Today, I have been pondering the question of what it’s like to be around someone with a massive mind like mine.
Because I know that, despite my delusions of humility. I radiate intelligence like it’s my own personal electromagnetic field. It’s a strong part of why I have such a strong presence and why my attention can be such an intense experience.
I have thus far lived my life in a kind of holy ignorance of this effect on others. I go through life as if I was just another person and try, in my own highly eccentric fashion, to get along with and relate to average, everyday people.
But I’m not one of them. I’m a giant. And I am beginning to think that the smart thing for me to do is to concentrate on being a friendly giant instead of squishing myself down to try to pass as human.
And fail miserably, of course. It’s pathetic, really.
It’s true that I don’t know what I really am. I was talking about this with Doc Costin recently, I know that I am not autistic and yet autism is the closest thing I have to a label or a diagnosis for why I am so damned weird, and always have been.
So calling myself a giant makes as much sense as anything else, really.
Anyhow. About what it’s like to be around me. I can only guess that it can be kind of freaky, especially because I send such mixed messages.
That magnetic field of mine sends a very clear message of power. But like a lot of large people, I have invested a certain amount of my potential into appearing friendly and harmless so I don’t scare people.
That and my strange combination of charisma and shyness must make it potentially quite confusing to be around me.
Not to mention my tendency to talk about things other people don’t understand as I try to convey opinions and observations that are simply beyond their ken.
I do wonder sometimes what would happen if I simply forgot about whether people will understand me or not and just concentrated on speaking my truth, uncut and unfiltered.
But no. I am strongly driven to express myself and that requires someone to actually be able to pick up what I am putting out.
Some day, though. Maybe.
I guess I have never really learned to relate to normal everyday people because I didn’t want to end up talking down to them, which is kind of inevitable when you’re a giant.
The idea of them trying to talk up to me is a nonstarter. I mean, the logical inversion is right there in the language but that’s just not how these things work.
Part of the problem with the complex signals I emit is that people can’t tell if I am a threat or not. In some ways I am and in others I’m not.
I try really hard not to be. I’m not looking to hurt anybody. I don’t throw my intellectual weight around. My cloak of innocence keeps me from really noticing it when someone is challenging me for dominance or whatever. I can’t say I have ever set out to deliberately outcompete someone socially.
But that’s more a testament to what a recluse I am, not to my personal humility.
If I had my way, all my interactions with others would be gentle and pleasant and friendly and understanding and kindly and good.
But that gets kinda complicated when you’re a freaking giant.
Maybe I just need to accept that I am a special little hothouse flower and that means I have to find my own way to make it in this mundane world.
The world ain’t built for people like me, whatever I am.
More after the break.
More on gigantism
I have never wanted to be “better” than others.
On any level. Don’t get me wrong, I dream of extremely high levels of achievement – the sky is the limit, really, I wanna fix the world – but I do not think of that in terms of putting anybody else down.
Maybe I would feel differently, though, if I had not always been so effortlessly dominant.
Intellectually, I mean. I have never met another person who is definitively smarter than me – not even as a child. I have spent my whole life feeling awkward and embarrassed about how I tower over others in the realm of the mind and it requires no more effort on my part to be that way than it takes for me to be tall.
It’s just how I am.
I know for a fact that I have dominated others with my verbal muscle and mental might without even knowing I was doing it. From my point of view, I was just participating in the conversation like everybody else, and if I wanted to I could plausibly maintain that posture and declare that I have no idea what people are talking about when they tell me I need to dial it back and I’m “just doing what everyone else is doing”!
But that would be like Superman saying, “What? I just tried out for the football team like any other high school guy!”.
Yeah but you know better, Clark.
My claim of innocence would be similarly disingenuous. And yet, to be honest, I still don’t know where that leaves me.
How should a mental giant like me behave? What should my attitude towards the world and myself be? What is my role in society?
The problem is that I have no role models. There’s nobody else like me in the world, as far as I can tell. I am a one of creation, the product of a very specific and extreme set of parameters unlikely to be repeated in any other individual.
I get along good with my fellow nerds, especially, of course, Joe, Julian, and Felicity, who mean more to me than I could possibly convey.
And I am humbled by their willingness to put up with a great lumbering beast like myself. I know that they are not exactly immune to my electromagnetic field but, thank God, they stuck with me long enough to get used to it.
But even among my fellow nerds, I stick out. I am the oddest of ducks, and it’s hard for me to imagine that a tribe exists where I would feel at home.
I just want one where I can feel useful, at least.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.