I have been thinking a lot about what lies outside the light lately.

By the light, I mean the dazzlingly bright and powerful (but cold) light of my intellect. I have been an intellectual in the deepest sense of the word for nearly my entire life.

I have been guided by this intellectualism almost to the exclusion of all other considerations. The intellect possesses such power and versatility that it is easy to forget that it does not contain all of the experience of life within it.

All my life, I have sought mental stimulation above all other concerns. That is why even as a preschool child, I wanted books, not toys. Toys didn’t do anything. They just sat there, expecting you to do all the work to make them interesting.

So I never played with toys as a child. I read books. My parents had plenty of books around, and I would also get books as gifts at Xmas and on my birthday.

And then video games came along, and I wanted those, too. They provided a rich stream of constant stimulation. What better for a too-intellectual kid than that?

So I had plenty of fodder for my intellectual development. But what of my social, spiritual, or emotional development? What of faith, security, social connection, or a feeling of being connected to something more powerful than myself?

Nope. Just intellectual development, and that, largely self-directed. Nobody took a particular interest in my bright young mind. I just developed a need for stimulation that brought intellectual development along with it as a side effect.

Yay, lucky me.

And I have gone nearly forty years of living without really thinking about what this intellectual over development has cost me.

Luckily, over the last few years, I have been approaching the problem by degrees. It started with me coming to feel that something was terribly, terribly wrong about how I grew up.

That is all it was at first, a feeling of terrifying wrongness. A feeling like a cold and unforgiving wind was blowing through me, and with it came the realization of just how lonely and closed off I was as a child.

And as I continue to struggle to grasp and truly understand my past, I have come to understand more and more of my own role in what happened to me.

For example, I have been pondering just how arrogant a child I was. I didn’t know I was being arrogant and I certainly was not doing it on purpose. But still, I was pretty arrogant compared to your average child.

My lack of respect for authority, my utter refusal to do the sort of work I did not enjoy, my arguing with the teachers right in front of the class, my obvious disdain for the school work I found beneath me because it was so damned easy… I was not an easy kid to deal with.

I can only guess at what the teachers thought of me. They probably thought I was a royal pain in the ass and wanted as little to do with me as possible. All that unwitting arrogance, and yet, I was also pathetically dependent on them because I could not get along with my fellow students.

And if the teachers saw me as a lot of trouble, what did the students think? I get why they hated me now. They had a lot of reasons. I am not saying bullying me was justified, but I get why it happened and I am not entirely blameless.

So as I slowly contemplate the cold, cold life I have lived (but it’s so brightly lit, how can it be cold? And yet it is. ), I begin to touch upon the truly raw, scary realm : the limits of my perception.

The realization that, after decades lived thinking you were perceptive and brilliant, that there is a whole universe to which you are effectively blind… that is oceanic in its degree of illumination.

Or in this case, the illumination of the limits of your illumination… brightly lit darkness.

So far, all I can really do is look at this darkness, this blindness, and let myself get used to the sure and certain knowledge that I not only lack knowledge and understanding of so much of the world… but that I do not even have the tools to explore this new space yet.

What went wrong with me happened so long ago that I fear I have to go back to the beginning to try to put things right. And having to start from scratch when you are nearing 40 is a daunting prospect, to put it very very mildly.

I have, at least, come up with some questions to contemplate in order to get me going on the kind of emotional development I need. Some way out of the bright and cold and into the dark and warm.

Towards not fearing that darkness outside the light, and maybe even figuring out how to dim the brightness a little and thus make the darkness less dark by contrast.

I want to be able to lead a full, rich, normal, socially connected life, without the loneliness and isolation and impotence that had held me back.

Questions like these ones :

What went wrong? What was the breaking point? The sexual abuse? The lack of kindergarten? My first bully? What?

What would I have been like if that had not happened? An important part of my recovery is recognizing that things could have gone differently and imagining what that might have been like. Once I imagine something, it becomes far more real to me. So what might I have been like if things had gone a little differently? I picture a warmer, more charming, somewhat cockier version of myself.

And here is the big one :

Who would I be if I was not so damned smart? It is amazing (and disturbing) to contemplate just how much you can substitute intellectual development for emotional and social development. What would it have been like if I had been born with an average IQ, and had to get along in the world the way normal people do?

Would I have been better off in the long run?

What would I do, who would I be, without the shield of intellect to protect me?

I don’t know the answer, but I feel it to be a very good question to ask myself.

Being smart has been the bulk of my identity for so long.

Could I survive without it?

Other people get along fine without it…