The Ability To Learn
This morning I opened my Medium and saw My Childhood Trauma Limited My Ability to Learn in School and Now I’m Playing Catch-up
Well no shit. How can you learn when you are scared and depressed? Terrorized is more like it from my experience.
Perhaps this is why I teach. I seem to be good at calming down frightened people. This is the criteria upon which I evaluate my teachers: whether they have the empathy to feel the students' fear and let them know they are safe.
I went to art school at 40. I had enrolled at 21 but my brother terrorized me again so badly I saw myself as unable to take the risk of school.
I returned to the hard life of transportation and logistics. I continued my education privately and it turned out to be excellent mostly because I like to take the risk of learning new things. I feel less broken when I do. My teacher/friend was also terrorized by a family member but we never talked about that.
We shared similar cognitive distortions around loyalty and our friendship ended when he figured I broke some unspoken contract. It was bitter.
So by age 40 I was managing my over anxiety no longer with pot, but with spiritual woo woo like yoga which is a good distraction from being terrorised by my thoughts of I must and I should or else something awful will occur, but it never got to the cure, the why it takes place.
So that was good enough. I was recruited with sex and fake affection by a covert narcissist who bought a house with her fathers money and off to art school I went to become an adult student.
The critiques were genuinely scary, they were meant to be. A professional artist has the skin of a rhino as a result, it's necessary in order to get an inevitable bad review and to keep working. Rejection becomes a disappointment not an awful event.
I didn’t take the praise and earning the honour role seriously. I wasn’t until Debra, a painting teacher actually hit me and said “when you find something easy it’s called a talent.”
So I came face to face with The Myth Of Self Esteem. If you have it, you can lose it.
Better to focus on the satisfaction of self acceptance instead.
