So this isn't for me, but for my boyfriend and I don't really know where to post this so hopefully I'll still get helpful advice. It's quite hard to sum up what's wrong with him just in the title.

So my bf is 23 and he hasn't really been able to learn a new skill since he was probably 10 years old. He doesn't have super high aspirations overall, that's what makes him very different to other people, but the bad part about it that he thinks he cannot learn any new skills. And yet he does technically know how to do some things, like he can play games really well and he can play some instruments but only on an "average" level as he describes. Apparently if he does learn something, there's a certain bar that cannot be crossed and what that essentially means is that he can only learn any new skill up to a certain level and not above that. And he's tried, he claims it's not out of not being motivated because despite wanting to learn and being motivated he just can't. 

He tried to learn how to drive a couple years back, for a whole year and with an instructor. He says that his ability only got to a certain level but it was still at the point where he cannot be safe driving and he wouldn't get a driving license with that level of skill. 

He says that it's hard for things to become 'second nature' to him like it is to others. In some ways he does a lot of "normal" things that anyone else wouldn't really pay much attention to, manually. Things like breathing, he says he sometimes has to control his own breathing. He says that when he talks, he selects his words so carefully and thinks over everything before actually saying it unlike most other people who don't notice that. 

This sort of difficulty made him fail English back in Highschool. Twice. One specific assignment he remembers is a writing assignment where he at first wrote out something that's too perfect, to the point of where he literally got failed by his teacher. He assumed that it must mean he has to downgrade his own writing skill which he did and then failed again because his writing was child like. He says that he cannot understand things the way other people can, and most normal people in fact who are probably even less academically capable of him can pass but he cannot because of this difficulty with assimilating into what most would consider normal. He cannot understand how to do things the way normal people can.

I thought that perhaps he is some form of neurodivergent like me, just not sure what specifically. To summarize, he has difficulty learning new skills and perfecting skills is pretty much impossible. Even improving is impossible. He has to do a lot of things manually because even natural processes of his body to him are manual sometimes, and that adds to the issue of learning new skills since he cannot become "used" to doing something, and last, he has a lot of difficulty doing certain things the way the average person would see fit, he either does it too well or too bad.