Hello everyone,
This is my first post.
I am a 53 year old male living in Canada who, for as long as I can remember, has struggled with learning.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, no one ever truly recognized my academic struggles. As a result, my self-esteem (among other things) profoundly suffered. I vividly recall one situation where my high school vice principal commented on my grade 9 report card, “Four failures indicates a serious problem. What is being done about this?” Of course, nothing happened to address these issues. Eventually, my personal pressures became so critical that I dropped out of high school in grade 11. Since that time, I have never returned to school.
Between 1989 until 2002 I participated in a series of evaluations to delve into my learning struggles. Unfortunately, I was never really satisfied with these evaluations. Recently, I compiled these evaluations into a blog which one can conveniently examine at http://myexplorationsinlearning.blogspot.ca and I am hoping that I might be able to get some constructive feedback from others.
Of late, I have been experiencing lots of stress, bouts of sadness, feeling unbalanced, constantly consumed by thoughts of self-doubt, shame, and unrealized potential. I procrastinate excessively. I feel frustrated and angry at times. This year I experienced a couple of anxiety attacks at work. In addition, a close friend recently observed that I looked “lost”.
Over the course of many years, I have wanted to return to school. There are so many things that I would love to learn, but each time I have feared that I would fail.
One shining exception to all this gloom and doom in my life occurred in summer 2010 when I began volunteering with a small Canadian charity called Adopt a Village in Laos, which works with the hill tribes of northern Laos. Seventeen months later, this volunteering experience culminated in what would prove to be an epic and life-changing adventure. I went to Southeast Asia for the entire month of December 2011 where I worked with and gained an intimate understanding of this charity. Since that life-changing event, it has been indelibly engrained in my mind, heart, and soul and I want to return to that region of the world to continue more humanitarian work.