And I never have.

I was born with a very powerful brain. This brain was further encouraged in its growth by by parents. By the time I went to elementary school (bypassing kindergarten), I towered over my peers on the intellectual plane.

A different sort of person, I suppose, would have taken that advantage and run with it. They would have become a type A overachiever, using their intellectual advantage to get the highest possible grades as part of a grand plan to soar to the highest heights of intellect and status by getting scholarships to all the best schools and meeting the right kind of people and blah blah blah, the usual yuppie life cycle.

But I’m not like that. I honestly do not want to feel superior to others. I want to connect with people, and superiority (and/pr inferiority) precludes that. I am only comfortable in a position of equality. Anything else weirds me out.

And it honestly never occurred to me to work hard to get the best possible grades. I got high marks without even studying. It seemed to me that to sacrifice my carefree ways in order to buckle down and raise my grades by five percentage points was an investment with insufficient returns.

Of course, I see the benefits now. But school was always so easy for me that I never learned to take it seriously.

It’s not like there were immediate rewards for higher grades. My parents wouldn’t have noticed and the school would not have really cared. So my marks went from “very good” to “great”. Big frigging deal!

As a result, I have never really known what to do with this big intellect of mine. Like I have said before in this space, it has just always been there. It never felt like a powerful advantage to me. I never stopped to think “You know, it’s awesome that I don’t have to study or work hard in school. ”

If anything, it felt like a disadvantage. Even in elementary school, I grasped that it was a big part of what separated me from my peers. And even more obviously, it led to me being staggeringly bored in class most of the time.

Bored, and often depressed. Hmmm. Tag that thought. It seems important. I will have to come back to it in a different post.

Because of this disconnect from my intellect, and my social isolation, I never learned the vital lesson of how to play with others. Specifically, I never learned how to moderate the output of my intellect in order to compensate for the power differential between myself and others.

Consequently, dealing with me could be a little like playing tag with the Hulk. In my innocent attempts to just do what others do, I ended up hurting or at the very least bewildering a lot of people. When you give someone a playful punch on the shoulder and they respond by hitting you so hard it bounces your skull off two walls, you kind of don’t want to play with them any more, even if they have no idea what they just did.

Actually, especially if they have no idea what they just did.

“In the last two weeks, Tsu Zei, ” said the Master, “you have cracked the ribs of three students, dislocated the shoulders of two others, and insured that poor Li Tao will not be able to walk for several weeks. ”
“But Master!” protested Tsu Zei, “I’m just doing what all the other students do!”

Of course, I was not trying to hurt or confuse anybody. I was trying to get along with them. It wasn’t my fault that I was the biggest and the strongest, mentally speaking. I wanted to have friends and be gentle with everyone and be happy.

But no matter how pure his intentions, the giant just can’t pretend to be a pygmy and hope to blend in.

I think that is the dark side of my attempts at egalitarianism. By not socially acknowledging my intellect and holding myself to an ideal of equality, my motive was not purely an attempt to do the right thing.

It also neatly sidestepped any need to really take responsibility for the elephant in the room. I could maintain my posture of innocence and not have to accept the burden of greater responsibility that comes with greater power.

But there is only so many times that big elephant can innocently crush your sofa before “sorry!” just doesn’t cut it any more.

Increasingly, I see my innocent attitude as less of an artifact of lofty ideals and more as a refusal to grow up and acknowledge that I can’t play by the same rules as everyone else.

It’s like the classic Superman plotline where a teenaged Clark Kent joins his high school football team and, of course, does amazingly well because he’s fucking Superman.

After the Big Game, he goes home, happy to be the hero of the game and so on, to find Pa Kent waiting there to talk with him and explain that it was not fair at all for Superman to play football against regular humans, and that Clark’s victory was meaningless because of that.

It would be like a grown man crowing over beating a small child at arm-wrestling.

Now if Clark was an asshole, he could have said “Hey, I played the game by the same rules as everyone else. I just happen to be awesome at it. Why should I hold back and not get the same rewards as any other star athlete? How can that be fair?”

And he would be right. It’s not fair. By pure chance, he ended up the guy with the superpowers. Like Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben said, with that great power came great responsibility, far greater than most people are asked to bear.

And that’s not fair.

But that’s the reality of the situation, and the thing is, responsibility does not ask permission. If you have the power, you have the responsibility. Period.

And it’s up to me to figure out what that means for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.