Well, I wrung my ears out onto the page about how depressed I was last night, so tonight must be the one where I talk about how IDGAF^[1] any more and how everyone {2} }needs to GTFO of my head and BTFO^[3] because I seriously don’t give a shit any more, nothing matters anyway, and ten years after I die everyone will have forgotten me and all I have done, so why bother.

Well, that last bit is a bit of a stretch. But it’s how I feel, now what I believe.

I am so sick and tired of living in a state of eternal internal pressure from constantly being at war with myself. I should know by now that it is futile to try to force myself into what I think I should be instead of working with who I really am.

But I have been too long at war, and peace seems like an impossible dream, like when you dream you can fly like Superman.

I can’t imagine what it would be like if this war between my will and my self ended. These massive conflicts are what generates my ideas, insights, and so on. They are the wellsprings of my creativity.

If I did not have these pressures constantly compacting the content of my mind, I might not be the creative whiz I am today.

Worse, I might actually be, you know….

Fru (in a hushed tone) : …normal.

When you have been a freak of nature on many levels for your entire life, being normal is like a death sentence, in that you’d rather die.

Why? Because the only way to deal with being different than everyone else is to convince yourself that, on some level at least, you are the good kind of different.

After all, being superior to everyone else is a form of being different. A star athlete is different than everyone else because of their superior talents. Nobody gives them shit for being different.

Of course, they had people actively looking for people like them. If the world was fair, there would be the same thing for us smart types and I would have been “discovered” and pointed to scholarships and all those good things at an early age.

Instead, my advanced intellect (and the social weirdness it produced) : meant two things : I was bored in class and everyone hated me.

The kids. The teachers. The staff. The principle. Everyone.

Well not my family, of course. They would have had to notice me first.

Not that I’m bitter (NTIB).

Anyhow, this need to believe you are the good kind of different is what drives so many of us gifted types into elitism. It must be a great comfort to believe that you are persecuted entirely because of your superiority and the people who shun you are the ones who are bad and wrong, not you.

But as patient readers know, I am not capable of that kind of self-delusion. I very clearly see why I was such a social pariah now.

It wasn’t my fault, but I get why it happened.

And even if I was capable of that level of bullshitting myself, I still could not embrace intellectual elitism because it disgusts me. I find it wholly repugnant and even the thought of putting myself above others like that makes me queasy.

That’s probably why I react so strongly to intellectual elitism in others. It really pisses me off, far more than it should – I mean, whatever you need to do to cope is your business – and I find myself driven to counter it and bring people back down to Earth.

Not my job, I know, and not always a good thing either. All I can say in my defense is that I realized what a nightmarish dead end intellectual elitism was at an early age and sincerely want to show people a way out of the trap.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a person is help them get over themselves. That does not mean shattering their self-worth or grinding them into the dirt to make yourself look better.

It means giving them the jolt they need to bring them back to reality, get a real good look at what they have been doing, and ask themselves if that’s truly what they want to be doing or is it just a coping strategy that got stuck in a loop.

Sometimes, the short sharp shock is the only way to break out of that loop.

I can sort of tiptoe up to the outer border of intellectual elitism and convince myself that my advanced mind is part of why I don’t get along with others and that I truly am, like,  really, really, really smart, but that’s as far as it goes.

In my life, being intellectually gifted has cause me far, far more problems than it has ever solved. I don’t begrudge my gifts for that and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

Except, like, a billion dollars. I’m not made of stone, after all.

But as a basis for a feeling of superiority over others, they make for sandy shifting ground. One might as well feel superior for having a hunchback or being blind.

Hopefully, some day, I will find a position that lets me view my superbrain as something valuable instead of seeing it as a liability. I know, intellectually (ha) that I have vast gifts that many people would give their favorite appendages to have, and I am actually quite lucky to be that way.

But until it actually does me some good, the jury is still out in the trial of Good Thing Versus Bad Thing re : being very smart.

It doesn’t really make a difference if you are intellectually gifted if you are emotionally crippled from decades of isolation.

In that case, you are not a miracle worker with astounding abilities.

You’re just another wizard on welfare.

But, you know. NTIB.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[2]] And by “everyone” I really mean “all the voices in my head”. [[2]]