Background:
My family (mother's side at least) are rather humble and we/they are not impressed by flashy cars or elaborate houses. Christmas gifts are small and cheap but also often homemade, personalised and thoughtful. I love that. However often this also includes personal accomplishments, you are not allowed to brag, this often means mentioning or talking about your personal accomplishments. Fine with me, it does create a rather relaxing and equal relationships most of the time.
However my problem is that I have noticed that they are not happy when I join a conversation and lets say contribute to the debate at hand. I have never considered myself as especially intelligent but I recently found out that I was always considered to be the brainy child (I always thought my cousins were a lot smarter
). Sometimes people get uncomfortable and suggest something or a close family member might tell me that I am coming off as arrogant or a bit of a know it all. This was more common when I was a child people were uncomfortable when a 11 year old wanted to debate politics with them
But the bottom line is that I think it might be a bit of my dyspraxia that I don't sense when people think I have gone too far, I can talk incessantly and sometimes loudly and afterwards I am embarrassed. However lately I think people have started to misinterpret what I say for arrogance or bragging when I am simply talking about something that interests me. This was particularly obvious when I had to explain what my undergraduate course was but in my defence when I said I was studying Politics and International Relations they said "I didn't know there was anything that you could study about that." Its a loose translation but they basically implied that all there is to Politics and IR as an academic subject is to observe what politicians do by watching the news
.It causes friction and usually feels like I am thinking on a different wavelength from the rest of humanity. I hate that I feel like I have to hold back when speaking to my family. I hate self-censoring. Is it arrogance on my part? do you guys get frustrated or annoyed when speaking to people who demonstrate a lot of knowledge. Or is it perhaps not what I say but how I say it?
