Here’s the thing.

All my life, I have had this sense of power. A feeling that enormous latent energies lie within me and that I am a person of extraordinary gifts who could really have an impact on the world. My mind crackles and sizzles with the kind of energy that average people can barely even dream about. I’m also highly creative, a very nice person, and I have no problem letting other people shine.

In short, there’s a rela chance that I might be an awesome human being.

And that scares the hell out of me.

In in tonight’s entry, we’re going to try to figure out why.

On the surface it makes no sense. It’s like being born rich and being afraid of your own money, or having natural athletic gifts and hiding them from everyone.

I’m in a position most people would envy in terms of natural gifts. But for all the time I have felt that sense of power, I have feared it. That caused me to ignore the information that comes with this feeling of power, and when pressed to dismiss it as something that didn’t matter and/or didn’t count.

It’s like there is me, and there is It. I’m the sweet, funny, lovable nerd and It is some kind of terrifyingly brutal machine that works for me, but strictly under the table.

Scares the hell out of people just the same, though.

I am sure that at least part of it is a fear of the responsibility that comes with so much power. I have a strange relationship with responsibility – part of me welcomes it and part of me avoids it like it was radioactive mutant cancer.

And the level of responsibility implied by my gifts terrifies me. It gives me the feeling of being trapped in my mind’s gravity well about to be chocked  by the life a responsible person should have if they are gifted like me.

My god, it even implies that I should be doing something with my life. Fuck THAT.

That leads to what I feel might be a real issue here : the feeling that if I embrace this power of mine, it will tank me out of the warm comfortable socket of my life and rag me kicking and screaming into the light.

And despite all my talk about wanting to walk in the sun again, the thought of being pulled out of my comfortable little hidey hole and forced to account for myself scares the living daylights out of me.

I take great comfort in my social invisibility. At the same time, I constantly complain that nobody notices me.

What I’m saying is that I am a complicated guy.

As I have been contemplating this subject, the outline of a science fiction ish short story has formed in my mind. It would be about a world where the government is constantly looking for high IQ people in order to take them, by force if necessary, into government service. Our hero would be someone with a high IQ who hides it for fear of being detected and indoctrinated and forced out of his comfortable low-status life.

The story would be about the day he is finally detected.

And sure enough, he is pulled out of his life, away from his friends and co-workers and everything else he knows, has all his clothes and possessions taken away from him,. and is given things “more in according with your new station in life”.

So there he is, in a grey funk, miserable in his weird new clothes in this weird government room around all these weird new people who are loud and efficient and always on the go, in this place where everything happens too fast or not at all, and all he wants in the world is to go back to his life and hide forever.

This sets the scene for a conversation between our hero and someone from the government whose job it is to convince him to go along with the whole thing willingly rather than making them use more force on him.

Eventually, he would learn that his new life is not so bad and that there are plenty of government jobs where he can truly help people, which is something he has always wanted to due.

There. Now I don’t have to write the damn thing.

And maybe another aspect of my fear is that my power seems so much bigger than me. And with so much force at its disposal, it’s like being at the controls of a massive machine you have no idea how to operate yet one wrong move could end in unthinkable disaster for everybody.

I suppose there is a social aspect of it too. I already have trouble relating with people without hanging a sign that says “super genius” around my neck.

I think the talking  version of the Warner Brothers’ Coyote did that once.

Perhaps I am in a form of deep denial. Part of me stubbornly insists that I am not that different from others and I can live in their world and be both like them and with them.

But I am a giant in a world full of pygmies (my friends and family excluded, natch) and that is possibly what frightens me the most. The idea of myself as Gulliver in Lilliput, desperately trying not to step on anyone, chills me to the core.

And yet,. it’s the truth. I am not like them. I’m not like anybody, really. Maybe I would be better off accepting that I am an alien amongst humans rather than rather lamely trying to blend in with them.

It’s a hard problem to solve. Denying a fundamental truth about oneself is always a recipe for disaster. And yet I can’t imagine truly owning up to my power. When I think about it, I feel myself pulling even further away from people until I lose all contact with the reality outside my mind.

That is my ultimate nightmare : the slender cord of my contact with reality finally snapping and leaving me trapped in my own mind.

That’s worse than being buried alive.

Because being buried alive ends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.