I want to be clear. When I talk about knowing I’m intelligent and wishing I could mention it without being a jerk, I don’t mean I want to be able to go around bleating about it willy-nilly. Just when it has relevance and in a thoughtful way. It’s not as if I want to rub everyone’s face into the fact that I’m soooooo smart. But, I don’t understand why it’s verboten to talk about it–or being empathetic. Here is the post from yesterday.
I’ve said this several times, and maybe it’s apocryphal at this point. I am a huge Poirot fan (which is not apocryphal). He is a pompuous, arrogant Belgian (NOT French) man who is not averse to tooting his own horn. In one of the novels, he is saying how great he is while Captain Hastings is dying in very British embarrasment next to him. Hastings says something about how Poirot should not say tihngs like that. Poirot says (paraphrasing), “If I met someone else with the abilities that I have, I would be impressed and say how great they are. Why should I hide it when it’s me?”
Again, that’s paraphrasing and I’m no longer sure it’s something I’ve actually read. Meaning, it could be something I have retconned into existence. But it’s something that Poirot would say, so I stand biy it. Meaning, he had no qualms about talking of his intelligence, though he preferred when Hastings bigged him up rather than when he had to do it himself. What else was a lapdog for? (He’s said things similar to that, too.)
I thought about that long and hard because I was raised to believe that saying anything positive about yourself was not only verboten, but blasphemous and rude. It’s Taiwanese culture in general, but especially for women/girls. Add to that the deeply misogynistic church we belonged to, and, well, it took forever before I could see anything positive about myself, let alone say it out loud.
I am better about it now. Dying (twice) really helped with that. It stripped away a lot of the bullshit that I had grown up with. Unfortunately, some of it has come back because I still live in this world and not some ideal one. But, I know my worth now. I know that I have worth, which is something I could not have said before my medical crisis. Not with any confidence, anyway. When I came back from the dead (twice), it was as if all the filters had been stripped away.
I was trying to tease out why people react so negatively about someone plainly saying they were intelligent/empathetic in a way they wouldn’t with someone who says they are very good at basketball/playing piano, etc. I was saying because the ability to do something is more concrete and measurable, but I think it’s also because…how do I say this?
OK. I’m just going to muse it out as I write.
Everyone has a brain of varying function. I don’t think that’s too controversial to say. But, almost everyone has mobility to a certain extent, too. We can talk about the latter (thoughtfully), but there doesn’t seem a way to talk about the former. I have seen people try to talk about their intelligence in forums while qualifying it every way left of Sunday, and people still jumped on them.
“Oh, you think you’re so smart, do you??”
“There’s someone smarter than you!”
“You’re not the smartest person in the room.”
I’m paraphrasing, but this was in response to someone carefully saying they were oftentimes ahead of other people in figuring things out (in a work blog). The commenter was judicious about what he was saying, extremely so. So many qualifiers about with the gist being that he worked twice as fast as other people and had to find ways to talk to them so they could understand what he was saying.
I nodded my head sympathetically as Iwas reading. I thought he had put it very carefully and underplayed it as much as he could and still get his point across. But it wasn’t enough for most commenters and there were several angry comments chastizing him for saying anything at all. This was on a blog that skews progressive, which I think is actally part of the problem. There’s been a push in that demographic to downplay anything intelligence-related, including college. Again, I’m talking mostly about the Ask A Manager website. I’ve noticed in the last few years, there’s been an uptick in saying college is overrated. But, at the same time, everyone saying this has gone to college. I find the disconnect amusing, quite frankly.
The other one I find funny is how people will say very loudly that nepotism is bad! But, if they tell a colleague about their (the commenter’s) kid’s job search, that’s completely different! WHich falls into this post quite nicely, actually.
The last time I talked to K, we had a very frank talk about things we didn’t say in the gen pop. Nothing nasty or gross, but things that we knew most people would not understand. I have told this story many times, but I’ll tell it again to make my point.
A few decades ago, I was really into buying things on eBay. I was also very into Alan Rickman. I bought a bunch of paraphernalia and media that featured him, and one of the items was a videotape (yes, it was that long ago) of him in a Broadway production. The description said that it was not pirated, which made me think it was a theater-approved videotape. When I received it, it was a personally-recorded video of the performance. I immediately contacted the seller and said that it was pirated. She wrote back saying it was a genuine copy because her husband had videotaped it.
Nowadays, I would have just notified eBay and pointed out that this was against their policies. Back then, I naively thought I could explain to her why she was wrong. We went back and forth a few times before she contacted eBay to complain about me. When I explained the situation, they immediately refunded my money. The seller gave me a negative rating so I did the same in return.
I mentioned it to my therapist because it really bothered me. I told her (my therapist) how I was frustrated because I could not find the right way to explain to the seller and was taken by surprise when I got the notification that she had reported me. My therapist said to me (paraphrasing), “Minna. You talk on a level six whereas others talk on a level two or three. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of need. You’re at the self-actualization level whereas they are worrying about physiological needs or safety.”
She also said to me at a separate time but on a related point, using the Senate as an example in relation to IQ. She said that the average IQ was 100. In the Senate, that means that half of them are over 100 and half are under. Her point was that I was in the top 5% or so, which meant that I was ‘above’ most people in the gen pop. That’s when she mentioned the second conclusion of the Dunning-Kruger study–that people who are much better at something than other people drastically underestimate how much better they are.
I’m back to talk about my ideal world once again. In the last post, I went off on a rant about sexism. I can’t promise I won’t do it again. I have a lot to say about gender especially as it’s becoming an issue again with the expansion of gender as we currently define it.
One thing I got into yesterday was how I don’t get gender. I don’t get a lot of the arbitrary categories we throw people into. I get (even if I don’t necessarily agree with) racial categories. I get religion, obviously, and disabilities in general. I mean, I understand that disabilities are…I was going to say each one was a discrete thing, but that’s not even true. There are things that spill over or are shared between differing disabilities. And the fact that there is such a thing as hidden disabilities–I’m just all over the place, aren’t I?
My point is that it’s not so easy to say someone is abled or disabled when you get past what we think of as obvious disabilities (being in a wheelchair, for example). Nobody is 100% healthy. Well, very few people. But that’s another post altogether.
In my ideal world, I want people to be aware of other people. It’s really that simple. But not that easy to get there. It took me so long to realize that people don’t automatically try to understand people who are not like them.
Side note: I have had to do that all my life. I was taught at a very young age that I was the keeper of my mother’s emotions. She would pour out her pain to me for hours every night–mostly about my father cheating on her. I don’t remember if she mentioned his cheating explicitly, but we all knew that was what was happening.
My father did not hide it, by the way. He didn’t see any reason to hide it because if he was doing it, then it was fine. I’m not being snarky or hyperbolic, by the way. My father is a narcissist in the classic sense of the word, and he didn’t feel the need to justify anything he did. If he wanted to do it, then he did it. Why would he not?
Side note: Here’s the fascinating thing. I used to thinki that my father did not love anyone other than himself. Then, I thought maybe he loved my mother if he loved anyone. Now, howeve,r I don’t think he even loves himself. He certainly does not (or did not) enjoy life. He never had anything positive to say about anything, and I can’t remember many times when he smiled in delight about anything.
When I was in my twenties, my relationship with my parents was very rocky. That’s putting it mildly, by the way. Every time I talked to them on the phone (they had moved back to Taiwan when I was in my early twenties (father) and late twenties (mother). Or maybe early thirty for my mother), I was suicidal by the time I hung up. That’s not me exaggerating, either.
One time, my father was here after a conference in the west somewhere (can’t remember where). We got into a fight about something. Again, I can’t remember, but it’s not important. At some point, he demanded to know if I was grateful for all he’d done for me (home, money, etc. It was a lot. I’m not denying that). I told him that I wasn’t because I was a raging ball of anger at the time. Plus, he had pushed me so hard, I wanted to hit him where it had a chance of hurting.
He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes, I mentally recoiled. He spit out at me, “Then why should I love you?”
I died inside at that moment, but it also was a moment of such clarity. I had a sense by the time I was seven or eight that he did not love me. I knew it by the time I was in my early twenties. To hear him say it with such spitefulness was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t have to question it any longer.
Even though I knew it on some level, and even though I felt numb about my parents at that time, it still broke my heart. I simply said, “You’re my father. It’s your job to love me.”
I could not believe I had to say that to him. But that’s part of being a narcissist–the idea that you could love someone just for themselves is beyond you (or might be. I know it’s not the same for everyone).
My fdather is in the late stages of dementia, and it’s pretty grim. It’s weird talking to him now because he’s more expressive than he was earlier in his life. After I told him that he should love me because it was part of his job as my father, he started telling me he loved me when we talked on the phone, but it was very stilted.
Now, he’ll tell me with emotion in his voice that he loves me. I believe he actually believes it. Or at least that he loves the person he thinks of as his daughter. This was something I figured out after my medical crisis: neither of my parents love me as a person. They can’t because they don’t actually know me. And what they do know, they don’t like. I don’t think there is a single aspect of my personality that they think is a good thing. I made my peace with their disapproval, well, mostly.
How did I end up there again? My point is that I have had to soothe their emotions for all my life. I don’t know if I’m innately empathetic, but I have honed that skill over forty-plus years. Itt’s become second-nature to me, which is a positive AND a negative. Would I have chosen it for myself? I don’t know.
Back when I was in my twenties, it was the rage to say that bad things happened to people to make them have empathy. That enraged me because I didn’t think I needed to have gone through the horrid things I did in order to be empathetic.
I have realized, however, that some people do need to go through bad things in order to get empathy. Mainly, people who have been born into several categories of privilege and have not experienced the hard knocks many of us suffer through.
It’s so hard to explain privilege to people who have it because it’s normal to them. You can’t show the absence of something as easily as you can add to an experience/equation.