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It all came too late for me

Deleted User

A significant factor,aside from the bullying,in my developing a SMI was the intense anxiety of not wanting to disappoint my parents and yet being acutely aware that I lacked the non academic/independent living skills to cope with going to university. Nowadays though the system could be better, it's  better equipped to help and support a 2020s version of me.A combination of there being no such support in the mid 1970s, and it taking till I was 60 for it to be acknowledged I had  such difficulties,  meant that,combined with fear of bullying,further education was not a realistic option.

Sometimes I feel worthless because of it. I wonder how many of my generation were in the same boat and, like me, never had the necessary help and support.

Parents

  • Feeling in a little better frame of mind. One that's not willing to buy into the 'If you haven't been to university, you must be thick' messaging that some like to push. Neither of my very intelligent parents went to university. My father was an army officer for a few years before joining the Foreign office. He was a very intelligent boy from a lower middle class background who'd got a scholarship to King Edward's Birmingham. In  the 1950s the F.O was very much the domain of middle/upper middle Oxbridge types. He did later do some studying for a law degree, but I don't think he ever completed it. Despite that lack of a degree he retired as the F.O equivalent of a major general.

    My mother was brought up mostly just by her mother. She chose not to go to uni, because she  thought her mother, who was far from well off, had sacrificed enough as it was. She wasn't as successful as my father had been, but was on the verge of being posted to Paris by the F.O when she married my father and was quite highly regarded.

    My IQ, as tested over the last couple of years by a psychometrician, is  1.33 SD higher than the average Oxbridge/Ivy league student. Whether I was to go to university or not doesn't change that fact. Nor would it change the adaptive functioning < IQ  gap that is quite large in my case.

    I have a stepfamily that I love a lot. That I can use 'I love you' with far more easily and naturally  than I've  ever done with my birth family. One that loves me despite the idiosyncrasies and flaws. 

  • in reply to Deleted User

    I had no pressure to go to uni from my family, but it was there at school, and you see others thriving at learning, even learning while talking a lot which i have no idea how they do that.  You feel thick/stupid, even if its not said.  I have learned much but actually prefer practical side of life, and self-learning what I need to do something I want to do.

    The naturalist Chris Packham went to Uni to study Zoology, and focussed on the learning and avoided the social aspects - silent student deeply absorbing it all.  That is how I would have been if I had gone, though not sure I would have completed it.

    Flaws and family experiences on both sides tend to cause difficulties or awkwardness, a step-family may be detached from that but may also work differently.

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  • in reply to Deleted User

    I had no pressure to go to uni from my family, but it was there at school, and you see others thriving at learning, even learning while talking a lot which i have no idea how they do that.  You feel thick/stupid, even if its not said.  I have learned much but actually prefer practical side of life, and self-learning what I need to do something I want to do.

    The naturalist Chris Packham went to Uni to study Zoology, and focussed on the learning and avoided the social aspects - silent student deeply absorbing it all.  That is how I would have been if I had gone, though not sure I would have completed it.

    Flaws and family experiences on both sides tend to cause difficulties or awkwardness, a step-family may be detached from that but may also work differently.

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