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perhaps late 2025 when we were at the drafting table doing some sketches and noticed that we (specifically miele and rena) are REALLY good at freehanding stuff in three dimensions hehe
i always knew i was good at school, just really unmotivated. i squeaked by in middle and high school getting As on all the tests but never doing any homework, like literally never. i didnt realize that would translate into anything meaningful for me until i got to engineering school. i almost got a 4.0 in a degree program most people struggle to get Cs. i still didnt think it meant much because school isnt real life. it took a few years of working as an engineer to realize im actually pretty good at it. i routinely catch things that more experienced engineers missed, and seem to have a bottomless well of ideas to solve problems, some of which are really good. i do most of my work from first principles because i really need to understand what im doing, while some engineers just apply what they already know uncritically.
its honestly really hard acknowledging any of this because ive been punished so many times for showing or stating my abilities. like i have to be exceptional to get by but im not allowed to remind anyone of it. so many people in my life have gotten butt hurt because i can do something better than them rather than just being fucking proud of me. most of those people were men. go figure.
I often think "I'm not good at anything", but I mean, I'm okay at some stuff.
I had almost no experience with Linux prior to installing Arch on my PC. I can't explain it; I guess it's because I'm a programmer? I kinda just have a knack for "computer stuff".
And music I guess? I don't know that it's good enough to monetise my little hobby, but I get plenty of joy out of it. I wish I could play jazz piano and/or guitar though.
Also it seems I'm pretty good at like, words and stuff? Maybe it's because I'm autistic, but I'm rather proficient in a variety linguistic areas.
I don’t feel exceptional in any area myself. I had a programming class last fall that I did well in. I would like to do more. But I just haven’t had the time. Often I feel like I’m too busy with the mundane obligations of life to excel. Other times I wonder whether certain people have different drives than I do.
As someone with major Shiny Object Syndrome, I have like a gazillion hobbies, and I'm not truly exceptional at any of them. 'Tis my curse, I suppose.
Does being good at remembering weird facts about insects and spiders count? Because I’ve been good at that since I was a little girl lol
I discovered last year that I’m pretty good at gardening. I had a zucchini and 3 cucumber plants in my garden bed, as well as a luffa in a container and 2 tomato plants in an Earth Box. This year it’s 3 tomato, 1 cucumber, 4 soybean, and a hot pepper plant in the garden bed, as well as 4 luffa in containers and 3 tomatoes in the Earth Box. My luffas are doing as well this year, but I have time to try for more. Probably plant those next month.
I also have 30+ Western Redbud seedlings under a grow light. I’m going to practice some bonsai methods with them as they get bigger 😁
Those are really fun, practical and useful skills!
I was 9 when I realized I was a fucking good musician.
I was 16 when I realized I was not good enough to make any decent kind of living from it.
I was ... probably around 22 when I realized that I had an instinctive understanding of some key aspects of marketing.
I had a similar trajectory with music - found I was really good at violin around 11/12. Knew by the age of 18 that I wasn’t going to make a career of it.
That world can be so competitive!
What instrument(s) did you play??
I started on the accordion (STOP LAUGHING!) at 4 (yes, 4). I moved to the organ for complicated reasons at age 8 or 9 (I forget which). I returned to the accordion (I SAID STOP LAUGHING DAMMIT!) when I moved to Germany at age 12. I picked up the saxophone at age 14 (which started my lifelong love of woodwinds; I own and play an embarrassing number of these now).
Accordion! What a fun and funky choice! I bet they’re a hoot to play hahah
That’s really cool you still play woodwinds now. I played in a symphony for a while and the woodwind players were always the most fun!
We're also the best in bed. VERY good embouchure control, breath control, lip control, tongue control, …
Ooo lala! When you put it that way, maybe I should be hanging out around jazz clubs more.....
Well, it was specifically jazz that convinced me I couldn't make a go of music as a profession.
But if you want to join the chamber quartet sometime, we can, I'm certain, find interesting things to do with bows and breath control.
(Wait a sec. Am i thinking the wrong chamber here?)
Haha well the only advanced music class in school in my youth was jazz and I actually was stubborn enough to transcribe and write my own parts for violin in order to participate. Could probably teach you a bit about jazz while you teach me breath techniques ;)
There must be some quartets with woodwinds and strings combined, right? It's been so long since I've been a practicing musician haha
Oh, right! I was talking a musical quartet! Ha ha! Not some kind of different take on four people in a completely different kind of chamber! Music! Clearly!
My issue at the time was improvisation. My musical exposure was ... epically bad. I was brought up in a household filled with James Last, Nana Mouskouri, Heino, and other such elevator music. My closest exposure to anything modern was a single ABBA album (Arrival) and the soundtrack to the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Actual rock music? Actual music with genuine emotion? Literally was me being exposed first to The Police (Ghost in the Machine) and then Black Sabbath (Mob Rules). And as a result I just didn't have the exposure to pentatonic scales, blues scales, and then that "feel" for what works when riffing off a key in those scales.
So my sax solos sounded so lame it hurt. I had technique but I lacked the ability to express.
Now I'm quite a bit better, but of course I'm also just someone who plays for her own fun; largely a meditative thing for me these days.
As for chamber music (MUSIC, yes! Not that other stuff that may have slipped into your mind through my clumsy ~~innuendo~~wording!), yeah, there's lots of pieces for flute and strings and that kind of thing. I want to say Mozart had quite a few, but I'm too lazy to go through my massive collection of his stuff to find it all. 😳
OK, I just dug through it. He's got some wonderful chamber pieces. The Flute Quartet in G (K.285a) is lovely. The Clarinet Quintet in A ('Stadler', K.581) is better, but ... I don't know if I could handle four.
I realized I had social capital skills and acquired a reputation that were enough to allow me to cross class boundaries. I learned this during greenfield and brownfield work in startups and it really didn't sink in until my enormous architecture gig for Utah State Board of Education. I am almost fully self-educated and autodidactic so I had massive impostor syndrome among my colleagues with masters or doctorates in compsci or whatever specialty like data analysis. they hated that I didn't need the degrees and still was more performant and widely capable. Yay me for my personal growth from living and breathing tech hellscapes for a while. I'm a fixer, no doubt. oh I also knew i was decent at sexual gratification when she said wtf to my gf after coming and my gf said "i know! right!?" My gf held her and I during and was so encouraging to her friend. I already blew her man too. I was beaming after I chauffeured 3 people in a row to their little deaths. The last on seems like kinda prescient whatever.
I didn't, at least not until people told me 😅 (and even then I have an awful lot of self doubt and criticism "what if they are just placating me, its awful garbage, look at all the glaring mistakes and stupid errors I've made, surely they see that...")
I'm good, but not great, at a bunch of random things (ADHD go brrrrrr) but when I got a real obsession with wanting to learn how to craft with leather (no I don't know how I got that into my head) I took a real shine to it, did some courses and really enjoyed it.
I started posting some of my work on Lemmy, just to get involved with some communities (shout outs to !Art_Alchemist_Guild@lemmy.today, !leathercraft@lemmy.ca, !imadethis@lemmy.zip and !handmade@lemmy.world) as well as right here on WomensStuff in the creative Wednesday threads, and I've had so much positive feedback and comments on my work that I'm starting to think... maybe I'm not too bad at this after all.
I've started making things for people and had them tell me that I could absolutely sell my items if I wanted. I occasionally share some of my stuff with the place I buy my leather from and again, loads of positive feedback and they sometimes share my stuff on their social media.
So yeah, its not a sudden realisation, but all the positive feedback and comments have started to shed that self doubt and internal criticism and make me think that maybe there is something to what they are saying...
I didn't realise I was good at ELEX (Electrical and Computer Engineering) until I had to take a course for my diploma 10+ years ago. I wasn't the best student, but what I thought was a super easy course, the top students (those A+ ones) were struggling. Looking back, maybe it's something I should have pursued.
Now I am good at spotting mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, and liars. 😂
I was around 14 when I realised I was a good actress, it was a gradual realisation. It was the first subject I was genuinely good at, and it got me through my teenage years
i always thought id be good at acting cause of the decades of autistic masking. every distinct social group got a slighty different personality that i felt fit best with the group. i dont think ill ever test this assumption though lol.
Funnily enough I think masking is partly why I was good at drama
You should try. You might be really good at it.
In Yue (Cantonese) Opera there is a concept called 虎度门 (hǔ dù mén in Mandarin, but fu2 dou6 mun4 in Cantonese). The concept translates literally to "tiger crossing gate" and generally refers to the stage door. I could nerd out for a long time on what this means and how it came to be, but I'll just do a summary to tie it in to your autistic masking.
See, the "tiger crossing gate" is a notional barrier. On one side of it is you. On the other side is the character you're playing. When you cross that 虎度门 threshold, it is a powerful symbolic transition from your (usually meek, unassuming) self into the (strong, tiger-like) character you're going to play in one direction, and naturally in the reverse it's the transition back to you.
Feeling any echoes yet with your autistic masking?
If I'm at all autistic, I'm barely on the spectrum at the extreme high function end. What I am, however, is an extreme introvert. I have to wear masks too, you see, to interact with people. Studied masks of energetic interactions. And I find 虎度门, a term I picked up while minoring in drama and watching a metric shit-ton of Chinese operas, a very useful abstraction to push myself onto a stage to present a character to people: whether that character was a literal character in a Shakespeare production, or the character of a poised professional market consultant telling clients what's what in my day job.
So really, give acting a try. It's a lot of fun, and the tools you already use are perfect for the task at hand in acting: slipping into another's head.