Portrait of an Idiot

Really cold and wet yesterday. Drier and not nearly as cold today.
It started when I was three. At least that's what they tell me. I don't remember any of it, which, I guess, is normal. I was sitting in the grocery cart (I don't think they let kids do that anymore), probably in the top pull-out basket for cabbages and stuff like that. I'm told I grabbed the cereal box I wanted and started reading stuff on it. Aloud. Heads turned. Mouths gaped. This kid who fits in the cabbage basket is reading the freaking cereal box to the rest of the store!
Relatives would take me grocery shopping just to watch me do it. It was a really small town, so everybody knew. Except, I'm sure, me. To me, it probably felt normal to read cereal boxes (if I wanted the cereal, that is). They were colorful, the letters were big, it said the cereal was sweet, and it also said the box had a little toy inside. Why shouldn't I want to read it? After all, it looked promising! How would I have known, at three, that this was unusual?

And that's been the problem all along. Everybody knew what I did after that was unusual. Except me. To me, it was normal. I rarely compared myself to other children in the early years, except when it came to sports. I could not keep up with most of them. They could run faster, farther, and for longer periods than I could. They were more coordinated, they knew what to do with a ball, and this was upsetting. I hated looking foolish when I dropped the ball, or when I thought it was heading for my face and I couldn't get my hands up there in time, and I looked like an idiot when it, yes, hit me in the face and I cried. Because it freaking hurt. And my friends are yelling at me because the guy from the other street who hit the ball is crossing home while I'm sitting on the ground in front of the ball, bawling.

So, I wasn't made for hardball. When the softball hit, it didn't hurt as much. I didn't cry, and I do recall being enormously relieved. It stung, but not that much. That is, when my vision returned.

Then, I got my tonsils out. My first doctor felt strongly against childhood tonsillectomies, because they were part of a child's body, right? Why take them out? I was 11 when a surgeon found a pair of abscesses the size of quarters in my throat where he'd cut away the tonsils. Because I was no good as an athlete, and I liked to read, I recalled the story of some famous Olympic athlete whose pre-Olympic track career took off after she had her tonsils removed. I exclaimed this to the surgeon (once I'd woke up and then stopped vomiting ether residue), who looked at my father. And they both howled with laughter.

I had been a fat kid. A year after the tonsillectomy, I wasn't so much. I found that coordination was mostly confidence, and that I was no runner because of extremely flat feet. I could walk, though. I walked everywhere I possibly could, eventually took streets with the steeper hills deliberately, to test myself. Though way behind the ball-learning curve, I swatted away by myself hour after hour, tossing the ball high into the air for myself until I learned the mechanics of hitting. I recall at 13 or so, a younger cousin invited me over for the afternoon. His town actually had decent organized recreation, and they invited me to play softball with them! I struck out the first time, forgetting I was batting cross-handed (all that single-handed swatting). I put the first pitch over the short high fence my next turn at bat. Fortunately, I was put in right field, where few hit the ball. My fielding was awful (It seems the family didn't like hearing the ball bang against the front wall of the house over and over again, so I had to quit my personal fielding practice.).

I learned private determination. I learned that skills could be acquired "outside the box" (or off the diamond). But maybe no one would ever know, so I had to just accept it as a private victory and move on. However, there was a catch. You see, I still had the invisible (to me) letter G stamped on my forehead. Actually, it was a number: 163. Beside the letters IQ.

There are so few of us in the general population (two percent, I think) that most people don't realize what a handicap it is. We don't socialize as well, we can't handle changes as well, we don't always mature at a steady rate (my way of saying we're all pretty immature), we tend to see things abstractly (making it hard to compromise), and we're all idiots.

Having too much brain can be almost as bad as having too little. Some mentally handicapped folk have much they can learn, depending on their disability. With us, it's hard to learn stuff in anything like a normal way. We have our own learning styles, we have our own pet interests, we have our own little worlds. It's very hard to break out of them. We don't realize how different they are.

I just didn't like math. It bored me. I didn't like staring at something I could not immediately comprehend. It was only last week, reading a book standing at a bookstore, that I learned even PhD's in math find new technical material daunting at first. They just stick with it until they understand it, and accept that as normal for highly technical material. My ease at reading words essentially tricked me into math laziness! I learned softball (sort of) through determination and private work. Why not math? It just didn't flow like reading words, so I just didn't get as good a grade. My parents were horrified to see my math grades, year after year. How could someone so smart be so stupid as to not see he needs to work on this? (They didn't call me stupid, I just assume that's what they thought. It would be normal.) But blind spots are big for people like me. And I never took math seriously, even on the SATs. My future was on the line, and I just didn't give a rip. It doesn't make sense -- even to me, as I'm typing it! But that was my attitude.

As I assay my past, I can see where this kind of blindness held me back, kept me from making important decisions at crucial times in my life. For example, it's almost as if I could not comprehend the obvious outcome of my smarting off to the boss when I was 28, starting me down a road that soon ended my newspaper career. I could go on, but it's just the same story, over and over again.

I don't feel I'm trying to skirt responsibility for my actions. They are my actions, and I could have chosen otherwise. My IQ blind spots didn't "cause" my mistakes, I made them. But I let my own brain trick me into thinking my actions did not matter. This is the conundrum of people like me, and, of the few I notice on TV and such, I see it repeat out in their lives, too.

You'd like to just sit them down and explain it to them, but you might as well tell an orange to just "be an apple." It won't work. We have to learn these things for ourselves, and it's usually far too late when we finally figure them out.

My main point here is that most of us are probably not the twisted evil masterminds we're often caricatured as in films and TV cop stories. I suspect most of us are more like the guy on "Numbers" -- a pleasant, nonviolent person who just doesn't get other people at all. Who can't adjust to his father wanting to move out. Who can't see the simplest things about relationships that his girlfriend tries to show him. Who just can't leave things alone, for a change. He's lucky that his family is supportive, and that he is comfortable in academe. The "Beautiful Mind" guy was lucky to have a devoted wife who stuck with him through thick and thin, mostly thin. (At least as portrayed in the movie, the Beautiful Mind guy was probably not psychotic, strictly speaking. He had this private little world people like us have, and he simply went way too far with it.)
My other point is that most people like me are good with numbers, or modern linguistics, or cryptography, something abstract like that. I'm just good with words, period. I've never met anyone like me. I don't think I ever will. And it's lonely out here.

It always will be.

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*I took this entry down a few days after I posted it on LiveJournal, but I failed to note the date in the copy of the text I kept. The original posting date below is an estimate. There are also a few minor edits for clarity's sake in this one, as well.


LJ orig.: 1/18/07*