memes

Your story, for all of its tragedy, is quite moving. Thank you for sharing it here. I will continue to reflect on what you've shared.

I think your appraisal of the tasks ahead are spot-on. This is exactly what I refer to in my long response, your experiences radicalized you to a point that the cruelty of this world moves you to be more caring, and to model that behavior for others.

I love this quote from Che, especially the vulnerability of "seeming ridiculous":

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

I think that rather failing as a student you have in fact succeeded in learning something that almost everybody misses, which carries with it the imperative to act, just as you say. We can learn from our experiences or we can ignore them, and many people are able to achieve great scholarly fame, they can just as easily neglect to see the human suffering happening all around them. This is impossible for people like us.

I have very little formal education, I was a "bad student" and only attended two years of art school. I was also raised in a very rural area, but I moved to the city and stayed. But after a particularly difficult period in my life, even with a host of undiagnosed mental illness, I just started studying and reflecting. My ADHD led me to read many introductions and prefaces, many first or second chapters while failing to finish the book, but theres a lot of info in those prefaces, a lot to reflect on for someone who is sensitive and intelligent, but resistant to institutional modes of learning. At the time I dont know what my motivations were, I was merely following the will of my spirit, and there is much that I was confused about.

But those years of reflection and discipline to study and develop in adulthood has delivered many unexpected positive results. Dont count yourself out yet, being able to see through the gunk of illusions does not have a tangible marketable value, but there is always a need for it. It will make you better suited to evaluate and act positively upon your experiences. This has a cumulative affect, although I encourage you to get treatment for ADHD if you are able, at least it definitely helped me to finish all the books I started and never finished, and helps me to organize ideas and themes so they can be communicated effectively. Just, dont count yourself out yet. I would count your experiences and the subsequent "failures" as a sign of your fitness for this work. We must believe that change is possible within people, in order to change the world, and that includes us. I suspect you are a better student than you give yourself credit.