Time to go to that most unstable and dangerous of places, the ego of a brainy depressive.

All my life, people have told me how smart I am. And not necessarily people who have seen me do or heard me say something really intelligent.

In fact, sometimes it’s people who have only seen me fuck up and be pathetic and lame.

Like a therapist who ran a group therapy group I was in. All she’d seen me do was oscillate between being too shy to say much and spilling as much of my guts out as I could manage. She’d never seen me in my element.

Back then, I didn’t think I had one.

And yet she commented more than once about how I am obviously really intelligent. ^[1]

And that makes me wonder : what, exactly, makes me so obviously intelligent, even to people who have zero evidence of it? What is this vibe I put out?

I mean, it’s certainly true that I want people to think I am brilliant. I don’t know if that’s a fundamental quality of my character or something that comes from being a broken person who invests their very small and fragile amount of self-worth in the thing he is positive he has, namely intellect. But it’s always been so.

But I also want people to think I am funny, lovable, and a sexy, sexy beast, and that has not always worked out in my life. So it can’t just be desire.

I feel like there must be some sort of electricity to me that comes out in the look in my eyes and how I carry myself and so on. Some cluster of of nonverbal cues adds up to “really smart” in people’s minds, and I worry that sometimes, it intimidates people, or worse, makes them feel stupid and that I think they are stupid.

Now, full disclosure, I am keenly aware that I am smarter than most of the population. But that’s how I see it. Not that people without my gifts are stupid. They’re normal. I am the one who is the outlier.

So I don’t look down on people for having average intelligence. In fact, I don’t look down on people at all, if I can help it. Like I have said before in this space, I require equality. I am too stubbornly independent to look up to people in an authoritarian way and I am too kindhearted to look down on them. I want to relate to people on their own level.

Anything else is kinda gross to me.

But I digress.

This electricity of mine is a mystery to me. I can deduce that I have it, but it’s not something I know how to control and use. Not yet, anyhow.

In fact, it’s clear to me that I have never learned to turn it off, and how I am driven to try to prove how smart I am in literally every single social interaction. I don’t think I do it in a dickish way, like some others of my disposition do. But it’s still not good.

It is, in fact, childish. Like I am still a little kid eager for attention and desperate to get back that moment in time when everyone was wowed by how precociously intelligent I was and I got a lot of attention and affirmation just for that,.

Thinking about my childhood (so what else is new), in my preschool years (of course), my mother always praised me when I did something smart. From a super early age, learning and thinking and such were the ways I got my mother’s approval.

Like I have said before, my mother did a wonderful job of stimulating my young mind and guiding my intellectual growth. And it must have been wonderful for a teacher like her to see me flourish so rapidly. I think that must be what channeled me into the intellectual side of things as opposed to being a somewhat more rounded person.

Because my mother didn’t teach me any social skills. She didn’t have them either. She didn’t teach me complex motor skills for the same reason. She gave me what she had, which was wonderful things like intelligence, curiosity, a love of books, and a great and all encompassing compassion and love for all the critters of the world.

But with it came her shyness, and her lack of the ability to make/have friends, and a few other things I could do without. That, coupled with the fact that in the same year my two best friends went off to elementary school and I was opted out of kindergarten, and the fact that my siblings and I were on different planets, and I had a very poor social starting position when I went to school the next year.

Add in the natural isolating factor of high IQ, and it’s no wonder I never fit in.

It honestly never occurred to me that I would have to change in order to fit in. Maybe some vital social instinct had never been activated, I don’t know. Nobody was asking me to change at home. I never learned how to adapt.

And part of me still stubbornly refuses to act dumber than I am. It’s a profoundly immature attitude and one I hope to overcome some day because it severely impairs my ability to get the sort of social connection I so desperately want.

Why should I think that it’s the world that has to bend, not me?

What makes me so special?

Why can’t I compromise on this one important thing?

Maybe I am still trying to please my mother.

If so…. I think I need to create an entirely new life strategy. Start from scratch, learn to value different things.

Or maybe I just need to ease up on myself a little.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.