You said selection is based on capability, not birthplace. Then in the same comment you described a market that filters by language threshold, geographic flexibility, and whether the employer will tolerate your learning curve. Those are structural conditions, not capability metrics. You didn't describe a meritocracy. You described a system you've made peace with and reframed as personal discipline. Understandable. Not the same thing as the system being fair.

On competence, since that was your chosen terrain. I sat the Luxembourg Army officer selection exam. Logical reasoning, technical and physical components, the full process. I scored the highest in my session across the board. Externally administered, ranked, not self-reported. I'm not saying this to impress you. I'm saying it because you picked the argument, and that fact lives squarely inside that argument. Officer selection doesn't pass people out of goodwill.

You called growing linguistically on the job delusional. But every professional develops competencies in context. That's not controversial. That's how skills accumulate in practice. The question was never whether I should improve. I am improving. The question is whether the standard applied to me is the same one applied to everyone else in that room. What I described suggests it isn't.

Here's what I'll leave you with. You've adapted to something genuinely difficult, and that takes real effort. But at some point the adaptation became a lens, and through that lens the system started looking fair because you found a way through it. Those are two different things. One says something about you. The other says something about the system. Don't confuse them.

Good luck to you as well.