Month: June 2019

I am realizing that I grew up in another era. I was constantly told that I was smart because I was good at stories – the texts, history, the interpreting, the rhetoric. I used to throw myself into them, get an intuitive mastery of many invisible threads pulled together by a logic blended with sensitivity, refracted by instinct, summoned and dismissed when it suited me, sliced into practical logics to fit the purpose of following the rugged contours of the subject at hand.
I was praised and rewarded for that. Today, however, that is more often than not the polar opposite of what’s smart. I am learning that my supposed smarts are in fact little more than sheer, damning dumbness – antiquarian passion for the irrelevant, heuristic reasoning, slow learning, lack of analytic skills.
At best one could say that I have soft skills, which, evoking a smiling employee who is not outstandingly productive but at least improves the climate, is almost a punch in the face for somebody like me who has suffered from autism and is still far below the average ability to interact successfully with fellow humans.
I seem to be good at nothing that our culture values. But I cannot forget that once, when I was younger, I was good at something, something that I am still good at, possibly even better, but that has suddenly lost its value.
I walked into the labor market when I still felt sustained by the self-esteem instilled in me by the old-fashioned Italian education system. I boasted and even lied to potential employers, sure that when they hired me they would see all too clearly my real qualities behind the curtain of smoke of stupid tests. Cheerfully, or only a little disturbed, I received the results of tests that, based on my performance in playing video games – I had never played a video game in my life before – divined my utter mediocrity.
When I finally landed a job thanks to a recommendation from a relative, though, I had to see the hard truth that none of the habits, both intellectual and practical and in-between, that were so ingrained in me after years of positive reinforcements, were fit for the modern times. Thinking intensely was for the losers, action for the winners, a need for solitude and silence was morally similar to the self-defeating need for drugs of an addict, everything that could not be expressed in the inflexible chains of analytical logic was meaningless at best, dangerous at worst, because the machines that we as engineers were operating would break down if fed with dumb, false, heretic thoughts. Which, of course, was the incontrovertible proof that those thoughts had no value.
In short, all the ways of being and of acting that lifted me to my “100%” were outdated or banned. Trying to conform was stressful and at times even painful. I was literally nothing: under-performing, incapable of friendliness, underdog in the political games, my spirit shattered, my self-confidence in ruins.
It took sometime to see things this way, to spot what I now consider to be the root of the problem and go on accordingly. Ambition is a sweet temptation and I had to suffer a number of further blows before giving it up. I still find it hard to imagine my future, but of one thing is certain: even if nowadays being like I am is no more a legitimate source of pride nor a career driver, even if from every side I will hear hints at my inferiority with respect to the scientists, engineers and in general the rational people that rule the world of tomorrow, even if the world of yesterday to which I feel I belong will keep rejecting me on the grounds of my working class origin and all the naivety, crudeness and lack of discipline that come with it, even if my psychic illness will make it difficult to follow consistently even my own inclinations, all of this notwithstanding, I will keep valuing the value that long ago I was made to see in my messy, old-fashioned, story-centered mind. The value might not be much, I have no illusions, but it is very likely not zero either, and I aim at joining, in some way, the overcrowded ranks of those who are going to guard and cultivate the dubious and doubtful way of using the mind that I share, enjoy and love.