Musing on how achievements can make life harder sometimes

I'm sorry I meant to reply to this thread yesterday, but it was my family's weekly supermarket visit yesterday morning and with the extra chaos and constant announcements it turned into a lost day due to me needing a lot of quiet time after.

I don't consider myself to have been an achiever or do I have any clue as to where I am on the high-low functioning, as whilst I did well academically that is the limit of what I have done in life really. I find myself agreeing with a lot of things that people have said, especially how the actually learning bit of education is the 'easy' bit and the social aspects are a minefield. For me I have always found that once I was able to spot the pattern in a course exams posed no problem - by the time I have done a bunch of past papers I find myself almost knowing the formula for each question and therefore how to answer it, plus you get a nice quiet room in which to do it. For me its when education reached the point that I had to guide myself (PhD) that the wheels fell off in a big way. Thats not to say though that the experience was pleasant and easy in education as I struggled a lot with the social aspects and had a horrible time with irritable bowel syndrome that led to a lot of hiding in toilets and silently sobbing :p.

I suppose what I meant by achievements being used against me is that I have seriously struggled since leaving uni in 2006, and since for the vast majority of this time period I have 'only' been diagnosed with anxiety and depression the moment that someone at somewhere like the jobcentre or at a voluntary placement when I had tried charity work or when been placed on the work and health program finds out that I have this qualification it immediately seems like they just expect you to be able on all levels and there is a lot of assumption that you should be able to do things. I find that understanding does tend to get replaced with exasperation and comments along the lines of "oh such a shame to be wasting your potential.." Outside of the narrow focus of education I have really struggled. Just as examples (I've recently filled in the ESA50 as I'm up for reassessment currently so I've been prodded towards a 'stock take' of myself) I've never had a romantic relationship of any kind although I don't think I miss it, I don't drive or travel on my own, I'm still shamefully reliant on my parents for so much. I'm not in any way bitter about these things, I just wish it was possible to get a complete picture across rather than an assumption that I just need to try harder at life.

As some of you have said though I also agree that I value my way of thinking. I LIKE learning about random crap that catches my interest, I like that I absolutely must do something properly if I'm going to do it. Thanks for everyones replies here. I don't think I put things very well at first - I had it clear in my head and then started typing and it all went to crap. I never meant to imply it as a conscious discrimination so much as just making the observation that I have noticed a tendency in people I deal with to assume success at one thing means I must be capable at success at all things, and that they will actively argue with you when you try to put them straight.

Yes, I have spent a large portion of my life living in my head.  At school the complaint levelled against me was that I spoke like the Queen or as if I'd swallowed a dictionary (perhaps ill advised in a rough comprehensive where it turned out that what I really needed was to be able to swear convincingly).  At work I generally "over thought" things.  And I've always loved to read and learn.  

To an extent some of this has been countered through various somatic approaches, especially yoga, chi kung and body scanning techniques.  But a large part of me wants to protest that actually my life is all the richer for this additional learning and searching.  I still believe that it's been a huge positive in my life and, when it come down to it, I probably wouldn't have happened upon chi kung if it hadn't been for my reading.  

Well put. Yes we are all different and finding happiness is very very important. I am very envious of people who are always having fun now even though I used to think of them as self indulgent and avoiding the work and problems 

Yep. When therapists have said to me "You're very much in your head aren't you?" I heard the words but it's taken decades to realise just how much of my life has centred around understanding things. It's been a comfort zone to learn about things that don't change over time or act randomly (e.g. laws of classical physics, maths) like people do and the sense of being "in the zone" whilst learning has been a refuge, *but* I also developed a habit of considering *every* risk, every possible outcome (pursuing several layers of bifurcation of the decision tree) and also developed a level of disdain for people around me who seemed not to care about understanding things (and then I became resentful that *they* were the ones who seemed happy, not me).

Thankfully I've more or less conquered the anxiety and rumination (compared to 10 years ago) and I am far less disdainful of others (I've turned this around so that I'm actually happy for people who are happy & untroubled by details & understanding things).

But yes, my intellectual brain remains one of my few "go to" sources of fulfilment, and I'm trying to turn my life towards simply "being & experiencing" rather than understanding and learning. Especially as my brain seems to be less able than it once was!

Having a high functioning academic brain can be a major disability I have found as I analyse everything in a negative way now and so finding a reason for living becomes very difficult 

I'm speaking in generalisations, of course, but I think that various achievements, and unfortunately especially academic ones, seem to increase resentment in others.  Others can then be all too happy to stick the boot in when that person fails to achieve something, with that something often falling into the domain of what they might, by way of a put down, describe as "common sense" or "general knowledge". 

I've found that achievements can also increase expectations, with the underlying assumption that people will be "good all-rounders" rather than having a more "spikey profile".  This is exacerbated when the areas of achievement and failure are out of kilter with what is the prevailing pattern - e.g. many people will find exams hard and socialising easy, whereas for me it's the other way around.  There's incomprehension on both sides because I see exams as simply answering questions to which I have already been given an answer or a "how to", whereas social situations are more of an unknown.  Others seem to just sail into social situations but maybe need support with exams.    

Mostly I find that people warm to others who are like them, people who share their struggles and interests.  The "birds of a feather" factor.  Others will therefore be met with understanding of a shared problem, while some of my issues have been met with incredulity.  The attitude seems to be one of, "How can someone who can do this not also be able to do that?"  e.g. "You've got all these qualifications so you'll surely not find driving difficult."

These days I've given up expecting anything from such judgemental people.  They obviously can't relate to anyone having a skill set too different from their own.  So I make my plans accordingly.              

Roswell said:

People with high achievements in this country, people want to pull them down and have a go at them.

That's the politics of envy - pushed by a certain failing political party - to appeal to the low-brow, non-thinking  work-shy because they are so jealous of anyone doing better than them.   If you can't beat them, drag them down.

I have a brother who was refused jobs when he went for interviews in entry-level jobs because he had a university degree. There's a segment of the population who resent people who've went to university. The simple truth is it pays to remove certain things from your CV or from what you tell people about yourself, based on which company you're in. 

That's partly how Boris Johnson has become so successful and ended up leading the country. He's not a total buffoon but plays down his intelligence. He has a whole act where he stumbles in sentences, and shouts out random things in the middle of a sentence, which are designed to make people notice less that he's one of the upper class elite. He wears his tie so it's pulled to one side or ridiculously long to make him look less like a professor and more like a dodgy second hand car salesman.

It's a peculiar thing about people. Certainly in the UK anyway. Not sure elsewhere. People with high achievements in this country, people want to pull them down and have a go at them.

But also I don't just mean this post to mean academic achievements, I used those because those are my specific example. I was wondering if people find that any success they've had in life can be used against them - and not necessarily by people meaning to be nasty - to minimise any problems they might have in the eyes of outside observers

I started a PhD, but it was more an attempt to put off leaving education than anything else in hindsight. I found the vague 'its up to you' nature of the guidance I was given horribly stressful and found that I got so depressed without realising it that it actually started to make me do things like walking etc slower. I only lasted a term and was given quite a lecture by the supervisor on the way out about using up an opportunity someone else could have had :/

I think I know what you mean about internal screaming too, that seems familiar.

Yes kind of. People tend to think that you must be OK if you've accumulated qualifications. And it *is* kinda hard to talk about without appearing to be blowing your own trumpet.

I also had school reports praising "Everything but PE" (OK in my case everything but PE, English Lit, Geography and History). I found Physics so easy that I almost thought it was self-evident and lessons were unnecessary. I went to Uni & got a degree (as do about half of school leavers nowadays) doing what limited amount of studying I needed, alone. Then I did a PhD to put off looking for a job, and did this powered by intuition and, again, alone. Then I spent the first 5 years of my first real job working alone. I didn't really start interacting with more than one or two people routinely until I was about 30 - which was when the full scale cycles of depression and anxiety started. It took two further decades of increasing material success and increasing inner screaming to discover that I'm autistic. Along the way, I thought of suicide often. But I'm "successful" - so I must be OK.

The other side of the double-edged sword is that my success and clarity of thinking in a very narrow field of expertise fooled me into thinking that I am a better thinker than many other people and that I can apply my thinking to any discipline; I now know that I can't. Even more than that, I am not at all skilled in thorough application of the scientific method or research processes - despite getting a PhD which I did by pursuing what to me was pretty obvious and being OK at doing vector calculus and computer modelling. I've always known that I don't know everything, but now I'm learning that I *really* don't know everything, and also often it's better to stay silent than venture opinions (e.g. on social media).

The other things that my narrow academic success tricked me into thinking was that I could apply science and logic to leadership and become a good leader or famous blogger. I now know that these things aren't true either.