Okay, this is going to be another blog where I sound like a raving egomaniac, so… consider yourself warned.

Here goes. What if I really am a giant?

Intellectually speaking, that is. Physically, I’m just a bit taller than average, and a lot heavier.

But what if I really am a mental giant? What if I actually am as smart as I sometimes think I am? What then? Just asking the questions makes me feel like I am tempting fate, but the question occurred to me last night and that genie is definitely not going back in its bottle.

I have no choice but to think about it and try to answer the question now. I need to know. This is a crossroads in my identity development and thus my recovery, so it is an issue that must be resolved before I go forward.

To start, let me talk about why I have resisted truly accepting that I am exceptionally intelligent.

I talked yesterday about responsibility, and that is a big part of it. Having to take responsibility for that much power is a terrifying prospect for me. I take responsibility too seriously to treat it in a cavalier, “the world better watch out” kind of way.

But there is also the matter of my connection with others. As you all know, I was a very lonely and scared kid all through elementary school. I had no friends, I was bullied constantly, and I just could not relate to my fellow students. I was light years ahead of them intellectually, and very cerebral to boot, and I just could not understand why they did what they did.

And the thing about a lonely childhood is that once you are a lonely and alienated child, you stop getting any of the social inputs that might have lead to the kind of social adjustment that would lead to reintegration. I tried, in my own way, to understand and connect with my fellow students, but I lacked the social matrix required. I attacked things logically and intellectually, and that does not work with social situations, especially in childhood.

Kids can’t tell you what you are doing wrong. They just know you’re weird.

So very early on, I internalized the idea that there was something I had called “intelligence” and that was why I could not connect with my fellow students, no matter how much I wanted to do so.

And this separation really hurt. I desperately want to connect with people and share social warmth and positive interaction with them. I have been a lonely person for a very long time and all that time, I was starving for attention and connection.

Thus, from a very early age, I resented my intelligence at least as much as I enjoyed it. It was what kept me apart from others and I always felt like the lonely giant who doesn’t mean to scare people away.

Certainly, it made school work easy (pathetically so), but that just meant I was bored as hell a lot of the time. The work was so easy for me that I couldn’t see the value in it. It is only as an adult that I can look back and appreciate all the pain and suffering I avoided by being so bright.

School was a lot harder for others. Most of them struggled with the work at least part of the time, and the ones who were bright like me were usually overachievers so it’s not like it made their lives any easier. If anything, it just ratcheted up the pressure on them.

So I am glad for my ability to not sweat the academic side of things, but on the other hand, I was isolated, frightened and bored, and so for me, my intelligence was at best a mixed blessing.

This is why I learned to crouch. If being a giant is what is isolating you, you learn to slouch down and try to get closer to people that way. The last thing you would want to do is straighten yourself up to your full intellectual height, because that would take you even further from everyone else and that is just plain unthinkable.

And it must be said, there have been times when I have been terrified that if I got any further from others, I would lose my mind completely. Get sucked up into my own mental realm and never come back. Float away like an untethered balloon and sail off into the sky till I disappeared from sight.

So, that is how it has been. But I have crossed the Rubicon now and I have to deal with how it is now. And the truth is, I will need to accept that I am a giant, a gentle and friendly one but a giant nonetheless, and it does me no good and a lot of harm to pretend otherwise and spend my life bent over like a hunchback.

Giants can have their head in the clouds and their feet on the ground at the same time, after all. No drifting off.

But what are the ways of giants? How does one live like one? How do you handle the knowledge that you are both quantitatively and qualitatively smarter than most people? How can you live knowing that the average person is a child compared to you?

I have embraced egalitarianism my entire life. I have never wanted to feel better than anyone else. My desired position is always, always equality. I want to relate to others on their own level. Anything else feels very very wrong. How can you relate to someone and understand their point of view when your head is so far above theirs?

And the thing is, you can’t talk to anyone about this either because the moment you start talking about how smart you are, people immediately close off and you become the enemy. By saying you are highly intelligent, you are, to most people, saying “I am socially dominant over you”, and if there is one thing that shuts off empathy as quickly as disgust, it’s envy.

I can only surmise that I have been envied by at least one person my entire life. The fact that I never think in those terms (I want to be equal, remember) does not change the fact that envy happens, and it could very well be a big part of why I have not been able to relate to others.

And to make things worse, I give off mixed signals. High intelligence, articulacy, and so on are all dominance signals. But I am also a slouching sloppy slob of a person who gives out nearly every other signal of social inferiority, including not having any pride in myself.

So by, in an attempt to relate to others, not embracing my intellect and the ego boost it might justify, I am actually making myself harder to respect and thus perpetuate the isolation.

Being a nice guy makes people like you, but it doesn’t make them respect you. And I need respect. People do not want to be around people they don’t respect.

As hard as it is for me to accept… I have to become more respectable.

And a big part of that will be making some sort of peace with being an intellectual giant.

And there’s nowhere I can turn in order to get advice in how to do so. Certainly I can’t turn to my fellow intellectuals and nerds… they are the people most likely to take umbrage at my declaring myself to be highly intelligent. Even if I use absolutely no words that imply any sort of quantitatively comparable measure of intelligence, my fellow eggheads instantly and instinctively react to any talk of one’s own intelligence like you are saying you are smarter than them.

And then the head-butting and competition and testing start, which is the last thing I want. I don’t want to compete with anyone, I just want to find people who have been through what I have been through and have some sort of insight on how to be an exceptionally intelligent yet still friendly and egalitarian mental giant.

But where do you go for that? Mensa? They seem highly elitist to me. I certainly can’t go posting to some forum about it, that will just make people descend on me like villagers pursuing Frankenstein.

And it’s not like I can just buy “Being A Genius For Dummies” from Amazon.

How do friendly giants find one another? How do I embrace my gifts without losing touch with others completely and having no choice but to retreat into elitism because I have nobody left but myself?

I have known, intellectually, that I am very bright for most of my life, but I never embraced it at all. How do I embrace this without either becoming a nastier person or becoming even more isolated?

If anyone out there knows, please tell me.

And please, please, please don’t hate me or resent me for talking like this. Don’t react to this like a challenge to your own intelligence and figure it is your job to bring me down to reality by taking me down a peg (and thus neutralize the threat).

Just try to understand that I am not challenging anyone. For all I know, you are twice as smart as me. I don’t care.

I just want to know how to be who I really am without losing sight of who I want to be.

That’s all for tonight, folks. Talk to you again tomorrow.