Depending on my mood, I sometimes try to prove these people wrong by deliberately failing, or vice versa, try to comply with their expectations. However, reality is I am just human, both with my strengths and my weaknesses, and most often I just want people to understand that I am, in fact, just like everyone else, no better, no worse - as I feel quite bad when others think of themselves as less than me.
My main strength is my rational mind, which seems to make academic things (school, university, research) easier for me than for most other people. I was recently blamed for not ever having to learn how to learn, for it has always come easy to me. And it indeed has. In terms of school learning, I have found most things that have been taught to me to be interesting, and have thus only very rarely struggled with motivation when it came to school, and mostly for that reason, school has in fact always come naturally to me. As of yet, I know of very few others around me who has been this lucky.
My main weakness is understanding social situations and other people, and most importantly - myself. Having been raised in a city environment as an only child of a single parent, I have mostly lacked both situations and people to learn good social skills from. It has only been the past few years during which I have found the people and quite deliberately put myself in the situations that I can indeed learn from. Nevertheless, many people around me have expected me to be quite a lot further along in this respect, and I have lost at least one very important person for me for the reason I was not. I have taken long steps in this respect in the past few years, especially in the past year and a half - but unlike school learning, this is not something that has ever come easily or naturally to me. In fact, quite the opposite. Nevertheless, it has been a priority, and I have worked quite hard to get as far as I now am - mostly by constantly pushing my comfort zone in hopes of expanding it and learning about both life and myself - which has, by no means, been easy.
Trouble is - most people cannot understand this struggle, as for them, these things have come naturally, and they expect this is the same for everyone. "You think too much", they often say. In reality, I don't - for it has been this same thinking a lot that has gotten me as far as I am now. This is not to say I do not think of the wrong things often, but confusing it with thinking too much definitely does not help. What has helped me to be where I am is my faith that everyone can learn everything that he wishes to, if he is willing to put in the effort .
As for perfection - there is no such thing - or if there were, we should feel sorry for it, for it has nowhere to develop anymore so it's life must be pretty boring. To err is to be human - and this is something that should never be forgotten.
