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I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I had a friend as a kid who made straight A’s the first semester in school every year, then straight F’s to the last semester where he’d pick it up just enough to pass. I remember a teacher laughing at him because his cousin blacked his eye while he was fighting his mother, “Oh, you mean a girl did that?”
Once he got to high school he couldn’t pass the 9th grade because the strategy of passing the first and last semester didn’t work anymore. He dropped out and got his GED. He took the test one time, scored 90% higher than average.
He slept in class every day because he spent his nights prepared to fight his dad when his dad attacked his mom.
I remember in middle school when the regular teacher was out long term for surgery, he handed a test to the substitute and she cried and apologized for not paying closer attention to him. She worked with him after that and he passed her class.
The last time I seen him, he was strung out on heroin and doing nothing. We went to school together from the 3rd grade until he dropped out and I only ever seen two teachers really try to help him. Police came to the school one time to photograph his bruise covered body and nothing ever came of it.
He used to write stories and give them to me on the bus. I asked him if he kept writing. He told me he hadn’t since his early 20s.
I can’t stand to think about how many kids out there have so much potential, only they’re stranded on an island with nowhere to put it.
Fuck man, that's so sad. You tell it really well, too. I can't imagine hanging on if the adults in your life kept letting you down that consistently. Poor guy... And like you said, he's just one person. 0 doubt there are others out there there who've got it way worse (not that it's a contest).
Reminds us to try and be kind when we come across someone who's struggling. We don't know their story but guaranteed they have one.
Damn, this was so hard to read and felt so close to me...
I used to be the kid that got the best grades and didn't care to study in the last semester too. I had severe family problems, and my father also tried to attack my mom.
I grew up left behind and with no one to ever support or guide me. I ended up isolating myself from society to such a degree that my life went downhill and I messed up everything to become a disfunctional adult who can't evem get a job. I didn't get into drugs, but isolation and depression did a similar thing to me... I ended up losing all my dreams, stopping doing all tbe things i was good at, and kinda losing even my cognition with time.
I can't express in words how painful reading about your friend's story was to me. I feel so sorry for him.
Trust me, it feels very close to me too. I get it. I really do.
I hope things improve for you. We only live once, so make the most of whatever you have. That’s what I do. That’s all we can do.
I try not to resent the world myself. None of us asked to be here, so we’re all kind of winging it.
I believe that beauty is everywhere. I believe that if we spend as much of our time as we can focusing on that beauty and not our own situation, we can be happy. Sure, we have to pretend a bit to cover up the things that aren’t beautiful, but we can find beauty and we can make beauty.
I was a "gifted program" kid with problems at home and undiagnosed adhd. I went from A's to failing and dropping out and nobody cared. Nobody wanted to know what was wrong. All they wanted to do was punish me.
My daughter just started high school this year. It has became very clear to me that she’s dealing with that. I’m standing outside at her first mental health appointment now.
I’m hoping she gets what she needs here. I’m sorry you got missed. I did too, big time. So did my mother though, and her mother.
Maybe today breaks the chain.
Thanks for sharing that story. I knew a guy, not as well as I should have but enough to say hey when I passed in him the halls in school. He was an incredibly talented artist, always doodling in the margins of our textbooks and doing graffiti, eventually did some automotive painting and a few DIY tattoos and at least one canvas painting for an art class I saw. He had this really clever minimalist style that would imply a greater image with just a couple of lines, definitely something he developed while doing graffiti and things like that. I have a really clear memory of one random conversation we had one day where he told me 99% of his work happened in his mind, and it was only once he had his whole project figured out already that he could let it out through his hands.
Like I said, though, I didn't know him as well as I should. I vaguely knew his dad was in prison and heard rumors about his mom being an alcoholic and him having to raise his younger siblings, but I never reached out while we were in school together and graduated and lost touch. Then a few years after that I read in the news that he tried to rob a place with a couple friends and an unloaded gun, got shot and ended up severely brain damaged, and it was only about then that I realized I had always really liked his drawings.