Let’s take another kick at this one.
I have towered above others in many categories for my entire life, and I have never been comfortable with it.
The main example, of course, is towering over others intellectually. I am not bragging when I say that I am way, way smarter than most people.
It’s simply a statement of fact.
And while this conveys many benefits – like, for example, never having sweated a test or assignment in my life – it also comes with a lot of problems that I have never really addressed or even wrapped my oversized brain around.
Because as patient readers know, I don’t want to tower above people. I want to be with people, on their level, so I can relate with them. Understand them. Get where they are coming from. Add their perspective on my own.
But I need to be realistic about how much of a possibility that is. No matter how empathic and understanding I am, I am still a giant among pygmies, and a certain lack of connection and understanding is inevitable.
And it hurts. It really does. It’s cold up here, and the air is so thin. I look into the warm safe world that most people live in and I feel a great and terrible longing for it, I wish with all my being that I could join that warm and wonderful world.
But I can’t. I don’t fit. I’d be better off looking for a home fit for a giant, but I don’t know if such a thing even exists, let alone how to find it.
But something has to give. I’ve lived this hunched over life for far too long. It’s time I straighten up and stand proud of my gifts, and to hell with people who can’t handle the weird and wondrous wizard that I am.
Part of that, I think, will be learning to somehow project who and what I am, without illusion or subterfuge, in such a way that it gives people some place to start when it comes to dealing with me.
I am not even sure what that means yet, but I think it has something to do with making peace with the fact that I can be opaque and enigmatic to some people, and that there is only so much I can do about that and past that point, people are just going to have to deal with it.
This, in turn, is going to require certain modulations of the way I deal with people. These involve giving myself a certain amount of permission to be aloof, detached, and even superior, instead of trying to blend in with the pygmies.
I suppose it really boils down to the advice central to life in an individualistic society :
Just be yourself.
It sounds so simple but it can be so incredibly hard to do. Especially for those of us whose fluid sense of self makes it so much easier to be someone else.
Or even nobody in particular. A cipher. A mystery.
Or maybe some kind of alien.
On being an alien
It’s not so bad, if you just own up to it and stop trying to be a human.
I’m working on it.
The bitter, bracing truth is that it is impossible for me to be like others. And I think I have always known that intellectually, but I have fiercely resisted and denied it emotionally.
There is no possibility of my becoming just like everyone else. There is no series of moves I could possibly make to achieve that outcome. It’s a null set, a non-starter.
Because even if I could wipe depression from my mind completely and forever, I would still be an alien because I would still be hyperintelligent and imperfectly socialized and temperamentally devoted to being myself with neither compromise or conformity.
I couldn’t conform even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.
So it’s time for me to fess up and own it : I am a very weird dude and there’s nothing I can do to change that so I might as well stop hating myself for being hard to reach and focus instead on being the best very weird dude I can be.
Sure, I’m an alien. Or a robot. But that doesn’t mean I can’t connect with you fleshy Earth creatures in my own alien robot way.
And that starts with throwing away the cloak of dissembling and illusion and being myself for a change,. Let the world see me as I am, with no ambiguity to hide in, no shame to turn me away from the light, and no rabbit holes for me to bolt down the moment I get scared.
Total exposure, in other words. Emotional nudism. Sentencing myself to be exposed before my peers.
TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
I’d link the video but I already linked it quite recently.
And the thing is, when that wall comes down, the sunlight can get in. The emotional warmth I need to badly can make it through the ice and melt my heart. Those deep dark shadows with their shameful hiding and life-destroying chill are chased away, because I don’t need them any more.
You can’t connect with others if you are not being yourself. It’s like trying to collect your Nobel Prize while operating under a pseudonym. You can’t send s surrogate and expect that to connect with others for you.
True connection can only happen between individuals. Not ghosts, or shadows, or doppelgangers, or false twins, or holograms, or any other false self – only the true self can connect with the rest of humanity, and all those false selves have to go.
Maybe that’s the problem with being Fruvous some of the time. He’s a version of myself as I would like to be, not the real me.
A mask like all the others, albeit the best one I have ever made.
Maybe I need to spend more time just being Michael John Bertrand for a while.
It’s a terrifying thought, but I’m going to be him whether I like it or not.
Might as well get used to the idea.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.