A Brief History of Time

All of the following are true. I list these not to boast, but to illustrate how little control we have over our lives, and how reason and rhyme rarely come into play:

When I was four, I wrote my first short story. It was one sentence long and had two spelling errors (I misspelled "might" and "maybe"), but the grammar was perfect and it had a protagonist, antagonist, and moral. It was also illustrated (and not just random scribbles)
When I was six, I was reading at a fifth grade level and did math at a tenth grade level.
When I was seven, the charter school I went to proposed skipping me two grades. I was already a grade ahead, and my parents decided to keep me with my peers.
When I was nine, the school suggested holding me back.
When I was ten, the school threatened to call child services on my parents if they didn't put me on Ritalin.
Two weeks later I won a national writing contest. I forgot to attend the award ceremony. That same year, I placed second in the state spelling bee.
When I was eleven a special meeting was called to address the fact that I was receiving an average of two hours of detention a day (eight demerits), and the teacher was running out of times when he could punish me.
When I was thirteen I was dropped from AP math and placed in remedial English, though I was still 2 grades ahead of my classmates in both.
When I was fifteen I was thrown out of the school by my ear (literally).
When I was sixteen I was accepted into a scholarship-paid international exchange program. That same year, my counsellor expelled me from school, citing that I was unable to learn. I was allowed to finish out the semester, at the end of which I blew out the curve in my Chemistry class by finishing a test that was specifically designed to be unfinishable and scoring 100%.
When I was seventeen, I received a perfect score on a physics exam, again one not designed for a perfect score to be attainable. I was informally accused of copying, except they couldn't figure out who I would have copied from, since the next best grade was a 62%.
When I was eighteen I was allowed back into high school, provided I agree to take over various classes that I had skipped over the years, including ninth grade reading, tenth grade math, and eleventh grade English.
When I started college, I tested so high in my entrance exams that I was barred from taking core classes (as they would inflate my grades), which would eventually prevent me from meeting the requirements of my degree.
In my sophomore year of college, I again blew the curve in my philosophy class, prompting the philosophy teacher to stop grading my tests.
In my junior year of college, my professor bargained with me to stop taking her class because I knew more about the subject than she did and it was affecting her authority in the class.
After three years in college, I graduated cum laude with honors credits. I was the first of my peers to get a baccalaureate, even though I started a year later, had to take a semester off (because I couldn't take core classes) and never took summer classes.

Ten years after graduation, I am a data processor at an insurance company. I make $7,000 below the average American wage. No more than a quarter of my colleagues can be considered fully literate in English. My boss has never heard of the European Union. My other boss is convinced I'm constantly in trouble because her boss keeps asking to talk with me privately; I am the only one who gets this request. Next week, she will be putting me on probation for not meeting the needs of my job.

It may be me, it maybe the system, it may be outside forces, but somewhere someone has failed. It's not egoism– it's data.