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Apple-Picker picked a peck of pickled pommes: Bah. I feel ya, VJB2. When I was a kid, I was in this special program, and wouldn't you know it, almost all the kids that came out of it ended up being some of the most pathetic underachievers I've ever seen. "We're smart, and that's enough for us!"
But it's not really the kids' fault; it's the fucked up adults who live vicariously through this shit who pronounce the race over and you the winner before you've even stepped up to the starting gate that really fucks with a kid's mind. I'm a big believer in personal responsibility, which only comes to me after a good chunk of my life being even more victimhood-inclined than I am now, but on the other hand, in that nabile state, kids need a delicate balance of encouragement and critique of which unfortunately few parents seem really capable.
It probably saved me, though. My parents thought I was plagued with learning disabilities before the program called them about me. My grades had been terrible, you see.
That's how it worked out for my sister: all through school until she dropped out of college her freshman year, she got so much reinforcement that she had learning disabilities that she believed it. When she finally went back school as a more fully formed adult, she realized she didn't really have learning disabilities at all. And the contrast in perceptions vs. reality between the two of us I'm sure led to further mindfucks for the both of us.
Maitreya saves: It hasn't all gone wrong, you haven't lost your chance, your still alive with a chance to do something, (something that you may not even be aware of yet) so how could it have?
Get back up off the damn floor!
Take that handle rather seriously, do you?
Look, I'm prone to bouts of melodrama, I admit it, and this is after many years of work to minimize that. A few years ago you would have had to have sat through every sordid detail of my tale of woe. I'm a bit beyond that, now, and I have a purpose to my existence, and for once I actually appear to be making some sort of motion in that general direction. I'm not saying I don't have a certain satisfaction in the way in which events have played themselves out, or even that certain alternatives would have been without their own idiosynchratic flaws; I don't know that. What I know is that it was a moment in my life where my potential was quantified, as much as such things can be, as being extraordinary, though that quantification may have been the first step in destroying what it perceived. However it started, that moment was torn away so completely that the void where it should have been has been a ghost that's haunted me ever since. Thankfully, the edges get blurry and it's been spackled over in parts and it's far enough in the distance that it doesn't loom as large as once it did, but it is and always will be there in not being there.
VJB2 |
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