day69 - the gifted* kid
dear luci,
tonight, i am writing my 69th (nice) entry on 4/20 (NICE). but despite the incredible coincidence there, tonight's entry will be a little less joyful.
today, i did very little. i didn't really rest, per-se, i mostly just sat/layed down with some idle distraction, and felt a tugging at my soul. there is so much i want to do and learn, so why do i spend my free time so idly? i felt caged, constrained, as if there was some invisible barrier keeping me at bay. here is something i wrote during that spell.
"I often wonder what's broken in my head. There are so many things I want to learn but just can't seem to understand. it feels like I'm an old car revving its engine as it tries to ascend a hill, yet making negligible progress. Where do I start? I don't know. Just start somewhere. Why do I always need to be taken by the hand and led directly to the answer? Am I just fundamentally incurious?"
my earlier self's sentiments were propelled by some cursory interactions with a few things (namely, my NAS' OS) that i know well enough to use, but not well enough to understand. actions outside the norm are completed by blindly following the steps of a tutorial, and any adjustments that need to be made to fit my use case are implemented clumsily or not at all. these are the gaps in my knowledge which i feel deep in my soul, like broken bones which never healed properly. it is the catalyst for my impostor syndrome which permeates my life, both working, and social.
it comes down to the fact that i am easily overwhelmed. tech in particular is a very vast field. you'll spend your life trying to study every branch on that old tree but you'll die long before you do, no matter how good you are. it is so difficult to just point to a spot on that tree and say "there. that's where i'll start". i have always needed to be pointed in the right direction before i begin something, and to rebut an earlier insecurity: i do not lack initiative or curiosity, because when i find that path, i will create my own momentum as i travel down it.
in my head, there's so much i have to prove. to myself and to those around me. i understand all too well that, even if that were true, proving yourself is an outcome, not an action in and of itself. you prove yourself by learning. by doing.
i talked to a friend lately about my mid-tier gifted* kid complex. i was always pretty smart, but never smart enough to be consistently acknowledged or recognised for it. that's where the asterisk comes in. english and the humanities came easy to me, but my inability to wrap my head around maths left me feeling so stupid and insignificant. it wasn't rare that i would cry with shame and anger over my maths homework. in many ways, it's probably good that i was never "the smart kid". i didn't have that external pressure. i wasn't defined by that preconceived notion before people could get to know me1. but like, i still kinda did have those pressures. they just came from within. and since i could never really live up to them (unrealistic as they were), i got used to feeling like i couldn't ever reach that standard. it's why i gave up on pursuing tech. in year 7 i wanted to study computer science at uni. i tried to learn and explore ideas that interested me, but i kept hitting that wall, and i just decided that meant it wasn't for me. now i work in IT, and the way i felt (albeit now at a much lesser degree) when i struggled with maths in school is a daily reality in my workplace. I did Year 11 Maths, even though I didn't need to, though. Because I loved the challenge, and I loved the structered-ness of it. I did so many subjects where there was no concrete answer to questions, and i loved the process of finding The Answer to a maths problem.
I used to get E's and E+'es at best in maths in year 9 and 10. And you know what? I got a good grade in my Year 11 maths exam. I can't remember what it was. An 'A' or something, maybe. After all that time, I finally fucking made it. and then i decided i no longer needed to prove myself. i dropped maths the following year.
I have never been one to shy away from a challenge. I don't feel like changing that anytime soon.
It won't always be easy. That doesn't mean it isn't worth it.
Sweet dreams, luci <3
don't worry, they had plenty of other preconceived notions to judge me by.↩