Wanting to be the best

    When I was in college (I got my Associates in science degree a few years ago) one major point of contention between me and my mother was that I didn’t work hard enough to get A’s in all my courses. My mother believed that if I worked hard and studied, I should get all A’s, so the fact that I didn’t was an obvious character flaw. The major problem was that I hated studying, still do. I have one of those brains where if something is not deeply interesting, it’s nearly impossible to focus on it. One of the things I hated most about college was that you had to be able to motivate yourself to learn everything both inside and outside of the classroom. I hated it so much. I ended up with AS degree mostly because once I got past the first two years of coursework (first two college years at least) It was nearly impossible to pass anything. Part of that was that my mother wanted me to do something that involved a paying job in an office, and I just hated that idea so much. My greatest weakness, easily, is my extreme lack of social skills. I have no innate talent for it at all, and I’m painfully aware of that fact. Naturally, I was born a member of a species for whom social skills are an absolute must. 

   My biggest problem is that in this day and age, we expect our children to get good grades, and if they don’t, we are deeply ashamed of that. I was always smart enough to get good grades, but if I hated the homework or found it too anxiety inducing, I wouldn’t do it. The way society works is that if you can’t be who society thinks you should be, you’re still supposed to want it. If you can’t do something society says your supposed to do, you’re an object of pity, if you don’t want to, you’re an object of disgust. Most of my life has been spent trying to avoid being either. 

  One of the nice things about blogging, even if it’s about nothing important, is the thought that someone reading this might be in the position I was in for most of my life. All my life, I wanted to be someone people liked. Not famous or popular, but the kind of person you could point to and think, “Man, she’s something special isn’t she.” And I just couldn’t seem to be that person. When people think of you as smart, they think of you as loving science, and that’s what everyone, especially my mother, expected of me. I didn’t want that. I love science, but I’m not a scientist. I don’t think of the world in numbers, and math makes my head hurt (though oddly, I’m better at it than most). But I love art. I’m not a good artist, but I love learning about art, and what people think makes a good art piece. You learn a lot about people. 

    I wish we didn’t push people to be the best so much. I understand the impulse, but it means that people like me, who don’t want to do analytical things, are pushed to do science things because that means your smarter than people who do art. As someone who studied science, there are a lot of stupid scientists, and all of the smart people I know of are artists. I don’t want to be the best, and frankly I think most of us don’t want to be the best either, otherwise society would look a lot different than it does.