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Musing on how achievements can make life harder sometimes

Kras83

I don't mean this as a moan or a complaint, but more of just sharing some of the things I have thought over while I look back on past experiences and try to make sense of them.

Since being on the waiting list for assessment I have found that I spend an awful lot of time just thinking, sometimes its wondering if a particular thing could be explained by autism but its also often wondering what stopped me being picked up much earlier in life. A big part of my thoughts regarding that have been as to whether the fact that I have achieved good results in education served to cover up any problems early on, and later in adult life if when I've sought help but not known how to express the stuff going on inside people have just assumed upon finding out I managed a degree assumed that there can't be much wrong.

In school I had a lot of time off sick, especially in secondary school when I became ill enough with irritable bowel syndrome on transitioning from primary that I had to be transferred from the local grammar to the local high school. My school reports always comment on the large amount of absences and often describe me as quiet and needing to engage more in class, but also in pretty much everything apart from PE (abysmal reports) praise my accomplishments in the subjects. It makes me wonder (half jokingly) if things might have been different if I was less academically able. I'm not blowing my own trumpet there by any means - I'm not gifted, just learning seems to be my niche.

Later on when I was first out of University and struggling to find work that didn't terrify me, then signed off with anxiety whenever people would ask about education they always seemed to suddenly become less sympathetic the moment they hear the grade I achieved. People seem to form a snap judgement about you and never want to hear - sometimes actively shutting you down - about how much of a struggle the experience of University was, the amount of missed lectures because of hiding in the toilet, the amount of time spent sitting in a secluded spot thinking about suicide. This particular example is now long in the past so the 's' word need not cause alarm here.

Does anyone else identify with this?

Parents

  • 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.

  • in reply to I'm done with Christmas Cards

    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

  • in reply to Kras83

    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.

  • in reply to Roswell
    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.

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