I just realized that whatever my ex-boyfriend may have managed vis-a-vis taking 5 courses a semester for his entire undergraduate career, I am going to take no more than 4. Ever. For the rest of my academic career.
Ohhhh shit not this junk again.
I didn't do any meaningful art practice for nearly a decade because of comparisons like this. People younger, more talented and overall cruel towards me for no reason making any feeble attempts at drawing anything pointless. It's a black hole of ineptitude and feeling like crap.
Except unlike me you have talents and can go the distance, so it's not something I want to see you suffer through.
He was in computer science at a less famous university, which he had been trained in by his PhD-bearing father since his early childhood. I solved many problems better and faster than he did, without anything like that same training (I basically started my technical education at 19). So as far as I know, it wasn't that he was more strictly-speaking talented than I am, though goodness knows his personality and brain are better than I will ever be at planning out time and schedules and getting things done. As far as I can tell, the very thing that made me "special," that being my inhuman abilities to work as long as I have a good block of time to do it in, as well as an extreme lasting creativity, has made it basically impossible for me to keep to any sort of schedule. Too much mental flexibility, and too much thinking about possibilities, and too much of that thing where I get tired and don't want to sleep or stop whatever I'm doing. Being a "determinator" at the same time as being a cloudcuckoolander does have its serious drawbacks.
I've already suffered with this issue for years, but what I'm realizing now is that the very most important person to defeat is myself and my own inabilities, not anyone else. That's why I'm working to become a mathematician, and not any of the things I've been traditionally good at. This is the best way to "become myself."
Or, if you like, I'd like to become a so-called [warning: Tvtropes]
spirited competitor.