Serious navel gazing time.

So I am chatting with some folks online, and holding forth on a fave topic, how badly I want to find someplace where all the gay intellectual types hang out so I can land me a smarty type boyfriend, when I say something along the lines of “I need someone who can keep up with me intellectually, and that’s a depressingly small percentage of the population. ”

OK, I recognize that this sounds kind of arrogant, if you look at it that way. I can see how someone might think I am claiming to be incredibly and phenomenally smart, and basically tooting my own horn in the paper-thin guise of complaining about my romantic prospects.

That’s not at all how I meant it, in any way, on any level. But, that’s how a bunch of people took it.

So now I have a bunch of people getting all offended and attacking me for being “egotistical” and “arrogant”, even though the very next thing I said after my first statement (because I realized how it sounded) was “Not that I am claiming to be the smartest guy in the world or anything. I’m just an intellectual. ”

But it was too late, people had already become offended by what they thought I meant, and were going to let me have it because I had somehow hurt their feelings by suggesting that I actually knew I was intelligent.

And this is a sore point for me, and has been since I was a kid.

See, for a great deal of my life, I felt like my intelligence was more of a burden than anything else. I was bored out of my mind most of the time in class. Teachers and administrators either treated it as an inconvenience that made their lives more difficult, or decided it was a license to ignore me, figuring if I didn’t need help learning, I didn’t need them at all.

Looking back, I can see the role I played in that, because I found the work very easy and did nothing to conceal that fact.

But why should someone have to hide their virtues anyhow? And that’s the nub of the issue with my argument in the chat. So I said I was intelligent. I never said “And you all are MORONS compared to me!”. I never even said “I am incredibly intelligent”. I just said I was a fairly intelligent person.

And it’s true, damn it. Why should I be made to feel guilty about a true statement that does not put anyone down? Why is it that I can’t say “I am fairly intelligent” without people taking it as a statement about them?

I firmly believe that people should be allowed to enjoy, or at least plainly state, their own virtues. To make someone feel ashamed of their strengths simply because said strengths might make someone else feel bad for lacking them seems to me to be horribly backwards and wrong.

What’s wrong with just letting people enjoy what they have, as long as they don’t use it as an excuse to put other people down or think themselves superior?

I’m a smart guy. It’s empirically true. I taught myself to read at the age of 2. I showed up at school already reading at a grade six level. I got good grades without even studying. Blah blah blah.

I don’t go around bragging all the time. I don’t go out of my way to make anyone feel stupid. I don’t consider myself better than everyone else because I am so darn smart. It’s not even necessarily the most important thing about me, although it is one of my primary assets.

So why should it be some kind of crime to just acknowledge the fact?

And the things people read into my single comment were astounding. That I was arrogant, that I thought I was better than everyone else, that I did this all the time, etc. and so on.

One guy even starting making personal attacks on me, completely ad hoc ad hominem, like he had to prove he was actually better than me despite my asserting that I was fairly intelligent.

Am I wrong to think that if you feel you have to attack somebody’s entire status and sense of worth just because they say they are intelligent, it’s you that has the problem?

I am sick and tired of this soul-destroying notion that we all have to pretend mediocrity just to keep from maybe making someone feel jealous or insecure. No wonder low self-esteem and depression are rampant. People are made to feel ashamed of even the good things about themselves.

Well to hell with that. I’m smart, I’m nice, I’m funny, and I see no reason to pretend different.

And I am sure you have wonderful virtues I would love to hear about too!