The Language of … love?
When I was growing up, it was just me and my mom, and we didn’t talk about feelings. Feelings were things to be squashed down deep into the subconscious (landing squarely in the physical body) and controlled. You didn’t show feelings to people because that was a sign of weakness, or worse, someone could use your feelings against you. (Also according to my mom, all men were bad people and the job market was out to screw all women, but those are topics for other essays).
Some people use food as currency, or maybe acting out is a form of currency too. In our house, intelligence was the currency of choice.
My mom came to the US when she was 19. She taught herself English, started at city college, put herself through UCLA and USC, and became an adjunct professor at UC Irvine. Later she left academia because a single parent on a teacher’s salary, even back then, left us flat broke, but needless to say doing well in school and being book smart was how the Neil women operated from the very beginning.
It’s stuck with me to this day.
After my mom died, I had to go through all her possessions. It turned out that all the stories I’d written and illustrated when I was young were gone, lost in the milieu of a hundred moves (she could never stay in the same place very long). But one box filled with report cards, awards, and certificates remained intact. I don’t ever remember talking about school performance expectations, they just seemed to permeate everything. She didn’t need to make sure I studied hard. I just did.
At one point, maybe in the second grade, I was given an IQ test and it was suggested I skip a grade. I didn’t, which was probably for the best, but the result was being bored a lot in class. My mom always refused to tell me exactly what my IQ was. She said it was so it wouldn’t go to my head. Holy Jesus on toast, woman, what do you think NOT telling me did to my head? Honestly. Parents.
Then about thirty years later, she sort of hinted at what it might be, so that’s the number I go with. Why is this important? It’s absolutely not, in the grand scheme of things. But “being smart” was something I could hold onto when nothing else about school or people or work or life in general made sense. I still kind of do it. Life is too hard to navigate, but at least I’m smart.
On one hand, it was something I could always fall back on. I may not have understood social contexts or emotional constructs, but dammit, my IQ was high so at least that was one thing I was doing right.
On the other hand, it raised a lot of questions that have plagued me most of my adult life. Like, if I’m so damn smart, how come I’m not…
- more successful
- able to figure out what “successful” means
- richer
- ruling the world
- enjoying the royalties off the patent of a life-changing, world-enlightening something-or-other
- living on my own island (maybe I just answered my own question of what “success” is with this one)
Sometimes this line of thinking is nothing short of agonizing. If I’m so smart, how come I feel so stupid, so often? How could I not comprehend whole chunks of “Life with a capital L,” as my mom used to call it, even though I have a genius IQ? To always feel like there is something I need to know that’s just beyond my intellectual grasp is frustrating AF. How can this BE???
Then last year I received an answer to these questions.
Ohhhhhh, right. The spectrum.
At first I was really upset. How could I continue this way, if there was really no hope of me ever understanding certain things about how life was supposed to be? What was the point if I’d never get the point?
Fear was followed by relief. Hooray, I have an excuse for never getting it, whatever “it” is!
These days I am hopeful. Maybe.
Now it’s about trying to understand that “I am different” is not the same as “there is something wrong with me.”
It’s about understanding that “smart” is not a number on an IQ test. It means a million different things. Like there are a million different subtleties to the human experience. And just because I don’t get most of them doesn’t make me not smart. It just makes me different.
It’s about letting go of trying to find the right answer to an unknown question, and instead finding the courage to ask my own question.
I wonder if there’s a currency exchange program for this stuff.
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