As someone who was born with severe dyslexia and was hyperactive, I struggled with formal academia and always had a hard time with testing, depending upon who was teaching.
Sometimes I would be at the head of the class, and other times completely bomb out!
To complicate matters for me, I had the highest intelligence rating of all my siblings, yet did poorly in the public schools to include my SAT testing at the time, so I worked in manual labor instead of attending college. My parents were overly concerned, and overly protective, in that they tended to suffocate and suppress me as a person well into my 30s!
As a result, my confidence and self-esteem were severely damaged! My social skills also suffered being made to feel like some sort of mental defective; when in truth, I was not! I can recall after my time in the Coast Guard meeting a young lady at the Maritime Museum wanting to go out with me, she was lovely and was also a Bio-Chemist, but I was so very intimidated and conditioned to see myself as a barely functional fool, that I froze at the opportunity, expecting a deep rejection. The older men who tried to encourage me simply thought me nuts!
About that same time a “senior aid” came on board, he was an alcoholic to some degree and not as capable as I was in understanding shipboard maintenance nor mechanical engineering, but he was much older than me, and I could plainly see was after my job and wanting to make me subservient to him. This really burned me up, and he even tried using physical violence in an effort to get me to submit! Yet I was having no part in it, besides, I was in my prime, and he was an old man,
What he did do, was to try and undermine me on every level despite his ignorance of shipboard maintenance. As an example, I had set up a professional painter’s brush, roller, and cleaning station within the paint locker. The brushes and rollers were suspended above the paint thinner in which they were cleaned, and the unit was sealed and self-contained. Prior to all this, these brushes simply sat in old coffee cans with thinner scattered around the ship. The City Painters were the ones who showed me where to order the cleaning equipment. Then my detractor went to the ship’s Captain saying “I had a fire hazard”, so I had to abandon my cleaning system, and go back to the real fire hazard of having open cans lying around the paint locker! Excuse me for saying that my detractor was a black man and the spineless leadership at the museum was white, fearing political ramifications if they simply dismissed his unfounded rants against my job performance. It was not racially motivated (as I was accused of), it was simply that I often didn’t agree with the man and found it hard to even like him!
This continual undermining I experienced has made me very defensive while attempting to maintain my hard-fought status in the world. This “luggage” which everyone carries to some degree, eats at my guts when I feel it’s happening again to me! There will always be someone who is more capable and more groomed than you, but the trick is to accept who you are within the competition and continue to simply move forward; without getting oneself into knots about others!
The world is not a fair place, and social politics concerning others will always be there to rush in and fill the void, Today misplaced “victimhood” based on social status, ethnicity, and opportunity are assessed by those at the top (lawyers): “is but an illusion” to try and make the world a fair place! But the real issue is that you will never displace those who are in powerful positions, you will only serve to create more disadvantage to those who struggle more than yourself!
Excuse me for saying, but “chit rolls downhill”, and if you are raised up to a level beyond what you merit, you have been falsely raised to a power position, even on the backs of the less fortunate than yourself! This all happens despite what race of people you may belong to; and is a trick that “race-baiting – class warfare” politicians use, in an effort to maintain power and control over others, which they claim to be helping! So be not deceived by people who are concerned with helping no one but themselves!
