When I was young I made straight A's in school. I used to be a very good test taker and felt very smart because of it. I was able to get jobs that paid well because I scored higher on employment tests than most of the other people who took the tests.
I am one of the slow people now. I think my son sometimes gets impatient with me when I have to ask him how to do things on the computer. We sometimes race each other to do algebra problems and he always wins. He feels good about this. Occasionally he asks me why I am so slow.
I am slowly thinking about why this might be. Let's see. My first thought is that sleep deprivation slows me down--coffee no longer works for me at this point. I read to my 14-year-old son every night to help him fall asleep. He has to wear a painful scoliosis brace and he is more sensitive than a lot of people. The last several hours of brace wearing each day are the hardest and I told him three years ago when he first started wearing a brace that I would help him through this. I stay up until about 4 a.m. with him. My husband wakes up at 6 a.m. so I wake up, fall asleep, and wake up again until I can see it is just futile and I stay up. This morning my husband had another skin cancer surgery and I had anxiety about that. I think I got about 5 hours of sleep.
I let my son sleep as much as he can before I have to wake him up and put the brace back on him. The stress I feel doing this makes me tired. Not only am I slow but I am also very cranky. My son gets more sleep than I do and that's okay. He needs to get enough sleep so that he can learn. I just try to ignore his comments about me being slow.
Although I am actually middle class, I often feel poor. I worry that I won't be able to afford college for my son and I don't want him to take out student loans. When I was young I thought I would have more money than I have now, but life happened. Things happened that were beyond my control and that caused anxiety. I watched all the people who I was closest to deal with painful health issues. This raised my blood pressure. Blood pressure medication slows me down even more but as a highly sensitive person I have trouble trying to keep calm and carry on. I am the slowest of slow when I have a migraine.
If my son doesn't learn anything else, I want him to learn to have compassion for slow people who might be having a bad day, a bad month or a bad year.
As far as being lonely, my son and I know all about that. He didn't fit in with people who accept being told what to think and neither did I. He won't pretend to be like the other kids just to fit in.
