I wrote a bunch of paragraphs to explain this, but it all turned out to be nonsense. Point is, everyone seems smarter than me because I can't seem to understand simple things, and I feel sad about it. I feel... childish. Funny thing is, I get straight A's... I'm not smart though. I just study study study and ace my tests, then forget all about it later on. Has anyone ever felt this way? Did I explain myself well? I tend not to... I don't know those fancy words that everyone uses.
Yep, pretty much was the same way in school. Don't remember a bit of it but it comes back to me when I need it... Does this tend to happen with all subjects or just ones you don't care about?
There are many different ways to be smart. You sound like you may be a realist and can see weaknesses in yourself more clearly than most people. It's really interesting how unrealistically optimistic people are. If you take a group of people and ask them to list the important experiences of their past and then ask them to mark them as being "good" or "bad" they will typically rate them 50% good and 50% bad. But if you ask them to list experiences they think they will have in the future they predict they will be 70% good. In reality, most experiences are bad or neutral with only about 20-30% actually being good or beneficial to the person. So even though your pessimism is getting you down, you do have an advantage in that you are able to see yourself as you truly are and are therefor in an excellent position to actually do something about it. I would call that being pretty smart.
You're probably smarter than you think you are. Almost everyone sometimes feels dumb. Put me in some advanced math class, and I'll feel like a fish out of water. I'm just not terribly interested in maths. One area where I used to feel especially dumb (and sometimes still do) is social/emotional stuff. Some people found it amusing that I usually couldn't understand things such as sarcasm and reading between the lines. Of course, it helps that one of my main interests is psychology, and I'm fascinated by people... I've heard that playing video games, can help people get quicker at learning new things. I'd like to add that video games helped me become less clumsy. So keep gaming! Oh, and fuck those fancy words, because this isn't an essay!
OP, I understand you here more than you know. The truth is, as far as intellect and ability go, you're perfectly fine. I'm the opposite when it comes to learning-- I'm a great book learner who can remember stuff from class without having to study and can retain it for the test and afterward. But that meant school was too easy for me. I didn't have to even figure out how to study, let alone develop a sense of cunning to work at keeping my grades up. Now I am an out-of-touch academic struggling to figure out why I can't do what comes naturally for supposedly "average" students. I'm not going to say that grades don't matter-- they do, but they matter for a different reason than the ability to wave them around and be proud. They represent productivity in the workforce. For me, they did not very closely do so, because I could essentially switch off at school. While when I try the same at a paying job, I have terrible performance because I have come to expect it to be easy through almost two decades of reinforcement. The student who struggled and put forth full effort at school gets used to keeping focused and exploiting every advantage, so they are well adjusted to working hard. If you are busting yourself but making the grade, you are doing it very very right. Until you get to the cumulative final, that is, but the info is easier to remember the second time around.
