This kind of shit is why I refuse to let people talk negatively about their own skills when they try to compare themselves to the more impressive parts of me. Idk how different their lives are than my own was, but there are lots and lots of things that are totally expected of adults that I can’t do because of how fucked up my childhood was. A couple glowing beacons of brilliance in the muck and mire don’t actually make for a well-adjusted person.

I ain’t done shit with the smarts I’ve got. You might not have the capacity to learn three foreign languages (of different roots, because I found that easier) simultaneously, but who cares? I can’t hold down a job (in any language) to save my life. Sure you might not be able to plan out an entire self-sufficient homestead, but I bet you can actually make moves toward your goals, whatever they are! I can’t, I’ve had the same goal for 30 years and have made minimal progress toward it, other than long long long lists of things that I want to do. I can’t even form proper bonds with people because my childhood taught me to trust nobody but myself, so I’m lonely and isolated.

The truth is we are all a series of strengths and weaknesses based on the environments in which we are raised. I struggle daily with left and right, but I’m masterful with learning new highly technical information well enough to teach lay-people. I can’t tell time on analogue clocks, but I’ll bust out calculations for close-enough answers to weird physics questions, because I find it interesting. The best experts in one field are the worst novices in most others.

All this to say: try to be kind to yourself for the places your education and childhood failed you. They weren’t your fault, and aren’t something you should feel shame about, even if you do make efforts to bring yourself up to speed. There have been various trials of random nonsense bullshit over the years (like the US’ current spiral into illiteracy due to doing away with phonics) that have fucked up generations of people, and those people, just like you, are doing their best with the shit cards they were dealt. We have no control over how we were nurtured, if we even were. And thats ok. It’s part of your story, what makes you the you you are today. You’d be someone totally different if you’d gotten more math and less jesus, and maybe that someone would be better in some ways, but they’d probably be worse in many others.