Here’s the thing: I’ve been tested. I’m not HIV Positive, but I do have an IQ that is within the “creative genius” range. My retention level is rather amazing. (if I do say so myself). My ability to assess, absorb, perceive, discern and create new thoughts, patterns, images is truly exceptional. I am also a word warrior. (Need a word? I have plenty to spare. I am never without words).
I am difficult and headstrong much of the time. I am perceived as being egotistical. I am outraged by injustice. I cry at the thought of animals suffering in heavy rainstorms (How can I be egotistical?). I am unusual. I feel sadness for the world. I would sacrifice myself first. I spend a lot of my time alone.
My mother didn’t know what to make of me, as a child. I would cry when she made me wear shoes. I couldn’t stand the feel of my coat when it was buttoned up and confining my body. Rules were very threatening to my spirit. Rules that were enforced without reason terrified me. Authority based on fear and force terrified me. It was in the realm of the intellectual that I found my safety and my solace — not as insulation from life, but as passion and drive toward all that which affirmed and nurtured and freed life.
Brilliance is not thought to exist in the minds of children. I was accused of stealing other peoples ideas all the time when I was young. My ideas were too big. I learned to act like someone far less than who I really was. In high school, I rebelled. A teacher threw me against a wall one day, and asked me what my “effin” problem was. I stared him down with the intensity of my mind.
Ordinary conversation confuses and disturbs me. People and everyday conversation confuses and disturbs me to the point of angering me. I don’t get the point of most social interactions and social niceties. I say things too bluntly for most people. People are hurt and wounded easily by things I never intend to say or do. Most of the time, people are unaware of the insult their everyday gestures, denial and conversations bring onto me.
My energy is intense. I want conversation that will plunge me to the bottom of the sea. I want physical and mental labour that will use up my excessive energies – labour that will hook me, engage me and sustain me. I want to transform the world with the energies I harness. Rarely does ordinary conversation do this for me. I write and I work and I walk and I day dream. I want to go to bed tired. I don’t want to work on “relationships.” I don’t know what people are talking about when they say this kind of thing.
People rarely hear me out so I am misunderstood most of the time. People don’t have the time to take a thorough look into the vastness of my intellectual designs. People ask me if I saw Trista and Ryan get married. They want me to say “yes” or “no”.
I am often seen as someone who sets herself above others. I am not that. I would never choose this degree of intellectual isolation, or this degree of intellectual heftiness. I have too much respect for others to set myself apart for the sake of satisfying an ego need. People are, generally, very wrong about me.
I have intellectual clarity. My mind is luminous. It would be horror to ignore this kind of gift just so the egos of some can be satisfied. It would be stupid – a dishonour to the entire universal design. But people ask this of me all the time. They perceive me as defective. They want me to see the world in their way. They want to break down the complexity of me.
What I see is not what I want to see (Can I say this enough?). What I see is simply what I see: many times what I see is a sky without fog. Complex theories are revealed to me while sitting in the bathtub, or sunning my face on the lawn. It is not frightening to me. But often I cry because I know there is no one around me that is at all interested enough to share these kinds of magnificent revelations for which I have such thirst and passion.
I am bisexual, meaning I have no sexual preference for gender. Gender for me is like eye colour or hair colour. It isn’t something that identifies me or defines me. My gender is the shape of my genitals; the roundness of my breasts – that’s all. I can make no sense of gender being an identity.
As a bisexual human, I am set apart. As one of the “intellectually gifted,” I am set apart. People don’t want conversation that plunges the depths of the ocean or passion that climbs the heights of the stars. People don’t want to know how tender I am in my love for both genders, or how logical. People think I am insulated by the genius of my mind. They think I am on an upper rung of some ladder. People don’t understand the vulnerability and nakedness of mind (How can a body be insulated by its nakedness?)
People don’t want to hear about gender as a trait or as a cosmetic detail, but it is to me. Neither do people want to hear about superior mindedness as being child-like and humbled and innocent, but it is to me. Arrogance inflicts horrible pain. Arrogance is opposed to genius and to childhood. Children see with naked minds. People don’t want to hear that.
( I go to bed tired on nights I try to figure the arrogant, commonplace mind ).
Carole E. Trainor is the editor of the Canadian Femninist Compilation, “And I Will Paint The Sky.” Her articles and poems continue to appear in various newspapers, magazines, creative and academic journals throughout Canada. Carole’s work will be enjoying a much broader readership in 2004 thanks to various Feminist and GLBT magazines/zines in the US and the UK. She lives in Nova Scotia. She can be reached at: trainorcarole@hotmail.com
