I feel a real sense of deep churn today, like everything in me is spinning in a great, slow whirlpool. The speed in terms of RPM is slow, but the angular velocity is enormous because of the sheer mass involved.

And who knows what flotsam and jetsam will be sucked up from the depths and tossed past the horizon by the sheer centripetal force of it all?

Accompanying this state of churn is a deep brooding, nameless and wordless but profound. And that’s a good thing, this brooding. I am pro-brooding, as I have said before. Brooding lets you slowly burn off repressed emotions like anger and fear without a big emotional apotheosis like the one I had recently.

Better to brood than explode, am I right?

Now, about last Thursday’s therapy session. Stuff came up. Deep stuff. Powerful stuff. Stuff I would rather not have dealt with, which, of course, means it’s the exact kind of stuff I need to deal with and that I want to deal with, but that I would have a hard time dealing with without a therapist there to metaphorically hold my hand and take me through it.

So it was a really excellent session all around.

First we talked about anger, and how I find it really hard to deal with or even look at all the deep frozen rage I have buried deep within the permafrost of my soul.

And it always devolves to the same old thing : I am so uncomfortable, nay, terrified to deal with all that anger because it feels like if I tap into it even a little, it will, at best, merely blow my psyche into tiny pieces, or at worst, turn me into an angry, bitter, sarcastic, callous, brutal, dismissive, judgmental asshole who everybody quite rightfully hates.

I know that sounds ridiculous to people who know me, because that would basically be a total personality inversion on my part, but there is a very dark and angry side of me that I keep locked up tighter than a twelve year old back injury, and I am afraid to let it out.

Even though I know that it, too, is a part of me, and the secret to my recovery is in finding and dealing with all the pieces of my scattered and shattered soul and putting them back together, and that being unable to accept a part of yourself is the opposite of that…. still, I can’t do it.

Well, knowing what you should do does not instantly confer the ability to do it, and when you have the illness called depression like I do, what you can and cannot do is a far, far more complex question than merely what it is physically possible to do right now.

So we started off, my therapist and I, talking about anger, but then somehow we transitioned to talking about arrogance and intelligence instead. I am not sure how the subject changed, and I am pretty sure I did not deliberately switch off anger to avoid talking about it, but you never know.

My mind is so subtle and devious that even I don’t always know what it’s up to.

Anyhow. What we ended up talking about is my knowledge from an early age that I was extremely bright, and how I never really truly integrated that knowledge into my ego.

After all, having an IQ of 161 is something to be proud of, or at least, so it would seem to people who do not have it. Means I am special(special!). So special(special!). A lot of people would think being so damned smart was a wonderful thing.

And yet, I don’t think I ever thought of it that way. Before I went to school, it didn’t really make much difference in my life apart from occasional adult praise (and fear), and after I went to school it insure I always got good grades but it came so easily to me that I never really valued it.

It is really hard to value that which comes easily, even if others would think it highly valuable and might work very hard to get it. And that’s as true of intelligence as it is of, say, natural beauty or athletic ability or artistic ability.

If it’s easy, it must not be worth much. It’s the labour theory of value all over again.

And for a lot of my childhood, it seemed like more of a curse than a blessing because I took the benefits for granted to such a degree that they became invisible to me and all I could see were the downsides, like it isolating me from my peers (I had nothing in common with them but age) and insuring that I was frequently extremely bored and completely unchallenged in school.

But there is another, deeper, and more important layer to this question, and it relates to elitism. The obvious route for someone who is bullied and harassed by and thus isolated from his peers by his intelligence is to become an intellectual, elitist snob who declares everyone who is not as bright as he to be idiots, unworthy of consideration, let alone association.

It’s a path lots of others in my position took, and who knows. Maybe if the teachers and administers had been more supportive of me and protected me, that is how I would have turned out.

But I didn’t go that way, and I wonder why. It would have provided some much needed ego defense and gone a long way towards helping me cope with life. So why not?

And the best that I can come up with is, because that would take me even further away from people. I want to be close to people, to feel their warmth, to interact with them. Elitism would not solve the problem of isolation for me, it would only make it worse. I just cannot imagine putting up that kind of barrier between me and others.

The thought of it makes me feel stifled.

Add to that the fact that elitist are assholes and I do not want to be that kind of person, you can see why I took the much tougher path of egalitarianism instead.

And I suppose that was the beginning of my passionate devotion to deep humanism as well.

This is all noble and wonderful, of course, but it does mean that I went too far in the other direction. There must be some sort of middle ground between elitism and discounting your gifts entirely.

And perhaps I have been, to a certain extent, a victim of my own ruthless pragmatism. If results are all that matters, then my intelligence sucks, because all it has resulted in is mildly clever conversation.

And really, this is just the tip of the negative self-worth iceberg. I have all kinds of assets and gifts that I have always discounted and which I am actually afraid to really acknowledge on an emotional, personal level.

So what the heck am I afraid of? Becoming an egotistical dick?

Or is it just… fear of the unknown?