yeah, maybe I'm not saying things that need saying and that would form a contribution to a greater truth. But you know what? My happiness and wellbeing is more important.
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Yes!
To your point c), I actually had to stop expressing things that no one else was expressing because I didn't enjoy doing it and found it draining.
Good point: I do enjoy it, but maybe that just makes it a subset of (a) for me.
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Learning to recognise the "false realism" you mention without going too far in the opposite direction (if, indeed, I ever do either of those things in the first place, which I can't quite tell yet!) is currently one of my priorities.
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Basically I think I was just an early developer, certainly by year 12 I was nothing special and I think I have been falling away comparatively ever since. I spent most of high school being harangued that I was not 'living up to my potential'.
I wrestle a lot with depression/anxiety/fatigue as well so I found your post extremely resonant. I have terrible self esteem - I do think it is partially due to being told that I was brilliant and then when I did my best and it wasn't particularly great, being told I was lazy.
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Urg, yes, that was my whole Phd, it's really no fun.
I went to a talk on how to teach gifted kids once that said many of them are just early developers but noone takes that into account when teaching them.
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...this bit reads like you reached into my brain to pick out where I am right this second. *cries* (Papers. Oh god papers are the bane of my life.)
Ahem. This is a wonderful post and thank you for writing it.
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Mmmmyes.
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YES YES YES YES!!!!!!!!!! Low on spoonses, but I have been pondering this for a while. Sometimes I just want to *be*. (but not in an icky-sticky happy-clappy way)