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I'm smart. I've always been smart. And by this I mean academically - I pick up on concepts easily, ace tests without studying, write A papers in the two hours before they're due. I don't say this to sound pretentious or anything, it's just the way it is. And I'm pretty sure that most of you guys are the same way, because I tend to make friends with smart people.
I had this idea that university would be different from high school, because the people who were there would want to be there, they would be clever and well-read and intelligent, and oh the horrible disappointment when that turned out to be wrong. There were more smart kids in college; but most of my classmates were just as dumb and annoying as they'd been in high school.
I think that's why I dropped out the first time. I mean, what was the point? Maybe if I was out in the working world, surrounded by adults, it would be better. Of course, this didn't happen either. I worked a lot of secretarial jobs where I was smarter than my co-workers and my bosses; I added extra duties to my job just so I would have something to do; I ate lunch alone, because I didn't want to talk about boyfriends and sitcoms and children like my co-workers. Most of these people were just as boring and stupid as the people I'd known in school. When I was eight and ten and twelve, adults were smart, because they knew at least as much as I did - but I learned more and grew up and they didn't change.
Eventually I went back to school, attended for a while, dropped out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I failed classes, not because I couldn't do the work, but because I couldn't be bothered. I didn't see the point. And on some level I was afraid of finishing my degree, because then what?
There are things that no one ever teaches you when you're "the smart kid." About the drawbacks.
Most everybody knows about the external drawbacks - the constant rejection from other kids (teasing, bullying, violence, being ostracized for being too weird); pressure from parents and teachers to perform up to standard.
But most of the issues with being smart are internal. I am my own worst critic, I give myself impossible standards, I have to sit here being absolutely bored to tears while a teacher explains what seems to me to be a blindingly obvious concept for the third time to my classmates.
Eventually I think every single smart kid hits their academic Waterloo, and flails, and fails, and rips themselves up over it, and has no idea what to do. Because if everything comes easy, you don't know how to study, you don't know how to "apply yourself" to learn anything, and everybody else in the world looks at you and goes "WTF is your problem?" because they just have no damned clue what it feels like. And it doesn't matter if everybody else has to work harder for everything, struggle is struggle and pain is pain when it comes down to it. I was actually talking about this exact thing with someone else the other day, because he's taking a subject that he just doesn't understand and he has no idea how to learn something because he's never had to try.
And what it is is frustrating. Frustrating for someone who is so often frustrated by everything in the world (if nothing else, by how damned slow everyone else is, Jesus Christ, are you people stupid, how do you not grasp this obviously simple concept? You must be stupid). My Waterloo was the times tables. I couldn't memorize them. Couldn't. Tried, and tried, and cried and screamed and couldn't do it, and my parents were convinced that I was being lazy or obstinate because I was so smart that it never occurred to them that maybe my brain didn't work with numbers, at all, ever. I did arithmetic on my fingers until I was in my twenties, and the only reason I managed to memorize my times tables is because my dad found a tape with them set to music and memorized that.
And then there's this crushing fear of failure, and the urge to just... blow it up, because there's no way you could ever be that good, as good as they expect you to be, more, as good as you expect you to be, there is no way you could ever live up to your own expectations because you expect you to be perfect. God, do I know this one. So many things started and not finished because if I didn't finish them no one can tell me that it wasn't good enough. Hell, I've started writing livejournal comments, got distracted or bored or too intimidated by the idea of sounding stupid in front of a community of readers, and just erased them. I told myself I wasn't going to get up until I finished this post because if I stopped I'd never get through it and it was fucking well important.
One day I stumbled across the descriptor "failed perfectionist," and yeah, it totally sounded like me. This idea that if you never finish anything, it's not a failure. If you procrastinate something until the last minute, it won't matter if you don't do well on it, because obviously if you had more time to do it, you could have done better (which leads to that vicious cycle in which you discover that you can produce an A-quality essay in an hour so why bother taking any more time than that?). And revising something is boring, and completing a novel is boring, because once you've figured out where the story ends, who cares if anyone else can read it? You know how it ends, and nobody else really cares, because nobody else has to know it exists. Between the frustration and the low tolerance for boredom and the fear of failure, you never get anything done.
In November I wrote a novel. It's a pretty good novel and the people who were reading it enjoyed it, and if I hadn't had that feedback and the encouragement from Jack I would've stopped 8,000 words from the end in the last week of November because that was when it got hard and tedious and I wanted to cry every time I sat down. Yelling at myself did nothing but make me more frustrated. What actually did work for me (and God I felt like a stupid little kid for it) was rewarding myself. I wrote for 15 minutes (timed!) and then took a break. I hung out in the writingsprints chat room, where they do that too, and I had an external force making me start after my break. I finished the chapter and walked around the room. I hit x goal and went for ice cream. For me, since everything had to be easy for me to want to do it, I had to find ways to make it easy and fun or at least bearable.
So what I really had to do was start from something (you're smart and things are easy for you) and sort of turn it into a disability, something I needed to compensate for. Like - some people learn from lectures, some people learn by reading, some people learn by doing, and if you have one of those learning styles and find yourself in a situation where you have to learn something in a different learning style, you have to compensate. In order to finish something, it has to be easy and fun. How do I make this tedious task easy and fun? Well, I can break it into pieces.... Etc. I also have to keep reminding myself that I am my own worst critic and everyone ever will think this is better than I do. Everyone likes me better than I like myself. Maybe they'd like me less if they saw inside my head but they don't and they never will that is enough.
And thinking about all this, and having this conversation and similar ones with several friends at the same time, I've come to the conclusion that what we maybe need is a community (livejournal, dreamwidth, in-person, on AIM, hybrid sort of community, ideally) where the smart kids who never did as well as they were told they should, who "Never Lived Up To Their Potential," and GOD do I hate that phrase, can get together and help each other. Share their coping mechanisms and their breakdowns and remind each other that it doesn't matter if you don't have a PhD and a six-figure income, you can be happy anyway.
Because none of us have the first damned clue how to cope with being smarter than everyone else; nobody teaches you how to do that, and nobody understands when you're struggling with it - and I've figured out some ways to make myself work, and I want to share them, and I'm sure other people have too, and that way we don't have to totally reinvent the wheel individually and separately. I want a place where I can go where people will say to me, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY SMART FAILURE OUT THERE. In fact, honey, you're not a fucking failure at all.
What do you guys think?
I deliberately left this unlocked. If you know other people like this, feel free to invite them in. If we get a bunch of smart kids together, I'm sure we can figure out something awesome to do.
I had this idea that university would be different from high school, because the people who were there would want to be there, they would be clever and well-read and intelligent, and oh the horrible disappointment when that turned out to be wrong. There were more smart kids in college; but most of my classmates were just as dumb and annoying as they'd been in high school.
I think that's why I dropped out the first time. I mean, what was the point? Maybe if I was out in the working world, surrounded by adults, it would be better. Of course, this didn't happen either. I worked a lot of secretarial jobs where I was smarter than my co-workers and my bosses; I added extra duties to my job just so I would have something to do; I ate lunch alone, because I didn't want to talk about boyfriends and sitcoms and children like my co-workers. Most of these people were just as boring and stupid as the people I'd known in school. When I was eight and ten and twelve, adults were smart, because they knew at least as much as I did - but I learned more and grew up and they didn't change.
Eventually I went back to school, attended for a while, dropped out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I failed classes, not because I couldn't do the work, but because I couldn't be bothered. I didn't see the point. And on some level I was afraid of finishing my degree, because then what?
There are things that no one ever teaches you when you're "the smart kid." About the drawbacks.
Most everybody knows about the external drawbacks - the constant rejection from other kids (teasing, bullying, violence, being ostracized for being too weird); pressure from parents and teachers to perform up to standard.
But most of the issues with being smart are internal. I am my own worst critic, I give myself impossible standards, I have to sit here being absolutely bored to tears while a teacher explains what seems to me to be a blindingly obvious concept for the third time to my classmates.
Eventually I think every single smart kid hits their academic Waterloo, and flails, and fails, and rips themselves up over it, and has no idea what to do. Because if everything comes easy, you don't know how to study, you don't know how to "apply yourself" to learn anything, and everybody else in the world looks at you and goes "WTF is your problem?" because they just have no damned clue what it feels like. And it doesn't matter if everybody else has to work harder for everything, struggle is struggle and pain is pain when it comes down to it. I was actually talking about this exact thing with someone else the other day, because he's taking a subject that he just doesn't understand and he has no idea how to learn something because he's never had to try.
And what it is is frustrating. Frustrating for someone who is so often frustrated by everything in the world (if nothing else, by how damned slow everyone else is, Jesus Christ, are you people stupid, how do you not grasp this obviously simple concept? You must be stupid). My Waterloo was the times tables. I couldn't memorize them. Couldn't. Tried, and tried, and cried and screamed and couldn't do it, and my parents were convinced that I was being lazy or obstinate because I was so smart that it never occurred to them that maybe my brain didn't work with numbers, at all, ever. I did arithmetic on my fingers until I was in my twenties, and the only reason I managed to memorize my times tables is because my dad found a tape with them set to music and memorized that.
And then there's this crushing fear of failure, and the urge to just... blow it up, because there's no way you could ever be that good, as good as they expect you to be, more, as good as you expect you to be, there is no way you could ever live up to your own expectations because you expect you to be perfect. God, do I know this one. So many things started and not finished because if I didn't finish them no one can tell me that it wasn't good enough. Hell, I've started writing livejournal comments, got distracted or bored or too intimidated by the idea of sounding stupid in front of a community of readers, and just erased them. I told myself I wasn't going to get up until I finished this post because if I stopped I'd never get through it and it was fucking well important.
One day I stumbled across the descriptor "failed perfectionist," and yeah, it totally sounded like me. This idea that if you never finish anything, it's not a failure. If you procrastinate something until the last minute, it won't matter if you don't do well on it, because obviously if you had more time to do it, you could have done better (which leads to that vicious cycle in which you discover that you can produce an A-quality essay in an hour so why bother taking any more time than that?). And revising something is boring, and completing a novel is boring, because once you've figured out where the story ends, who cares if anyone else can read it? You know how it ends, and nobody else really cares, because nobody else has to know it exists. Between the frustration and the low tolerance for boredom and the fear of failure, you never get anything done.
In November I wrote a novel. It's a pretty good novel and the people who were reading it enjoyed it, and if I hadn't had that feedback and the encouragement from Jack I would've stopped 8,000 words from the end in the last week of November because that was when it got hard and tedious and I wanted to cry every time I sat down. Yelling at myself did nothing but make me more frustrated. What actually did work for me (and God I felt like a stupid little kid for it) was rewarding myself. I wrote for 15 minutes (timed!) and then took a break. I hung out in the writingsprints chat room, where they do that too, and I had an external force making me start after my break. I finished the chapter and walked around the room. I hit x goal and went for ice cream. For me, since everything had to be easy for me to want to do it, I had to find ways to make it easy and fun or at least bearable.
So what I really had to do was start from something (you're smart and things are easy for you) and sort of turn it into a disability, something I needed to compensate for. Like - some people learn from lectures, some people learn by reading, some people learn by doing, and if you have one of those learning styles and find yourself in a situation where you have to learn something in a different learning style, you have to compensate. In order to finish something, it has to be easy and fun. How do I make this tedious task easy and fun? Well, I can break it into pieces.... Etc. I also have to keep reminding myself that I am my own worst critic and everyone ever will think this is better than I do. Everyone likes me better than I like myself. Maybe they'd like me less if they saw inside my head but they don't and they never will that is enough.
And thinking about all this, and having this conversation and similar ones with several friends at the same time, I've come to the conclusion that what we maybe need is a community (livejournal, dreamwidth, in-person, on AIM, hybrid sort of community, ideally) where the smart kids who never did as well as they were told they should, who "Never Lived Up To Their Potential," and GOD do I hate that phrase, can get together and help each other. Share their coping mechanisms and their breakdowns and remind each other that it doesn't matter if you don't have a PhD and a six-figure income, you can be happy anyway.
Because none of us have the first damned clue how to cope with being smarter than everyone else; nobody teaches you how to do that, and nobody understands when you're struggling with it - and I've figured out some ways to make myself work, and I want to share them, and I'm sure other people have too, and that way we don't have to totally reinvent the wheel individually and separately. I want a place where I can go where people will say to me, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY SMART FAILURE OUT THERE. In fact, honey, you're not a fucking failure at all.
What do you guys think?
I deliberately left this unlocked. If you know other people like this, feel free to invite them in. If we get a bunch of smart kids together, I'm sure we can figure out something awesome to do.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 02:22 pm (UTC)From:And the internal critic rises to like Gojira form the fucking SEA when we don't get something.
I hear you on the times tables, too. My dad wrote me a simple little program on our old cassette-data-readin' commodore to teach me the dang things (he was awesome in so many ways but then he'd turn around and freak and freak and freak if I did poorly).
And randomly - have you ever had someone up and decide that you couldn't have been bullied? I've honestly had people go 'oh but that doesn't really happen right you must be exaggerating' or they claim that bullying is no big deal - um, yes it is. Being slugged in the back by a little sociopath is a big deal. For some strange reason people REALLY REALLY LIKE to make believe that I can't possibly have dealt with anything beyond cottonballs, when n reality I learned to hide in bathroom stalls by standing up on the little tank pipe so the creepy girls couldn't see my feet under the stall door...
Anyway, yeah. I went to an art university (now, watch someone come along and say I'm putting on airs for mentioning this - they have before, and they know who they are, too, and they still owe me an apology I will never get) and I was amazed at the high school hipsterism persisting. Like - guys, you are being taught that the shit you are HURR HRURRing over is real, will you grow up?
That's another thing they don't warn you about. Sometimes because you're seeking more knowledge you end up more emotionally - something than your peers. You see things that affect you and you have no vocabulary, mental or verbal, for what the fuck is going on. You put two and two together and people will fall all over themselves trying to convince themselves you didn't because OH HORRORS AND JEEBUS CHRIST if you did that it means their stupidity had an affect they didn't anticipate and onward come the vapours.
Parents are proud of smart kids when they're harmless. I wasn't, so sometimes the pride was abruptly absent. I was a cranky 'why why why why' kid with attention deficit disorder (untreated until I hit 26) and associated oppositional defiant crabby. When you're a 'good kid' they love you. When you're the object of pride it's great. But if you hit a bump in the road - bullying, difficulty with a concept, etc. - you are on your own so very very quickly.
Yes, o ye skeptics, THIS DID HAPPEN TO ME. It don't matter how much you cry and scream that I was never hurt omgomgomgomg. I was. Most of us are walking wounded. And if you have trouble with that concept, skeptics, your emotional immaturity and uselessness is not my problem.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 03:48 pm (UTC)From:And then in seventh grade, the "popular" kids thought it would be fun to tease me about it by convincing me to say the "Sally sells seashells" tongue twister, and then laughing and repeating it over and over in exaggerated lisps.
I wasn't the good kid from about third grade onward, because I was miserable. I had no friends, and my parents thought I was lying about how much I was trying to make friends. I hated school even though my teachers were really nice, because it was so boring, and by sixth grade I just sort of... gave up. And then I got mocked and ridiculed for failing classes because I didn't do the homework, even though I got As on my tests.
I couldn't win. Either I was a "retard" with a lisp who failed everything or I was a teacher's pet and was always sucking up to the teachers for better grades.
...just to say that oh god yes you nay-sayers, we were often DEEPLY wounded.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 04:21 pm (UTC)From:It took a GIANT FREAKING BRUISE on my forehead to bring this to the attention of my otherwise most awesome parents. I was like "ARE YOU CONVINCED NAO?!"
They were. Dad called the offending punk's dad, who then marched said offending punk up to my house by the ear and made him apologize.
I so wish we could have done that with EVERY kid that picked on me.