Quote:
Originally Posted by Cron  How did you family and friends discourage you? Telling you it couldn't be done? Encouraging you to divert time and money away from your hopes? |
In my mother's case, it was by telling me it couldn't be done. She was the master of making excuses for herself and anybody else. She said that I was too short (5 foot 6) to get ahead, that my last name was at the end of the alphabet (began with 'S') so I was always picked last in class, and that I was never any good at math so any technical field was out of the question. All BS I knew even then, but she BELIEVED in her victimization routine, and was upset that I didn't. She wouldn't let me get a license or even learn how to drive while I was living at home, saying that I would quadruple her insurance rates, so after college, I joined the Navy, just so I could gain some independence (how's THAT for irony). A few years ago, she actively tried to discourage me from ever leaving town, basically accusing me of elder abuse. She wasn't well, and really couldn't help herself from behaving that way. Any 'help' that she would have received would have been on the state's bill, and probably not have been very pretty.
My (divorced) father was just ridiculously cheap and refused to support me as I was growing up. Neither one would pay for my glasses, so basically I was stumbling about in a fog until I could afford my own. In high-school, my friends really didn't didn't discourage me at all. A few tried to help me get jobs as a teenager, but my dad wouldn't let me get working papers, so that fell through.
After I joined the Navy, it was a different story. My 'peers', mostly kids 5-10 years my junior, were not interested in anything but binge drinking, strip-joints and video games, three things I was never interested in, so we didn't associate much. They thought I was a stuck-up prick, and I thought they were a bunch of overgrown spoiled adolescents. I was enlisted (recruiters are paid quite well to lie- they told me that the military had a glut of officers and didn't want or need any liberal arts degrees. It turns out the exact opposite was true), so while I felt more akin to Officers, association with them was considered fraternization, so technically I wasn't allowed to even talk to them when I was off-duty. I pretty much kept to myself then, my main goals being to stay out of trouble and get out debt-free with money in the bank. Afterwards, I was finally able to start working on my PD (or 'worthing' as I preffer to call it)