[Written: 2024-09-04 – Updated 2024-09-09]

An ‘autodidact’ is someone who’s self taught. I discovered the word when someone with the word in there name liked a post or two of mine (thank you for the new word and the likes :)). Maybe one of the reasons I struggle so much with words, language and people is that the words and language we use is subject to perspective, much like the word autodidact. Can a person be fully self taught?

I have always found words and language interesting, ever since I can remember. Even though most people believed I was not as bright as some of the other kids. My family to a certain extent also believed this; until I passed my Eleven Plus exam with flying colours. I had wanted to do the higher custom exam to try to get into a prestigious Grammar School, but I was not allowed as nobody thought that I was up to the challenge and was setting myself up to fail.

Maybe it was because I came from a rough council estate, or maybe it was because I found it quite intimidating to speak when I was a child, as like any other child I was always up to no good and being, but hated being told off and took it to heart. I did deserve it, with the many things I said, did and wanted. Childhood is a tough time; and the parents are tougher to be able to instil the truths of the world and our misguided conceptions, all whilst providing and giving us time to be children; at a cost to themselves.

But, I did pass the Eleven Plus exam, and then my mother applied for an emergency late testing to the Grammar School, and argued successfully that her ‘mistake’ in the observation of my intellectual abilities should not be my cross or burden to bear. She was a tough cookie, our mother, and I don’t blame the headmaster for biding to her request. And I got in – by the skin of my teeth, but I was in. Myself and my two brothers (at different points in time) took the test, we were all separated by a single mark.

I did very well at school; that is until puberty. After that my grade’s slipped but I still managed to get B’s and C’s for my GCSE’s – this was considered below average for my school. I then failed A-level’s, and was lost in life when I left school. I then had a mental break down, which lead to diagnosis with a life-time mental health condition that needed to be medicated.

Some time during on my recovery to get back to being a contributing member of society, I managed to resit my A-level’s, get a 2:2 on a Civil Engineering Bachelors Degree and get back to work in different forms, tarmacking the main one (not requiring my degree, but I used it with some of the work I did in my six years there). I never really fully used my education in any of the jobs I did, but lots of parts of it helped me great deals in my jobs and life in general.

I was quite skilled as a tarmacker, had many idea’s, worked efficiently, effectively and with a well above average in the level of quality. In the end I had to move on due to a combination of physical and mental health issues the job and some select workers were causing me.

During my life I have learnt a small bit of conversational Dutch, (I have family in Holland), and at school I struggled with English classes and was found to have dyslexia, just a well adjusted one, which is why I passed the test to get into the school in the first place.

But can a person be fully self taught?

If an artist creates music and puts on a show that is their creation, but it is not entirely theirs. Just the input from the point of time it happened, you have the band, the equipment, the stadium and designers, the crowd, and pretty much an infinitely long list of other things. You could even argue that it is also the culmination from the entire history of human life of this planet that help evolve our language; our technology and instruments, our civilisation – and you could go on to add it also includes the culmination of life on the planet too, and how it’s being / influence helped propagate the human race to what it is now.

If someone is self taught then they must learn what they know somehow: by watching and by observing, or by trial and error.

If the are watching to learn, are they not learning from that person or thing? Is learning just observation then? Can things be created or just observed?

By trial and error maybe be a way of teaching oneself, but we are using tools, be it hammer and chisel or pen and paper, they are tools that have helped us get to the level that we couldn’t have obtained without them, so does the creator of the pen and paper a get part of the credit? And which one if so? The original creator of the quill and parchment or the pen and paper designer, manufacturer, advertiser for the ones you used for the job you were on?

I don’t know why, but my trail of thought goes to Einstein’s “Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only transform from one form to another.”

This maybe physically true, so in a way could we have infinite energy in the universe if we learn to recycle it, but it doesn’t explain how the energy you feel when your hear your favourite singers music, especially at live concerts seems to create sensations and experiences that weren’t in existence before.

The booming energy isn’t just amperage and volume, it’s designed and added to something that feels as if it wasn’t here before. You can feel it as if the sound waves have hit the earth from out of space and is reverberating all around the planet.

Words are a different sort of energy, to me they are a bit like light, they are particulate and waveform in nature at the same time.

By this I mean we observe the words when spoken or read, the are a combination of single particles/words that create new energies/make a wave.

I don’t believe it’s possible to argue that the individuals work is just energy being observed, and it was always there, and there art or craft is their own creation. But, I do believe that new energy is created through the words that we use. And they change the path of sometimes many.

I know I am not well known, nor is my writing or work at an exceptionally high level (at least at the moment), and it may never be, though I still believe my work is appreciated; and needed in some form or another, and it is my work.

I can’t fully agree that I am self taught; but maybe to a certain degree; although the paths I now pursue I have not had any official education or training in.

My parents, family, wife, friends, neighbours, schools, society, NHS, army, police force, will always set and reset the foundations of which I walk on, and I know through to my very core and infinitely further that we must always pay homage to these giants whose shoulders we stand on to get to achieve what I have accomplished at this point, and any point in my life. And if I feel I have come away and have gained something valuable from my time and experience, then that is a miracle that I think we all look for sometimes, even though it is nearly every direction we look to.