I get so god damned sick of how fucking smart I am sometimes.
And I’m hella smart. I always have been. Learned to read at the age of two and a half. Sailed through school getting good marks without noticeable effort. Even in college, I found the work easy to the point of absurdity most of the time. On standardized tests, I bury the needle.
Blah, blah, blah.
In fact, being hella smart, way smarter than average, has been such a constant in my life that I am sure that I not even begin to truly appreciate it at all.
It has just plain always been true.
I am not bragging. It’s just a fact of my life.
The doubt is not whether I am redonkulously smart or not.
The doubt starts with whether it fucking well means anything or not. For most of my life, I have thought it doesn’t. Not really. Not where it counts.
Sure, school was easy. But life was hard. My intelligence (plus a whack of other factors) just isolated me from my peers. I was never like them at all. The things they said and did seemed pointless to me. Looking back, they were simply acting like children their age.
And I was not like them at all. I was never normal. I was too damned smart for my own good, times ten.
No wonder people thought I was arrogant and stuck up and thought I was better than everyone. I never thought that way, but in many ways, I acted that way.
So all my life, more or less, I have considering my high intellect to be more of a burden at worst, or a sad joke at best. Gee, I am so smart, so why am I miserable? Ha ha ha.
Because I wasn’t connecting with people, that is why. I was a lonely, emotionally and socially stunted child with an outrageously out of control intellect that often felt like it was dragging me along behind it, like a small child with a big dog on a leash. One far to strong and wild for it to control.
And the older I get, the more aware of the vastness of the warm, living, wholesome, healthy, natural world I have missed by being so emotionally cut off, frozen, isolated, and strange.
If I could have somehow known what I would be missing, perhaps I would have tried harder to connect with my schoolmates, found someone I could relate to, make some sort of connection to the world of normalcy before it was too late and I was too broken to make the trip.
As it is, here I sit, 38 years old, never had a boyfriend or a job, isolated from the world in my lonely garret because I just plain can’t handle jack shit, and I look into the mirror and all I see is sad, broken, twisted, deformed, pathetic creature who wants desperately to be loved by someone who understands him.
But wanting something, needing something, does not automatically give you the ability to get it. And so here I am, smart as hell, and what has it gotten me? Nothing.
Dumber people just go out and live life and do what feels right at the time and get hurt and learn lessons and grow as human beings and find love and meaning and purpose.
But not me, oh no, I am too smart for all that. I just stay in, make no mistakes, do nothing, learn nothing, and remain an emotionally crippled child in a hideously ill-fitting grownup suit.
And that’s just going to get worse over the years.
Right now, my hopes of escape are pinned on therapy and writing.
Therapy… I don’t know if it is doing a lot of good, but it’s way better than nothing. Sometimes I worry that basically, my therapist can’t keep up with me. If I throw everything at him that is within me and that I want to share, it would be too much for him. Like with nearly everyone else, I have to slow everything down to match the speed of the person I am dealing with.
Another marvelous benefit of my engorged intellect. I am just way too much, too fast, too weird, too out there for even trained therapists to handle at full power. I always have to step things down and take it slow for fear of losing my audience.
And that is far more painful than I like to think about. Than I like to admit. It is kind of impolitic to tell people how painful it is to slow down to their level.
How painful it is to feel like a giant among dwarves, Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians, always worried that one tiny wrong move will shatter their miniature world and worse, hurt all the people in it.
No wonder I prefer to spend my time in the wilds, and why I seek the company of other giants.
Justtyping all this down, I know some people reading it will hate me for daring to say how smart I am. How dare I just come right out and say it. How dare I make them feel bad. How dare I be so egotistical and conceited.
It’s true, though. That should count for something. I am not claiming that it makes me superior to anyone. I am not telling anyone they suck because they are not as smart as I am. If that is what you are hearing in what I am writing, that is your issue, not my own.
But I am getting around to thinking that this big brain of mine is something that I at least have to acknowledge, comprehend, encompass, own, and deal with somehow.
I have spent my whole life more or less ignoring it and taking it for granted and not appreciating or valuing it at all. I have a highly abusive relationship with this big brain of mine.
But maybe I can write myself out of this hole. Maybe I can use my writing skills to get some more financial security, which I think would do wonders for my emotional security.
Poverty makes you feel very, very vulnerable. And I don’t think I will be getting out via the routes that makes sense and sound practical to normal people any time soon.
I am going to have to make my own escape tunnel. You would think that after all these years, I would have learned that I just plain have no choice but to down things my own way. Other people’s ways just don’t work for me. I am far to unique and strange and hopelessly ill suited for the normal world.
Some of us never really had a choice about whether we were unique individuals or not.
Some of us were just born that way.
In the words of Ogden Nash: