This year I have come to terms with my shortcomings. Maybe my mother is right and I am somewhere in the autistic spectrum. It is not that obvious, though. Total Aspies don’t appreciate nonsense and word jokes as much as I do. But I am completely incompetent with sub-text and hidden agendas. I’m either too tolerant or totally intolerant. My intolerance stems from complete inability to comprehend certain issues. I don’t understand non-compliance with rules. It makes no sense to me. Incompetence, being late, inefficient procedure, and specially games are way beyond my understanding.
I need a solid falsifiable model to work, period. It took me months of hard study about cluster B personality disorder and criminal psychopathy to build an explanation to what happened to my money. The model was falsified. It is still taking me a while to finalize a good explanatory model for my siblings’ behavior, but I think I got it. If it will be falsified or not, it is basically up to them to offer new data. Only data falsifies a very good model.
That makes me a horrible organizer and a disaster as a political animal. I do a good job supporting meet organization, for example, but just can’t be a meet organizer. I had to be, it was awful. There is too much human sub-textual interaction and irrational interaction (“fuckery”). I was a good principal investigator, I kept my students in line and disciplined, my projects were successful and met deadlines. I never – ever – managed to get even close to understanding the power play going on in university job searches. But I build a model to explain them: I accepted it and moved on.
This leaves me with what I am: a good educator. That, neither I or anyone else can dispute. And I enjoy teaching. It may be the only human interaction with almost or total strangers that I am capable of enjoying. I like formal teaching, I love science popularization, I enjoy sports judging in a sport where the judge is the true technical authority. Being able to rescue a young lifter from a bomb-out, fixing his deadlift lockout in the last moments, fills me with satisfaction. Observing people writing more consistently, evolving and building better arguments makes me proud. Watching my athletes’ achievements excites me more than my own achievements.
Nothing comes close to what happened a few weeks ago at the EliteFTS website, though. A reader left a comment to one of my articles in the “motivation” series saying that he had decided to end his life that day, that moment. For some unexplained reason, he logged into the website and ended up at my article. He gave up committing suicide, deciding for “a lot of thinking” instead.
I’ve been told that writing for EliteFTS was irrelevant for my career. Honestly, I totally disagree. Of all the jobs I had, none gave me the opportunity to actually do something as positive as what I am doing now, through the EliteFTS column, largely because it is with the EliteFTS team. Fortunately, I have the whole team supporting me and agreeing with this.
I can look around now and see things I never did, like a position in “health education” for the Hispanic community, for veterans, for all the sub-populations I am so fit to serve. How come I never saw that before? Maybe because I never had everything destroyed and was given the chance to rebuild a perception of myself with the true building blocks I have.
The truth is, I’m an educator. The truth is, I’ll never be happy except as an educator. A little bit of education is the brick in the wall I can contribute.