I share this with you to give you a sense of my thinking process. I think in images. I think in systems. Perpetual, self-contained, complete, and closed systems.
My eyes feed information to my brain to form data point which it uses to form an image in my head. It is only then, when I can wrap my mind around something, when I can fully ‘see’ a 3-dimensional image in my head, that I can then truly understand it. And when I say understand it, I mean really understand it, front and back, forward and backwards, up and down, and all around.
This way of ‘seeing’ things in my head was a major reason I struggled in school. As the speed of new topics increased, especially math, it soon became too fast for me to thoroughly process them and therefore fully understand them. And since one mathematical concept builds on previous ones, once I started falling behind, I was completely lost. My teachers and parents thought about my challenges from a moral perspective and felt I wasn’t trying hard enough nor living up to my potential.
What made matters worse is that my sister, who was a class ahead of me, did exceptionally well in school and I was always compared to her. So when I came along, with my unorthodox learning style, my performance seemed lackluster compared to her and my teachers and parents were not shy at sharing their disappointment with me.
It didn’t help that I was too embarrassed to raise my hand and ask for help. As the oldest boy in my family, I wasn’t encouraged to ask for help, I was supposed to be the help. I was continually challenges and taught that I had to depend on myself and that no one was going to do anything for me.
I eventually realized that this way of understanding the world, my unique perspective, is my greatest gift. But for the first 40 years of my life, it was the bane of my existence.
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