Am I really useless?

Hello, I really need help, since I don't know if I am useless or not.
My dad just isn't understanding of me and my condition. I have ADD and a high IQ, but believe it or not, it's even more "impairing" in a way.. I think too much, and imagine all kinds of stories and plots, I think about how dark energy works and I am constantly reading, or surfing on the web to learn more about psychology, astronomy, and how what is life and at what point chemistry turns into biology.
But my dad is always putting me off, telling me I am dumb, and he used to say I am dumb in the "dating department". He compares me to people, and one time, at karate, I forgot to ask my teacher for my new belt, since I hate karate and I wanted to go already, and he said that "even those little kids in the class do things better than me". He does things like this often, and I am anxious around him all the time, always thinking if he is going to ask me a favor. I can never find things he asks me for fastly, since 1) It's not something that I want to focus on, and 2) he puts me nervous when I ask him for more specific locations for the object he is looking for. Strangely, I find my own things faster, since no one is there to mock me. Don't get me wrong, I really want to be helpful, but it's hard for me to do things I dont want to focus on. It works like this: He asks me for a pen that is somewhere in the room, and I either start thinking about his mocking comments, about my own interests, or about just wanting to do it fast and go. That doesnt let me to focus well enough and I dont find things efficiently.
I can do very good at academic tasks, at my own readings, and interests, but I am not a practical person, an for my dad that means useless.
It doesn't bother me that I dont focus on girls, since I am not interested in finding one at the moment, and I dont want to do things just because he pressures me. I hate doing things that way. If I am going to do something it should come from my own will, not his ******** expectations.
It's all because this double exceptionality, and my dad us ignorant about it. And no, telling him about it won't do anything. He is a self-righteous person and has never apologized for how he makes me feel.
He is also selfish towards my mom. For example, we have two dogs, one is heavier than the other, and my dad carries the light one and makes my mom carry the heavy one. I am not for chivalry, since it's mysogyny disguised as kindness, but my mom has back problems, and, i am not being mysogynistic, but she is much weaker than him, for real. She doesnt play victim. And she has commented how he always looks out only for his comfort and can never have a normal conversation without criticizing people or trying to "educate us". Yes, he tells both my mom and me how to behave, and doesnt realize we are fycking grown-ups. He thinks he is always right, so I guess that's why he never realizes how he hurts me.
Probably I am just spoiled, since I have all I need regarding material things. But remember, emotionally I dont feel like it balances well with materials.
oh , and dont forget his typical line: No one else loves you as much a me.
I am skeptical about that, since actions speak better than words.

I'm sorry you are dealing with that at home. Maybe he is the useless one, at least he doesn't sound like a positive voice in your life. Too bad your Mom is in the same boat. Some people have a very critical nature. I hope you can get his voice out of your head and find the path that's best for you in life.

I'm so sorry. Whether you know it or not, your father is emotionally abusive. He sounds JUST like the father of my children. He was an absolute JERK. He was never wrong, he never apologized once in his life for anything, and he DEMANDED respect -- he didn't EARN it. And he SPOUTED that he loved the kids, but he never SHOWED it. Like YOUR father, he constantly told them how to do things, but didn't show them how. He constantly ordered them about; made them get things for him and hollered if they didn't do it soon enough. He sounds so much like your dad.

You aren't spoiled -- you're abused.

You are CERTAINLY NOT USELESS!!! You get good grades, and you should be PROUD of that! With all this abuse going on at home, I'm surprised it hasn't effected your grades. I'm proud of you that you haven't let it.

You don't NEED to be looking for girls now. You have plenty of years to be doing that! Focus on your studies and have some FUN in school, if you can. These years should be enjoyable for you with great memories!

As for your father -- I wish I had some advice. But I'm afraid I don't. All I can advise is to stay away from him as much as is humanly possible while living in the same house. You probably won't be there too many more years, so try to get along as much as you possibly can -- but steer clear of him too. I'm sorry you have to live like this. Saying it's unfortunate is an understatement.

God bless and please take care of yourself. Hugs, Lee

Well, tbh, it has kinda affected my grades indirectly. I constantly brood about whether I am stupid and that iq test lied, or if I am just overthinking. That has made me to pay even less attention, and I developed trichotillomania, and I already have a small bald spot. I stopped recently, since I am trying to relax.
And he has his good moments, when he comes home and asks me how am I, or when he asks me about science. But Thats a little rare, usually he disbelieves what I tell him, or starts questioning the sanity of the person who wrote what i read, when in fact they are accomplishes scientists from universities like yale or harvard.
I tried many times before to talk to him about parallel universes, and how they may explain the reason of the big bang. There is this theory that says that before this unverse started, the only thing existing was vacuum energy, virtual particles that popped into existence and anhilated each other instantly. So at one moment, one of those fluctuations can become a universe, just like ours, ane create many others.
What did my dad say? "thats just a theory, very implausible. They dont want to admit God did it all". And I dont want to offend you, since you believe in a god. I am perfectly fine with it, I believe in pantheism myself. But I cant believe he dismisses a perfectly reasonable and rational theory just because it doesnt fit his experience. So what i did is that I stopped talkig to him about what I read, and when he asks me what am I reading I just answer "stuff". Ofcourse , he tells me he isnt giving me any money if I dont tell him, but I dont care anymore. I am planning to get a job here at college, since they respect one's schedule.
Oh! and he always makes this argument about how something isn't true or real just because he hasn't lived or seen it. That's the dummest argument ever, since you dont see the moon's craters and marias but you accept they exist!
I talked to him about the ststistic of men who die after their wives die, which is a significantly high one, and what did he say? He of course accepted it! lol I wish that was even right. Right away he contradicted me and said how he has a few friends whose wives have died, and none of them have thoght of suicide or died, because "they have a stronger character". He is just some macho asshole, and in no way he is a role model for me. I am a guy, and I bought a hello kitty bag for my ipad, and a melody plush, and he shook his head in disapproval. In no way will I do that to my children if I ever have them. I know how all this crap feels, and I am not going to repeat it.

I don't believe there is any such thing as "stupid". Define it without using it's opposite, "smart", as in "not smart". See, it's too vague and loaded with feeling words instead of helpful, descriptions. I would stay away from all words that are vague and pat like that and don't help you understand, they are just words that are used as threats or to hurt people and are, in a sense, like cuss words, which are usually used by people without enough "real" words to express themselves. Your father is verbally incompetent :-)

However, I would also stay away from alleged intelligence tests too to built your self-confidence and try to get out of your head some and all that thinking. No one can see what we think, only what we do. I'm not talking about you need to do things for your father better, to heck with him; how fast you find a pen for someone else when you don't want or need a pen, especially a particular pen, means nothing more than you say it means. You are the actor, if you want to find all pens quickly in a room, no matter who "hid" them, then you can decide you do that task well or poorly but you are your own actor and director in your life, not your father. He can only decide how well or poorly you do things the way he does or wants things and you don't want to be like him do you? He doesn't even take the tests you do; he doesn't find the pen does he? He would probably take longer

Pretend to agree with your father. Tell him, "Yes, sir, stupid is as stupid does" because you know you aren't the stupid one, he is (if there was a contest for "stupid" and/or anyone wanted to act stupid). If you did things really well that your father wanted, he'd have you do more things for him and you'd have no time to work on becoming yourself. You are not his brand of stupid but wear it like a cloak of protection from him. He can't see you and I believe is incapable of appreciating who you are. But just drop the worry about your intelligence and whether you can live your life the way you want to. That is your true task and I believe you are more than capable of filling it.

Your parents marriage is not your problem, it is your father and mother's. Your mother has her own true task and has to learn her own lessons in her life from it.

Useless, when applied to humans, is another word that is useless; you don't want to be used at all, you are a human, not an object.

Sounds to me like your dad is the one with the problem, not you. I'm actually getting pretty mad at the guy from reading this. I'll try to keep that under control. Instead, I'd rather talk about the point in which chemistry becomes biology. what do you think it takes to turn raw matter into living organisms? i mean, the material is pretty basic. carbon, mainly... but what is life, then? will life be created simply by arranging the right matter in the right pattern (i.e. internal organs, ect..). hmm, maybe not. Still, consider when the smallest living organisms first appeared on Earth. Do you think life just flashed into existence from the matter it was made of? How else could it have happened? Even if it arrived on Earth on meteor, it still would have had to undergo the same process and make the transition from non-living to living matter. I know its still something which can't be recreated in a lab. Also, what have you learned about dark energy? Have you studied quantum theory and the multiverse at all? That stuff is infinitely fascinating to me. Damn, I'm not trying to bomb you with questions. Sorry. What about nanotech or the colonization of space? Any interest in those?

You're father sounds very abusive toward you and your mother too. He is just a bastard-that's the word that comes to my mind. Hopefull with your smarts you can go to a great college and get away from them, keep up with the studies, I know you will, you sound very intelligent, and curious. You are NOT useless, you are more useful than you will ever even know yourself. Stay the straight path, and I'm sure you will be a success at whatever you choose to do with your life.

Just my opinion, but from reading what you have written, I think by the way your father acts, he is insecure of himself and is trying to bring the people around him down to his level. He might feel threatened by your creativeness and thinking capabilities, so he is latching on and focusing in on your weaknesses. He just seems to me to be self centered and selfish, trying to get the world to revolve around him. Your house is a galaxy and it floats around the center(Your father). Sound like he only knows one model of behavior and learning and if you do not match it you are wrong. I hope for your sake that your father will start to open and learn to adapt that not everyone learns or can be molded the same.

It sounds like it will be hard, but you just have to focus in on your strength's and move forward. I to have some of the same issues with my father, not to the same extent. But I have told him of my diagnosis which I received only a couple months ago, but he said well good I am glad you are getting help. Sometimes I do things and I realize why now, I try to explain to him why I do them at the moment but he always ask's me why and I have no real way to answer why. It is my brain make up lol. I have brought my father into one of my appointments so my psychiatrist could talk to him and give him kinda a general overview. My father is kind of a bottom line facts based guy, but if the facts you present are about something he does not understand, or cannot understand. He doesn't open to accept it. He still wants me to be like him, but me and him do have distinctly different personalities. I think my personality and my fathers actually conflict, he is always on the go out doing stuff. I am fine just hanging in my house doing things, I do not always have to be out doing something. But that is his routine, never can be home, gotta be out with friends etc. But me I am fine with myself and my own thoughts. Don't get me wrong I like hanging out with my friends, but I don't have to do it everyday. Sorry for the ramble. It is my specialty. Hopefully one or two things out of this are helpful lol

Life has been attempted to be created in the lab, and the farthest they could get was to cell like structures, according to a book I read by Isaac Asimov. Other books say we have only come to create amino acids and couldn't go further. I think life can be created from non-living matter, because not understanding how doesn't mean it cannot happen. Maybe we had to wait more time for unicellular life to form, some million years? Thats a long time for an experiement.
What I know of dark energy is limited to what I have read on popular science books, but I know something: It also goes by the name of vacuum energy, or the cosmological constant. Vacuum energy consists of virtual pairs of particles that come into existence and annihilate each other since they are particle anti-particle pairs. The process happens really fast, and we cannot see it directly, but we know it's there because of the acceleration and expansion of the universe, and an effect known as the cassimir effect. That effect was discovered by placing 2 metallic plates separated and parallel to each other on a vacuum. They measured that a force is still present.
The issue with dark/vacuum energy is that as far as we know, it's useless for everyday life. It is so rarefied throughout the universe because it has high entropy (meaning high amount of disorder in a system). When something has high entropy, or is in thermal equilibrium, which is another way of calling high entropy, it is useless to turn something on or use it in any practical way. Everything in the universe goes towards higher entropy, and if something reverses the entropy, it was either a statistical fluctuation, or that system isnt a closed one and is consuming energy from another source, (one of the discoverers of the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy always stays constant or increases in a closed system, Ludwig Boltzmann, hanged himself. I think that thinking about entropy most of the time is depressing!).
So going back to dark energy, its quantity throughout space is pretty much the same, all homogeneous, so is its density. There are no regions with more vacuum energy than others, all have the same.
Dark matter is another beast altogether, and there are concentrations of it, meaning that some places don't have it. Dark matter is 75%, if i remember correctly, of the matter in the universe, as far as we can tell, and it is 24% of the energy content in the universe, with normal matter being the 7% and dark energy the rest. There are many candidates for dark matter, meanin materials it is made out of, and the ones i remember the most are WIMPS (weakly interactive massive particles) and/or brown dwarfs and matter that is too dim to be seen. Either possibility is fascinating. Ive read before that it may even be that there is a huge number of rogue planets and they are just too dim to be seen.
In the end, for me the universe is a place that you need to learn how to love it a it is. It is like an acquired taste: at first it is repulsive, but you learn to love its paradoxical combination of complexity and simplicity. It is also a place both destrucive and constructive, depressing and fascinating. It is indeed a paradox.

Your IQ test did not lie. We as ad/hd'ers have really great innate intelligence, it is just that the model of teaching presented to us in school does not fit our learning style and does not bring out the best in us and let us shine. As far as the brooding and over-thinking goes, that is all to common for us to over think and rethink many things, most of the time though, at least for me things I over-think and rethink are the negatives, like if I make a mistake I think about it and look at from many different angles trying to see how I made the mistake and if there was anything different I could have done to prevent it. To often that is the basis of our over-thinking, we just need to learn to focus it on the positive's. I know easier said then done. But also this kind of thinking is what lets us be innovator's and entrepreneurs and free thinker's of the world that allows humans as a species to progress and keep moving forward. People who look at thing's straightforward only see it in one light, but we see it in many lights. Helps make new and original ideas.

Not to be rude, but does your father believe in the theory that the earth was created only 3000 yrs ago, like what the christian's are teaching at a high school in my town? I also want to be clear, I have no problem if people believe, but for me the problem comes in when they believe in something so blindly they do not look at it rationally, and immediately dismiss the science behind it to back it up. Or the way they present there argument, there is no logical way to rebuttal it since they left it open ended and you cannot possibly refute it no matter how much concrete evidence you have. I am not saying your father does believe the earth was created 3000 yrs ago, but the demeanor you have described of him, portrays this kind of thinking to me and that is the case for him. I am not saying that it is all solely religious based either. But that seems to me to be the kind of closed minded thinking/style that he has. He is right and no matter what anyone else says they are wrong, even if they have the evidence to back it up.

I am really sorry you have to go through this. But the best revenge for you will be to become successful, more successful then he ever thought possible, prove him wrong at every turn, move forward and become better then he ever thought you would.

How can he be threatened by me? I have read about that before on pages about gifted kids and how people around them, adults specially, may resent them. I am also like you, I am introverted and I prefer to be at home. I have a small group of friends, like 6 people, and they are more or less like me, but more so two of them, whith whom I share all my secrets (my fetish for stuffed animals for example, oops, not a secret anymore! ). Those two also have dads who dont understand them and are a distant emotionally. Out moms are more in-touch with us. I am not sexist, I dont believe women are always like that, (hey, thanks to that, we are more emotional even though we are guys). Yes, my dad tries to mold things for his commodity often, and my mom has described him to me as a "comodino" (spanish word for someone like my dad).
You arent rambling, and you know, its good if you do. People need to speak about their feelings, and dont supress their emotions. Macho-thinking is backwards, and in fact, saying how you feel commuciates emotions to people, and people will go to listen and offer help, enhancing your chances of survival. Tears also express a need for help, and it is necessary to show them to attract social support. They also release stress hormones. Of course this a simplistic way of seeing things, and I am sure there are mor variables there.
Sometimes, when I am alone at my car or with the other two friends who are like me a lot, I yell, or repeat phrases a lot. One of them does it too, and he has his own version of yelling, which is laughing like a villain. He told me it all serves to vent out emotions, which makes sense. I think it is similar to tourette's syndrome, but I am not sure if we have it or not. I also have mild dyslexia, and so does he. he has the same interests as me, with just one or two things not in common (he likes zombies a lot, I am not that fascinated but I like them still. I like hello kitty, but he is indifferent towards it). I find it fascinating that the three of us are studying psychology related subjects. With me is Clinical Psychology, the other one that also yells is studying communication disorders, and the last one is studying forensic psychology.
Sorry for rambling myself... tee hee.
I have another question, is it possible to have many disorders at the same time and still function intellectually/academically? because apparantly I can.

As far as him being threatened. It could be that he just sees you doing thing's everyday life that he could never have possibly imagined doing in his life. Like you are not bound to a linear way of thinking, you do not think in steps, and models. The hard part for us is finding a starting point but once we have settled on one we can move forward and do things at an alarming rate, even if it does not fit a conventional mold, or the proper process. We look at the big picture, not what is just in front of us.That is great you have found friends who can relate. Yes it is possible to have other conditions. More often then not there is another condition involved with ad/hd, such as dyslexia, which you mentioned. There can also be auditory learning disabilities, such as the intake of information and expressing or articulating information out to someone or the world. or both. anxiety and depression can also be present, dyslexia and others. Some are a result of the ad/hd itself and manifest themselves years down the road as the child gets older, from being told they are dumb, or lazy or zone out a lot or get made fun of, it all builds up and up for years and no way to release so they individual starts to lose there self esteem, and becomes depressed, or anxious or both, sometimes they lash out if pushed enough or they just keep tightening the lid and stuff all the belittling down and in the process of that can actually forget how to show emotions. Like me for example. I have a hard time expressing sadness mostly, but really I have a hard time showing any emotion, anger is really the only one I can manage to show but even then that is a stretch. I do not know how to change the inflection of my voice to represent the emotion. I do not know how to show sadness and other emotions. I have not cried in a long time. The last time I cried was probably 14 or 15 yrs ago. I do not do it anymore. all it has done is cause me trouble so I have basically learned to do away with it over my life. I do not trust certain emotions.

You don't sound useless to me at all - you sound like a very intelligent person who is struggling with a few things, as we all are. I am sorry about your dad - it's tough when people don't understand or accept you, especially people who, you feel, should understand and accept you as you are. Some people are limited in their ability to realize that others may think in a different way. I'm always willing to listen if you need to talk :-)