intelligence versus effort
I had an interesting conversation with my therapist today. It is funny, as a note to myself I suppose, that I really do feel like they are conversations now, rather than “sessions” as I thought of them before. Before? When I was so deep in depression that I didn’t really even see how deep I was.
I’ve felt consistently good for quite a while now, a few months. I feel stable with it, like this is my new baseline. I can’t express what a difference it has made.
But the conversation today was about confidence, about expectations of a sort, about why I feel like I have a “deficiency” if I need to take a class in something. This isn’t true for every subject, it isn’t true when I want to learn something that is far afield from what I already know.
“There have been a lot of studies in the news lately,” my therapist said, “that tell us what a disservice we’ve been doing by praising kids for being intelligent.”
She explained that praising intelligence sends a message to kids that they should get things right away. The secondary effect of this is that as soon as the task becomes challenging, those kids give up. Instead we should be praising them for their effort.
And oh my god, did that ever ring some bells! Still rings bells. This is me, now, and apparently what I have to get over.
You know when we’d always hear, “there’s no such thing as a stupid question?” I never believed that. Did you?
I was never allowed to ask any questions..
the old “children should be seen but never heard.”
I think my self confidence always took abuse from the fact that I was not “living up to my potential” according to family , I am a waste, a vagrant artist who once was a member of Mensa, but now lives on love…
But Damn am I happy!
~shrug~
we can only live up to our own dreams..eh?
You know, whenever I hear someone talk about “mensa” I can’t help but to wonder what is so great about being part of a cafeteria anyway. (mensa = german for cafeteria)
But yeah, that “living up to potential” is such a curse. I got that in school all the time. I can’t remember a report card that didn’t come with that on it!
The funny thing is that I’m a “success” now, by a lot of career standards (my family has always been remarkably accepting of my fits and starts), but that feeling of “not living up to potential” never goes away.
Me, I think you’re incredibly successful, at least by real life standards! You’re doing something you love, you have a fantastic family, you run an unofficial summer camp for all ages!
Being happy, actually, is one of the biggest successes anyone could hope for. As someone who is chronically depressed, I definitely feel that my current happiness is a gigantic achievement!