Opal
New member
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2014
- Messages
- 1,391
- MBTI Type
- ENTP
The opposite happened with me. I was and am a rather bright/gifted person, and in elementry school, I was lazy. It really really comes at price to be smart, and I am still paying for it today. I didn't want to do any assignments outside of school. To me, school was school, home was home, and they should never mix. I was constantly grounded, in trouble, in detention for not doing homework or big projects. I was pushed/punished heavily, mostly because by all measures I was very smart and could easily be top of class. It was an issue of wasted potential. I was miserable in elementary school and part of middle school. No amount of pushing, punishment, prodding, etc. would get me to do it. Why? Because to me I'd rather try and game the system or twist myself around it so I could get around doing things. Not doing assignments wasn't an issue of it being too easy, I just flat out didn't want to do it. Was it interesting? Nope? Yeah not doing that. It's kind of funny, the amount of effort I put into trying to twist things to get away with stuff was far more energy that it would have taken to do the assignments. But from my prospective, assignments were hell, and worse punishment than grounding.
My relationship with school, work, effort, and success is very complicated, and I have accepted that it forever will be. I hate to say it, but my laziness issue and desire to follow the path of least resistence is intractible and has been innate in me since I was an infant. I was struck with the innateness of this when I saw videos of me learning how to crawl. I also very well could be the end of me with me working on my PhD, because I have never been in an environment structured in such a way that it completely hinders my normal tactics. Though, I am good enough that I have found a way to work it, but if it undo's itself, I run the risk of being completely toast. I could fix it, but my lovely mental issues and intractible motivation/energy problems have blocked me from doing so. Yay for being a mess!
*stares you in the eyes and fixes hair*
This retelling struck a chord with me. I've skirted all conventional forms of work and academic progress because, simply put, I could, and that process was vastly more interesting than what I perceived as grunt work. In my adolescent eyes following a track was death by submission, the reduction of the self in all its complexity to utility, and not even interesting utility. My study and time management skills are abhorrent because I always assumed I could problem solve in the moment; I would cram information within minutes of tests if I didn't wholly rely on the test's creator subconsciously sprinkling questions with clues.
I will likely never excel within an academic or corporate system because I failed to develop the necessary skills. In this way my intelligence was incredibly counterproductive to "success".