Becoming Normal

On shedding the “smart kid” identity

I was no longer the smartest, most reliable person in the room. 

My whole life, the most common compliment I got was on my intelligence. I don’t remember ever being called beautiful, but I remember when I told a classmate to “make an inference” in sixth grade, and the teacher raised her eyebrows in surprise at my vocabulary. I wasn’t at the top of my class in high school (I went to a nerd school), but I was close enough, and everyone knew it. Multiple coworkers have said that my seemingly effortless wisdom is what stood out to them. 

I was, of course, in the gifted program, beginning in second grade. Being the smart kid became a part of my identity because it was constantly reinforced to me, and I could coast through nearly anything on intelligence alone. I didn’t need to learn social skills, or study skills, or emotional ,or resilience. But I knew a day would come when that identity would be shattered, and I didn’t know if I could ever fully prepare myself for that.

College was easy, and although I was encouraged to go to law school or pursue an MFA, I decided I wanted to work rather than condemn myself to the misery of academia, at least for now. My first post-graduate job was at the same company I had been working at for the last two years, so I didn’t imagine that much of my identity would shift when I became a non-student for the first time since I was a toddler. 

Yet, after my first two-weeks as a full-time remote employee, my manager gently asked, “Is there a reason you are making more mistakes lately?” I said that I wasn’t sure if there was a particular reason, maybe I was just too scattered and promised to focus more, and then I ended the call and cried. No matter how bad my mental health had been during certain periods in school, my version of slacking had always been good enough. 

I remembered how in elementary school I silently chastised the other A+ students who would cry about forgetting their homework and having to take a late grade. I promised myself I would never be that person—someone fragile. Here I was, on the floor of my bedroom, understanding those students better than I ever had.

When I was younger, I was callous toward vulnerability because I had not been given permission to show it. I struggled with panic attacks my entire life, though I didn't have the language for it until later. The first ones I recall happened in kindergarten. In kindergarten, before I had the words for anything, I was regurgitating my lunch daily, and my parents solved it by changing my schedule, so I went to a.m. and p.m. kindergarten. (Maybe that’s how I got so smart, eh?) When I was old enough to say that my stomach hurt, I felt hot, and I couldn't breathe, my parents told me I should tell my teacher. So I did, everyday, but no one did anything. Eventually, I got the memo—suck it up, no one is coming to save you.

One of the most insidious parts of being a smart kid is that as long as you get A's, people assume nothing is wrong, or that it can't be “that bad.”

I don't say this to blame anyone, the adults in my life were trying their best. I say it to explain why I shut down my connection to my body. I learned that I had to power through no matter how my body felt because that's what people are supposed to do, hold themselves together. I gained a skillful obsession with appearing competent and put together (that I'm still trying to kick) and ignored any signals my body sent me. Up until now, I cried once every one to two years. You can imagine my shock when I learned that some people cry multiple times a week. 

I've only recently begun to pay attention to how emotions manifest in the body, and for the past few months, I've been tearing up more regularly. For the first time in my life, I'm trying to learn to trust my body and allow it to experience feelings. That doesn't mean treating my feelings as true: they are not true or untrue, nor are they good or bad; they just are. 

So, I took my lunch break early, cried on my floor for fifteen minutes, made myself a sandwich, and ate it out in the sun. I did everything right—allowing myself to feel, going outside, making sure to sleep, eat, and exercise a little—yet, two weeks later, I was still making mistakes. 

This is obvious, but I needed to hear it: an emotion isn't processed just because you deem that it should be. And acceptance solves many problems, but it doesn't solve everything. Apparently, leaving an identity behind that has been reinforced for nearly my entire life comes with some growing pains.

The difficulty is that, because my intelligence allowed me to muscle through everything else, I don't have much left to lean on. There is so much I never was and never will be: the kindest, the funniest, the friendliest, the most athletic. 

In Buddhism, the goal is to have no identity, but absent enlightenment, I've decided the second-healthiest view of the self is to have as many identities as possible. Holding many identities enables us to take less of a hit when one of those identities has to be dropped. However, it's not that straightforward. 

There are broadly five categories of identity: immutable characteristics (race, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc.), beliefs (religion, political ideology, etc.), relationships (daughter, spouse, friend, etc.), activities (hobbies, habits, job, etc.), and ways of thinking (leader, open-minded, fiercely independent). Each has their own problems. If you over-identify with immutable characteristics, then you have no agency, basing who you are on things that you have not chosen. If you over-identify with beliefs, then you run the risk of becoming an ideologue and not being open to having potentially false beliefs changed/ challenged. Similarly to beliefs, activities change over time, so basing your identity on it limits your flexibility to try new things and drop old activities that no longer serve your wellbeing. Relationships can change over time and are sometimes unchosen as well. Given these facts, I thought it best to value identities in each category, but to ground my most important sense of identity in the way that I think, in choosing to be an open-minded and independent thinker and writer, in choosing to constantly learn. But is that not just a more sophisticated way of placing my identity in my intelligence?

It's hard to prevent your brain from condensing things. No matter how diverse I claim my identity is as a 5’2 Gen Z bisexual white woman, atheist Buddhist vegan pro-free speech political centrist viewpoint diversity advocate, daughter sister friend cat mom, writer meditator podcast junkie reader and elite shuffleboard player, it all feels like it boils down to outsider, which is in and of itself is ideology that can make you falsely believe the world is against you. 

So I try, unsuccessfully, to be everything I am at once. If you have ever been in a writing class, you have probably heard the phrase “the more specific, the more universal.” The more specifically me that I am, the more universal I become. I am no longer the smartest in the room. I am not the most or the best at anything. I'm (god help me) a normie. 

I'm an adult out in the world now, where there is no top of class. I am allowed to cry and start over and move cities and go on terrible dates. I lift heavy things, though I'll never be the strongest, and read books, though I'll never be the most educated, and DIY home decor, though I'll never be the most talented artist. It kind of sucks not to have the validation of being good at any of it, but it's also kind of magical not to have to be. So, wish me luck retraining as I learn to be a devastatingly average human.