More goodies from my YouTube comments :
The question was, “Do you think your high IQ as more of a gift, or a curse?
Ain’t that the million dollar question. I hate to say it, but mine has hurt me way more than it has helped me. It made it hard to relate to anyone my age all through primary education. It insured that I was bored as hell in class. It definitely made me act in ways that came across as arrogant and haughty. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am, It meant that school never challenged me at all. Even in university. the course work was childishly easy for me. It meant that I was smarter than every teacher I have ever had, which means I never had the comfort of knowing that people older and smarter were looking out for me. It made me a pain in the ass to teach as a result. Not because I was snide and disrespectful, but because I was so unpredictable. At any moment, I might ask a question that makes the teacher or professor feel and/or look stupid. And worst of all, it means that in strictly cognitive sense, I live in a world of relative idiots. Ordinary people are like children to me. This violently clashes with my deep egalitarianism and desire to connect with people and find out their story and understand who they are and where they are coming from. And I have no idea how to resolve that conflict.
me, on youtube, this am
I posted that chunk of text here for two reasons : it seemed like a very psychologically important bit of writing in which I disclosed the details of one of the central conflicts of me entire life (and thus belongs on this self-therapy session of a blog) could poke, and I wanted to see if I could poke holes in it via looking for the positive side of being so god damned smart all the time.
And I probably can. So for extra credit. I am going to do so without drenching my words in the usual coating of self-defeating negativity and snark.
Hoo boy. Let’s begin.
Let’s start with the obvious : school was never hard for me. At all. And while that does have the disadvantages I listed above, I can’t deny that compared to most people’s experience of school as a place of risk and danger and stress, I had it SUPER easy.
Even all those keener kids who I went to school with had to work really hard to get the sorts of grades I got just by showing up.
And I appreciate that and value it and do my best to remember how extraordinary that is and hold on to the implications for my life going forward.
There’s surely a place out there somewhere for someone with my gifts.
Going deeper, we get into the much murkier and harder to define area of what intellectual joys and deep insights have been available to me only because I have the high powered hardware to support the search.
It’s a slippery subject because while it is simple in concept. in application it’s very hard to imagine what life would be like with a very different kind of brain.
I suspect I would have developed my personality and charm a lot more.
Closely related is the fact that I just plain see more than most people. More of the chess board, more of the big picture, and more of both the breadth and the detail of life.
And while that sometimes reveals very dark things to me, I would not trade it away for anything. It’s the beating hart of who I am on a cognitive/emotional basis.
And finally, there is no doubt to me that some of my non-cognitive gifts would be less than they are or even nonexistent without that high powered hardware.
My wit, for example. I would not be nearly as funny without the extremely detailed and interconnected and indexed comedy database I have been compiling since I was a kid.
So those are all the positives of my high IQ that I have come up with so far.
There’s probably not all of them, though.
Make sure you’re not hiding
Or, more fully, “Before you complain about not being noticed, make sure you are not hiding or being invisible. ”
In other words, take down your cloaking field first. I have spent most of my life bitterly resenting being overlooked, but the truth is, my social anxiety is so intense that I learned to fade into the background and not be noticed at an early age.
And it’s silly to expect people to notice you when you’re trying so hard not to be noticed.
The thing is, this cloaking field is not necessarily conscious. I went a lot of years without realizing I was doing it. So of course I resented not being noticed.
From my point of view, it happened for “no good reason”.
And that perpetual victim mindset is very seductive. Oh woe is me, I am the universe’s chew toy, a completely innocent victim of a chaotic and capricious world that is so evil and malign that I couldn’t possibly be expected to take responsibility for myself and do things to make my life better because I am the only one who can.
It would be futile. Who am I to take on the entire universe?
Phew! I almost had to grow up. That would have been the worst.
The phrase “powerless by choice” springs to mind.
It’s something I used to talk about a lot in this space : you can’t have the power to help yourself without taking the responsibility to do so, and free spirit types like myself are notoriously averse to responsibility, so we prefer to think we are helpless victims.
But if you’re choosing it, you’re not really helpless, are you?
So I have to ask myself : is this sad life of mine a price I am willing to pay in order to never have to take responsibility for myself?
So far the answer has been “yes, actually”. But that can change.
I admit that the idea of taking full responsibility for myself scares me more than any of my many anxieties or neuroses.
It makes me instinctively shrink back from reality and wants to retreat even further from the real world into the depths of my own mind.
That’s my go-to response for everything, really. Hence my being Avoidant.
But it is futile to fight such an obvious and inevitable truth : existential responsibility cannot be avoided. No matter how you slice it, if things are ever to get better for me, it will have to start with something I do.
Nobody is going to spontaneously come into my life and rescue me without my having to do a thing to get it started.
Especially when I work so hard not to be noticed by life at all.
Ball’s in my court and always has been, and always will be.
it’s not about what is “expected” of me by some nebulous entity. That’s just another way of dodging the truth of one’s responsibility for oneself.
What it’s truly about is what I want. And that’s way scarier.
I mean, what idiot left ME in charge?
Oh right. Me.
That figures, to be honest.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
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