Another thing that came up during yesterday’s therapy session is my intensity.

It is another facet of my struggle to understanf just what sort of effect I have on people. I have been lost in the cave of echoes for so long that I just don’t know what my true reflection even looks like any more.

I need to replace the false image I hated for so many years with something more balanced and true.

And part of that larger mission is my effort to make sense of my childhood. It is not news to anyone that I was a very diffifult child. All those brains and sensitivity, without the slightest clue how to be tactful and thus avoid biting the hand that feeds me. Willful and extremely stubborn, effortlessly indepedent of mind and will and hopelessly and patheticly dependent on my teachers for attention, extremely different yet desperate to be liked, to say that I was a handful would be a profound understatement,

I was an entire round of applause-ful.

What I realized yesterday is that I was not just a difficult kid, I was UNIQUELY difficult. In all regards, I was simply off the scale of what most non-specialy teachers could handle. I had the bad luck to be a four dimensional peg in a three diensional hole, and I cannot get too mad about the system just plain not being able to handle me.

Sure, in a perfect world, every school system would be able to handle any student, no matter how unique. But here in the real world, systems are designednbsp; to work for the largest number of people possible, and that is always the middle of the bell curve, not the outliers.

And I am an outlier amongst outliers.

From the point of the view of my teachers and family, I was very difficult to deal with, and very easy to ignore, Dealing with me meant fielding my way out of left field questions, dealing with my obvious kicked-dog neediness, and enduring the high wattage spotlight of my attention.

That last bit is what I mean by my intensity. The thing about being very bright is that you are hard on the eyes. Dealing with you is like looking directly at a lit lightbulb, especially for people of normal intelligence.

Whereas ignoring you not only spares people all that, but also incurs no penalty. It is not like by ignoring you, people have to deal with you acting out, or pestering for attention, or anything else.

And all it takes is the slightest hint of rejection, and I will go away and stop bothering you. It is the ultimate in convenience. A self-disposing child.

I was hard to take but easy to ignore.

Explains a lot, really.

See you tomorrow, folks.