Thank you for your reply. I have empathy in spades. I recently volunteered with homeless youth but I had to stop when my emotions began to get the best of me. I read, write, think and love.

You are right, we all have struggles and I am still working on myself every day.

I was “C” to “A minus” all through high school without reading the textbooks, just paid attention to the teacher. I had the “Cs” when the teacher was a babysitter and we spent most of the class time reading what was supposed to be read at home. I spent the hour daydreaming or staring out the window or falling asleep. A good teacher discussed the textbook, even if nobody read it the night before. It caught up with me at college because I was not a reader of anything causing me to drop out. The reading materials at a major university were tremendous. Speed reading techniques would be recommended for the college bound. I did not read novels. Today, I suggest what English teachers suggested in high school if one does not like to read novels – to read newspapers and magazines like Sports Illustrated if you like sports. With the Internet and E-Mail subscriptions and Social Media and a comment inbox and Yahoo! News and search engines to find research for a novel, I read more in a day than I did in a year during my educational years. The struggle is personal. I quit or I dropped out of things I did not like. I love Mizzou and I regret not studying. During my last semester of the two years I dreamt of being a college professor teaching anything while living on campus and writing novels when Industrial Engineering no longer engrossed me. There was a McDonald’s on campus. It helped in the dreaming. It was across the campus library. The other private college I transferred to, I dropped out to leave a bad environment of spoiled rich kids thinking that they have the right to play “hazing” games on anyone and we suffer the consequences for their actions.

Even privileged people struggle. I’ve been on both sides of that. To assume because someone is financially blessed that all of life is Easy Street is false. If we are blessed enough to not have those external struggles, we must develop empathy. It’s easy to forget that ur an outlier. Reading, volunteer work, talking to others who are struggling and being a great listener are priceless skills.

Often when we are blessed with privilege we feel like frauds, like we didn’t work hard enough for something. For instance, while I had struggles other places, God blessed me with a very sharp mind. I made As and never read the text book. I could write papers in one night that were better than papers that other students had struggled for months to put together. This always left me with a feeling that I didn’t deserve what I earned. That maybe I’d slipped through and really was a fraud. All humans struggle. We all suffer even if it is unique to us.

If you look at my struggles, they are nothing compared to what a woman in Afghanistan is going through. Thus, everything is relative, but all struggle is valid. Embrace it. Grow. Learn and let it give you a tender heart toward others.