Test Me

I’m going to say it: my college degree is useless for my life. Even when I worked in accounting I didn’t need my degree. I needed experience.

When I was at community college I took philosophy and history and business courses and swimming and physics. I learned so much at community college. My world view changed not just because I went to multiple schools in multiple states, but because I was exposed to so much.

Then I went through the upper division part — business school. I think I spent that time learning more about who I am, things I should have learned in regular school, than I did learning about my major. I passed my classes, I got a degree in accounting, and I learned very little. Did learning what tax laws were in place in 2007, enough to pass a test because the course was so fast paced, actually teach me those laws? Not really, no. Did it teach me how to pass a test? No, i’ve taken tons of tests. I detached from school more than most students, and that might be part of why I retained so little, but when I did learn I was thrown into the real world. Not just in college, though I loved working with real companies in my capstone class and I truly remember those courses, but all the time.

Becoming an author has taught me more about business than any teacher ever managed to do. I’m a good student, a performer if you will, but I didn’t absorb things like I do putting my partnership, myself, my family on the line with every decision I make.

I never learned that I might have a learning disability by going to school. That’s the hard part about being gifted — it can be almost impossible to see your deficiency when you have the ability to hide it. Being gifted didn’t change how I felt though. The dumbest person in the room — I said that in my first post — and it’s true. In accounting I felt like a fraud, even though many classmates turned to me. One time, after an exam, I got an F on a test. Part of the problem was that I was grieving a miscarriage, part of the problem was that I knew by then that real accounting wasn’t my thing. Not the nitty gritty let’s amortize stuff parts. I wasn’t going to become an auditor or a tax person. I didn’t want those things. Anyway, a bunch of classmates were talking about how “I definitely got an A,” and I never showed them my score, but I never accepted the lie. I left, and to the people that did ask I said “I did okay.”

I think they always believed I got an A, always believed I was this amazing at education gifted person, but I’m not amazing. I’m gifted because some people think my brain works differently than others, that I see the world differently, not because I’m smart of good at everything.

I fail all the time, like everyone else. I fail at marketing. I took a marketing class and I got an A and I have no idea why. It was the first time in school I wanted to go up to a teacher and tell them they gave me the wrong grade because I truly, deeply, did not earn it. How can you earn an A, the highest mark, when you have no idea what you did?

That’s how my brain feels a lot of the time. I get these grades, this praise, this high status, because so many people think that I know what I’m doing. I’m shooting darts in the dark through a hazy thick fog and strong winds and somehow I hit the target often.

Maybe that’s imposter syndrome talking, but some of it is true. Having a brain that makes communicating this stuff is definitely true.

I’m misunderstood so often. I say things in a way that my brain can make words work, but the I look back and realize how those words were heard. Not the way I said them. They’re not mean words, they’re not cruel or merciless, they’re sharper and more jagged. They’re void of the expression that language offers. It’s easy to say from the bottom of my heart, I am sorry. But it’s hard to say My insides are bouncing up and down at this idea, because I am so excited and I can’t sit still, and I want to scream to the world HEY WE ARE DOING SOMETHING AMAZING, but I also think that if we tweaked something a little it would improve it. 

That hits a lot of different areas. It hits:

• Imposter syndrome — are my ideas good enough?
• Failure at marketing — I don’t get the market, I don’t understand other people because I can’t think like other people. My husband says my stories I write are amazing and complex, but that what I’m trying to do is so new and foreign other people will likely struggle to get it, to see the vision. I don’t relate to others well, I don’t understand people well.
• Dyslexia — when I think those thoughts I usually end up sounding like a jerk. “Well it was good but then there was this thing that needed to be changed. Seven things, and then it will be good, but it was good.” That’s not heard as it was good, that’s heard as “It sucks, change this stuff and it might be good.” My words never seem to mean what I want them to mean, the same way when I try to do art it never looks the way I want it to look. Most of the time, I have to random doodle and then from the ashes of scribble land something cool comes out. If I sit down to draw something cool? Nope.
• Perfectionism — I am gifted, with a high IQ, therefore I should be better than I am, I should perform at a high level and succeed. If I fall short I am a failure of a being. Those thoughts are not helpful to reality. You have to try, you have to fail, to succeed.

It also hits this part of me that is a “natural leader” aka bossy. I want to be a partner, a team player, and I’ve done so many group projects, but most of those made me more of a leader, not more of a team player. Even athletics were competitive. We compete for friendships within the team, we compete to be the best on the team, for the best positions. Leading and following are easy roles. Standing beside someone and saying you are my equal in ideas, in execution. You are the strength to my weakness, and where we both fail we will become strong together is one of the hardest positions of all, and we see that struggle in divorce rates. I wish I learned this as a kid, I wish I learned it because I know that teachers wanted to teach it, but a classroom of 30 kids in a geographical area doesn’t give much room to likeness, to equal passion. It preempts inequality in teams, and it creates the leaders and the followers. There is a position for this type of team, it’s necessary, but there is a place for partnership too. Not just in romance, but in life.

Struggling to communicate well makes this divide so deep — a canyon in who I am. The more I practice at friendship, the more of the world I see, the better I get at finding the people who are able to see me as an equal, as a friend. Who can look past the struggles I never understood I had, who can work with them.

The things I learned that make my life function I’m learning as an adult. I’m learning because of mentors and friends. No test at school or benchmark for education could ever teach me these things. They served better to make me feel less about myself than to build anything up inside of me. They postponed living, postponed reality.

Living makes me a better person. Life — reality — is a hard enough test on its own.