Our two kinds never have gotten along, and it is not too hard to figure out why.

There you are, filled with tension and ambition and drive and worry and intellect and stress, working as hard as you can to get the highest marks you possibly can, with a future full of scholarships and Ivy League achievement and high powered jobs always hanging in the balance in your mind. The expectations on you are extremely high and you feel you have to scramble as hard and fast as you can every moment of your life to just keep up with them. Fear of failure is constant, and so you try as hard as you can on every level, all the time, never truly relaxing at all. Everything has to be right. The right clothes, the right friends, the right extracurricular activities, the right courses, and of course, the right grades, meaning the highest possible. Sweating every test, every grade, and no matter how good your marks are, you always feel like you failed, because you could have (and therefore should have) done better.

And this tyranny of high expectations takes a toll on you every day, wearing on your nerves, making you anxious and nervous all the time, and yet you can’t let any of that show, because that does not fit the image of the future alpha of the world you work so hard to live up to. That would not be “the right move” and your life is all about the right moves, no matter what. That is what your upper middle class parents expect of you, and not living up to their expectations is your absolutely worst fear.

You absolutely must do absolutely everything right, perfect in fact, and you always feel like you are failing even when you are winning accolade after accolade, and you feel like you are constantly dangling on the edge of a tall cliff, and you are not allowed to call out for help or even let on that you are scared.

And then you look across the sea of other keeners just like you in the classroom, and you see someone like me.

Wrong on all counts. Disorganized, messy, disheveled, sloppy, I seem to float around in a hazy and unpleasant cloud of ignorance, not even seeming to be pay attention in class a lot of the time, taking barely any notes, and looking positively homeless in comparison to you and all your perfectly groomed co-keeners.

By all accounts, by all rights, by all justice, by all the rules of the incredibly harsh and unforgiving world in which you operate, I should not even be in the same school as you, let alone in the same classroom, let alone sitting right there and looking calm and happy and like I am actually enjoying learning. I shouldn’t be chatting with the teacher like we are equals and not only getting away with it, but actually being encouraged in it by the teacher who actually seems to like me.

And I certainly shouldn’t be getting the same marks as you or even higher.

And without even seeming to try very hard!

So I don’t blame you for hating me, even though I know that in my innocent ignorance, I do none of these things with any thought towards hurting anyone. I am just being who I am, a dreamy, brainy intellectual who is just doing what comes naturally to him.

It’s just plain not fair that I should get what you get by sweating blood without even breaking a sweat. And the worst part is, I don’t even seem to know what I have.

Which is that I am naturally what keeners like you try so hard to force yourself to be.

And I can’t even claim it is because I am smarter than you. You are obviously not dummies or we would not even be in the same class. When I look at you, I wish I was more like you. Smooth, confident, organized, controlled, looking wonderfully put together and giving every impression that you are headed for the top no matter what you do in life.

So here it is, twenty plus years later, but I finally understand why you and I never got along. I never had anything against you guys, innocent that I was, but I can completely see how from your point of view, I was something that just shouldn’t exist.

I wish I had understood this back then. Maybe I could have bridged the gap.

Regardless, I forgive you.