Albert Einstein once said,"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
I honestly don't know how I'm feeling right now. Am I outraged by the world's inability to accept and promote diversity? Or am I slowly (and painfully) coming to terms with my shortcomings? Am I withdrawing into a shell, to try and come back strong? Or am I tending to give up on life, like I've done earlier? I do know that I'm having this terrible feeling (again) that whatever progress I've made in life has been shallow - that it has been achieved only in arenas that see very little human interaction. What have I achieved in any field where one needs to interact with, move and lead other people?
I grew up being constantly told how shy I am - and I almost wore it on my sleeve as a badge. After all, weren't all the "well-behaved" kids supposed to border being shy? I couldn't have imagined that in the process of growing up, it would snowball into something completely different, something that I am grappling with. When someone in an interview told me "you're not half as good as your CV", it was as much praise for my achievements as it was an indictment of my failure to back it up in personal interactions.
I find myself morbidly fearful in social interactions. I don't know why. And I also realise that this message has been drilled into me with such ferocity that even if I wasn't destined to be this way, I have become this way. I now wonder how much I am what people made me believe I am. When people said I'm intelligent, I went ahead and become more so. When people told me I am shy, I went ahead and become increasingly so. What others say about you probably shapes what you think of yourself (especially as a kid). I am also a strong votary of the point of view that you become what you think. By transitivity, what people say about you is what you become. I now wish that when I was in my formative years, somebody had held me, supported me and forced me to go out there and interact with the other kids. That's a skill I missed to pick up, and I suffer as a result.
As one moves up in life, the pyramid before you becomes progressively smaller. Hence, your interaction with each member of that pyramid becomes increasingly important. This is when your social skills start kicking in. Someone once told me "your raw talent, your intrinsics, can only take you a certain distance in life." I refused to accept it, but now that I think of it, it is a truism that I cannot deny. No matter how hard I work, what I do - at the end of the day, I will reach a plateau.
However, everybody cannot do everything - and perhaps my inability on this front is what feeds whatever I do well on other fronts. It torments me, yes - but who hasn't been tormented by their shortcomings before? So why not be at peace with oneself, and keep doing what one does well?
So, there are two paths that I see from here - one is a reinforcing image of myself, doing what I do well. The other is a radical shift in trying to do things that I am bad at. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, is the correct path. The search for the correct path will be eternal, and the question facing me is the sacrifices I am willing to make to search for it. Because everything has a cost, a price.
