<p>^ i’d have to agree with that, it also sounds as if you think this way because of the influence your dad has had on you.</p>
<p>^ That’s what happens when you’re a mistake. Seriously parents, don’t have kids if you don’t want any. I’m sure he likes me, but I’m not profitable enough or whatever.</p>
<p>profitable enough? ***. wow your parents some pretty messed up. they seriously see you as an asset? i mean do they expect your sister to somehow give them a certain % of her income in the future directly to them?</p>
<p>People have such grand ideas on what makes people successful. Like they were born smart (bzzzzt, wrong!) or they get up every morning with an iron resolve to swim/study/practice yodeling and that they themselves are mere mortals and could never approach such above averageness. Perish the thought!</p>
<p>People who are successful( that is to say that they are smart, a star athlete, or some such) are mortals! They have off days where their parents yell at them about leaving crumbs in the kitchen, they get up some mornings and the LAST thing they want to do is go hit a stupid tennis ball around a court at 5AM, they have problems they try for hours to understand but still fall short. </p>
<p>It’s the little decisions you have to make everyday that separate the herd from the stars. Two people get home from a long day of classes, irate professors, and angry parents. One of them decides that that’s it for them, they’re going to plop on the couch for the next few hours and watch some garbage while eating ice cream. The other person goes out to the library to study for an exam tomorrow and then off to practice for whatever sport they’ve joined. Who in this scenario is more likely to be scraping by?</p>
<p>I don’t mean that the road to perfection is boring, torturous, or a constant denial of everything people find fun or entertaining. It’s a lifestyle; make a goal, find out how to get there, and then DO IT. You want to be a star student? Check out how to study more efficiently, plan out your assignments so you get everything done easily, and seek help when you need it. You want to be a star athlete? Eat right, exercise, and go to practice in rain or shine. You want to be a more popular person? Screw what your dad says, and get out there and talk to people and push your comfort zone.</p>
<p>You can do whatever you like. I’m not saying it will be easy, I’m not saying there won’t be days when all you want to do is give up, and I’m not saying you won’t get crap from people who don’t believe in you but to get past the ennui you seem to be feeling, you need to keep pushing.</p>
<p>And by the way, success is the best revenge and anger can be the best motivator. Just a tidbit to keep in mind.</p>
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<p>Maybe. The only reason he decided to send her to that college was so that she could get a better job, which there is nothing wrong with. BTW, my sister will probably be seen nearly the same way as me now since she didn’t get enough scholarships to make the school affordable and now has to go to a much cheaper school. However, I have more essential needs than she does, so she won’t fair so badly. Wow, I sound spoiled, but trust me I have so many problems that were actually diagnosed by professionals. I doubt it was a gimmick to get daddy’s money.</p>
<p>Wow. Thanks Silvestris. That was very motivating. 
I know you deserve a longer response, but I really like what you wrote.</p>
<p>
it is something to smile about. you’re taking it for granted. you could have just as easily been born blind. you have to be able to appreciate what you have and live without what you don’t.
if you had a perfect dad then you would be saying something like “it’s nothing to smile about, one is supposed to have two perfectly good parents.” you’re so troubled by something you probably would have taken for granted.
that said, i think your life will improve if you just accept the way your dad is and work on the things that you think your life is missing. there are people who have been in worst situations and have made something of themselves, you can do it too.</p>
<p>“not going to invest much money in me”</p>
<p>your dad’s asian, huh?</p>
<p>No. He is an immigrant though lol.</p>
<p>I’m proud that I’m average but you should just try to focus on yourself rather than focusing on others and being competitive</p>
<p>I think your way of thinking is incorrect. But your way to in initiative is correct. Finding a job in this current economic state is difficult yes, but not impossible. I haven’t read through this whole thread, but I’ll post from the few I had read. </p>
<p>Being average is the state of mind in which you think. I believe that I am average myself. But to other people outside my world, I am considered intellectual and uncanny. I am considered above average and that is a shock to me. What your father is trying to say, or in my inference is that, that’s his way of saying get the hell out of this town while you still can, while instilling upon you the major characteristics of being able to survive on your own, ie: working, handling multiple issues, and dealing with various level of stress issues like this.</p>
<p>I believe, that you can make it through this. Save enough money from whatever your hired to do. And move out to the west coast :). There’s quite a lot of job opportunities in my area, San Diego. I don’t think the unemployment rate has fazed SD yet. Many of my friends aged 15-16 were hired by many local large name stores. And I’ve been hearing that is tough for some other people outside of SD and the nation in general.</p>
<p>I believe you can do it! Just don’t give up and be more optimistic in your doing. Psychologist have said that being optimistic every day will improve your well being a lot as well as provide a better outlook in life.</p>
<p>My two cents. Even if I didn’t make sense XD.</p>
<p>-Christian Wu</p>
<p>^ Thank you Christian, I will try to his point of view. I’ve always wanted to visit California. You seem like a very understanding person.</p>
<p>I’m getting the idea that you have some sort of disability that hinders your ability to socialize?</p>
<p>I noticed that you said you were happy and doing well when you were confident and had an active social life, and for some reason that social life dwindled down into nothing?</p>
<p>^ I have social anxiety, I did have a good social life this year, but it dwindled since it’s the summer. There is one person I still talk to quite a bit on facebook chat though</p>
<p>^ Me too, diagnosed with SAD.</p>
<p>The (not officially prescribed) medicine I’m on has helped a lot.</p>
<p>I understand about the social anxiety returning during the summer, esp if the people you are close to are from your college, and everyone is away for the summer. Don’t worry, college will start again soon.
About your dad, it seems that he is being unfair and does not understand you. Don’t listen to his brainwashing which makes you feel like you are average. I know it is hard, but you have to break free. You are your own person. Find yourself away from your father’s misplaced opinions of you. You can do it!! Have faith.</p>
<p>I am deeply sorry that your father said what he said to you. No father should EVER say something like that to his son. EVER. You’re not good enough to “invest” in? What kind of parent uses that term to refer to his children? You’ve got to prove him wrong.</p>
<p>No matter how awful you might feel, don’t blame yourself; it sounds like your father is doing a “less than average” job as a parent, to put it in his terms.</p>
<p>Hey OP, I’d like to point you out to my favorite passage from Looking for Alaska, which is by John Green. Reading this book and his other book, Papertowns saved my life. I believe it would help you as well.</p>
<p>This is going to be really long, but bear with me here. The passage is full of gold. However the passage below will definitely be a major spoiler if you have not read the book before.</p>
<p>Some quick background into the text: The passage below is the protagonist’s personal thoughts on his recently deceased friend and how we must approach the “labyrinth” that is life.</p>
<p>"Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And theres no sugar-coating it: she deserved better friends.</p>
<p>When she ****ed up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe it in spite of having lost her.
Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And heres how I know:</p>
<p>I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as somethings meal. What was her green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe the afterlife is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.</p>
<p>But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaskas genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.</p>
<p>Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we ARE as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, Teenagers think they are invincible with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they dont know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.</p>
<p>So, I know that she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edisons last words were: ‘Its very beautiful over there.’ I dont know where there is, but I believe its somewhere, and I hope its beautiful."</p>
<p>Having parental pressure sucks. And I understand that your life is made mor e difficult by your medical situation. But honestly, you’re only as average as you make yourself. My best friend is entirely average. Bs and Cs in high school, never got leadership positions, never quite found her passion as far as activities or hobbies or anything. But she never gave up on trying new things. She hated tennis, so she tried marching band. Didn’t love band, tried student council. She’s going to a pretty average state school. It was particularly hard for her since much of my group of friends is talented in one way or another (musicians, artists, athletes, excellent students). Despite the fact that looking around, she could easily say screw this, I suck at all these things. She just kept trying things. She took AP classes, not because she thought she’d ace them, but because she wanted to challenge herself. Currently, she’s trying a computer program to teach herself calculus because she did miserably in hs math. She discovered that she loves animals and biology was sort of fun. She’s going to try majoring in bio.</p>
<p>That said, try things. No, you’re not going to be good at everything. In fact, you may not be good at most things. Most people aren’t. Find something you love doing. It doesn’t matter what it pays or how above average it seems. (not to mention, jobs like plumbers, which is considered an “average person” like job, make a lot of money). Be happy with who you are, not who you think you should be. </p>
<p>Now for the negative portion of my post:</p>
<p>Quote:
At least you have the bare necessities to enjoy life. There are people without running water, plumbing, food, etc.<br>
This is stuff that people are supposed to have. </p>
<p>I can’t believe you said that. There is no “supposed to have” about those things. Its not a case of, well, everyone has those things, so we should just expect them. People have to work for those things. What your father said was extremely wrong, he shouldn’t have devalued your existance. But obviously your families’ finances aren’t in the best place, considering you mentioned thousands of dollars in debt from your sister and the fact she needed more scholarships for your family to afford college. As the second child going to college in a family in which the main bread winner was laid off due to the economy, I’ve seen how hard these times are. Don’t just assume your family can afford things - that you deserve things. Getting a job to pay for your own possessions… thats expected of most college students.</p>
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<p>Thank you. That passage was very meaningful to me. I will read his books and I am very glad you shared this with me.</p>
<p>I apologize for what I said rolledeyes.</p>
<p>If you get the chance, watch the “Better than the Average Cory” episode of Boy Meets World. It should be available on a certain website that allows you to surfthechannel. Whoops, forgot to space those out…</p>