I have a really deep desire to prove to the world how brilliant I am.

I have had this desire for such a long time that I have no idea when it started. It might have started the day I surprised my babysitter by suddenly grasping, all at once, how to read.

Oh neat, I might have thought. Being smart gets me socially rewarded!

Or maybe it was the experience of being an overbright kid in an elementary school just plain not equipped to help me that did it. I was always craving challenge. The schoolwork was far too easy to me for me to get any satisfaction out of it.

I wanted a real challenge, a cure for the boredom and lack of stimulation. And I was desperately emotionally dependent on my teachers, and so while I can see now that I might have seemed a little ungrateful too them when I innocent asked questions they couldn’t answer or pointed out something I thought they had got wrong, I still needed their approval and so I quite possibly wanted to shine for them and get social approval that way.

I don’t know though. This feels more primal than that.

The thing is, I have had this desire to prove to the world how fucking amazing I am for so long that it has just faded into the background of my consciousness. It’s a given, a constant. So I have never really taken a good look at it.

When I thought of it at all, I would usually deflect direct contemplation of this burning need by saying something flippant to myself (or occasionally, others) along the lines of “well intelligence is all I’ve got, so it better be worth something. ”

I realize now how stupid that is. It is totally not answering the question of why I feel this burning need to prove I am really mentally amazing. It’s just a glib deflection.

It’s strange. On the one hand, I want the world to tell me how amazingly brilliant I am. And yet, as I have said before, I have also downplayed the benefit of my intelligence all my life because frankly, it has done me a lot more harm than good.

It made me isolated and unable to understand my peers as a child. It meant I was deadly bored all of the time in school. It’s never won me an award or a scholarship or anything. Nobody in my life ever valued it and I stopped getting praised for it before I was even out of Grade 3.

So for a long long time, I viewed it as more of a problem than a solution. It was like a debilitating illness, except that those generate sympathy and all being super-smart ever did for me was make people hate me.

Jealousy and resentment really suck. Nobody should be hated for who they are, even if part of being who they are makes other people feel jealous or inadequate. That has never been my intention and it is not my fault. I have never deliberately flaunted my intelligence to make someone else feel bad. That is just not in my character. I want everyone to get along and be happy.

But some people just can’t stand the idea that someone has it better than them and there’s nothing they can do about it, I guess. How very petty and sad.

I don’t hate people for having what I do not. I’m not built for that kind of jealousy.

So anyhow, it is only recently that I have realized, on both a mental and emotional level, that this big brain of mind can actually be an asset and that other people have used theirs to their great benefit.

In fact, other people have had their extraordinariness recognized by those in the position to help and guide them, who assured them of its value and moved them into advanced classes which actually challenged them.

Now those people, I am jealous of. Insanely jealous. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all it ever got me was trouble and pain. For those lucky other people, it was their ticket to success. Where was my benefactor? Where were the people who would recognize and nurture my worth? Why did I end up never really valuing it until, like, this year?

Like Calvin said, I know life isn’t fair, but why isn’t it ever unfair in my favour?

Of course, the answer is, it was unfair in my favour for my whole childhood. The schoolwork that I found so unchallenging was a serious struggle for a lot of my schoolmates. They had to work really hard to learn the things I absorbed effortlessly. They had to study their brains out in order to pass the tests I finished in minutes. They had to worry about their grades, and I just plain took mine for granted.

Now I grasp how big an advantage that was, and I am glad for the problems I never had.

But I still feel the need to prove to the world how brilliantly shiny my mind is. I am positive that I could do it, given the chance, but of course, you don’t just get given chances.

You have to do at least some of the work yourself.

And I am through asking myself “how” to do it. There’s a million ways to do it. I know lots of them. The problem is a million miles away from being a lack of knowledge.

It’s more about a lack of resolve and a lack of courage. My pathologically cautious depressive mind wants to be assured of success before even starting something. It’s looking to get the reward before the effort, or at least, waiting for some sort of sign to tell me which way to go.

But that’s not how it works. You have to take risks. That is why it is so important to choose a path where you will be doing something you find intrinsically rewarding.

That way, work is play, and anything else you get out of it is a bonus.

I like writing comedy.

Maybe I should do that more.