You feel like an X-Man.
From a minority’s point-of-view, you don’t actually realize that you’re smart (different) until later on, and when you do you see that the smartest choice to make is to not be smart (different). Let me explain.
First off, I don’t consider myself particularly developed in one area of intelligence, I consider myself to be naturally above average in most forms of intelligence.
I’m black and I grew up poor. Very poor, and thus I grew up in the worst of neighbourhoods and the worst of intelligence enhancing environments. Though we were technically well-off where I came from (Rwanda), when I emigrated with my sister and mother to America we quickly joined the American lower class/working poor. My mother being a single-mother usually worked two jobs just to feed us, clothe us, and to put us through school. On top of that, we moved around a lot, but usually stayed in the same state, from one apartment to another (I think this is because my mother couldn’t pay the rent on more than one occasion).
There was no such thing as money left over to spend on books and movies. The only books my sister and I ever received from our mother were a bible, and an ancient kid’s encyclopedia (that she most likely got for free from someone/somewhere). We had a television set but never had cable, and we got an old computer when I was around 13 with no internet, which I didn’t seriously pay attention to until I was a junior in high school. (We only got the computer because our mother was married to our step-father at the time, who’s a failed CS major. Every time I peaked at his CS books or asked what he was doing with the computer he said it was too complicated for boys like me and to stay out, so I did, more so because he was an asshole.) The only options really available to me and my sister most of the time were to stay inside and draw (we’re both considerably above average in the naturally artistic departments), or to go out, explorer the world and get in trouble with friends.
Although at home I had quirks like taking apart locks, clocks, and our television set to tinker and figure out how they operated, school was the place that really hinted to me being smart, and even then I, and the people around me, thought I was just weird. I had a habit of being the most attentive student in the first week of classes and then of being the most bored child in the room. A thing to know about me is that I need constant stimulation to just stay steady and if I’m not receiving it I get really really antsy. Let’s just say I got so antsy and bored with class in third grade so many times one of my teachers took away my desk for an entire school year just so I could pace back-and-forth at the back of the classroom, so as to disturb the class less than I usually did. One particularly antsy day this same teacher had the bright idea of just sending me to the library with a guardian, because she couldn’t handle me and teach the class at the same time anymore, and that’s when I discovered the wonders of books.
As a minority in my position, you’re never taught that reading books is fun in and of itself, so although I knew of books, I never looked at them twice and shunned them for other activities (I’d read the bible and encyclopedia I had at home, but the bible was too inconsistent for me to like it or anything of its kind, and the encyclopedia wrote of ancient times I had no interest in, outside of ancient Egypt). But since this teacher had sent me to the library, and since my appointed guardian was making sure I couldn’t leave, I had no choice but to pick up a book and start reading. I picked up The Yearling and I honestly just zoned out, the next thing I can remember is that it was the end of the school day, I was done with the book, and I had missed all my classes for the day (don’t know why the guardian never interrupted me); I was onto something. So, the next day I figured out how to check out books from the school library and in a week’s time I’d finished reading about 15+ books in between dealing with the family struggles that arise because you’re poor and classes (where, because of ‘the rules’, I couldn’t read them no matter how boring the class became). The rest of elementary school continued as so. It did suck that, with it being an elementary school filled with books at an elementary reading level, I never got to actually push the boundaries of my vocabulary. (If you’re wondering about how well my grades were or how I did on tests, I can tell you I gave them the same amount of attention as I did in the paragraph above, none, but that I got a steady A/B+ average throughout my school years.)
When I got to middle school things changed. I’d moved once again, now to a neighbourhood and accompanying middle school filled with the worst gang members of all varieties in Georgia, and teachers started calling me smart (which was both new, and dangerous for me). In a couple week’s time, against my will, my math and languages teachers had collaborated and convinced my mother to put me in AP everything. They had the best of intentions but everything was just wrong; I’d had friends in my previous classes but all the kids in my AP classes were a close-knit group of people I saw as the ultimate social-stigmas, they didn’t accept me as ‘one of them’ (poor black kid in classes filled with well-off white kids, different natural dialects, &c.), and since I did all my work in my head in a fashion they and the teachers weren’t accustomed to I quickly became the pariah in my new classes. “Show your work” became both the bane and blessing of life. I hated that phrase, at the time I found no just reason why you needed to show your work if your answers were all right, and after failing to comply with the “show your work” rule one too many times I got moved back to my old classrooms filled with my old friends. This was not only a blessing but a saving.
Later, during the same month I’d returned to ‘normal’ classes, two of the AP kids got stabbed by a Crip and Vato just because (probably because of a dare of some kind), and the school broke out in a small riot, which escalated to a large riot after the principal had the bright idea to cancel all sport activities with an emphasis on basketball as punishment, in which everyone without friends/protection in gangs got, to put it appropriately, beat-the-fuck-up (friends who, because of the AP classes, I was that close to losing). I stopped taking a pile of books home after these incidents, and didn’t take to reading seriously again until I moved to Canada. I also learnt that after finishing tests I should wait at least an hour before getting up and handing anything in and that I should intentionally get 20% of the answers wrong; finishing an hour and a half test in less than ten minutes is not good in terms of social survival. You learn to survive at all costs, getting bullied because you’re smart and getting stabbed in the stomach in broad daylight with no one lifting a finger to help you because you’re smart are two drastically different things (people also got stabbed for other things, like shoes, if that’s of any consolation).
Luckily, we moved to Canada. When I moved the school year had already started, so when I joined my 8th grade class everyone had already made friends (this was a small school in which everyone knew each other since they were practically in diapers) and they were all sketching outside as part of an art class. (fun fact: When I moved to America I skipped first grade in order to stay on track with the students, and when I moved to Canada I skipped seventh grade; my sister skipped two grades as well, we never felt behind in our classes, far from it.) My new teacher asked me to join in the sketching, and after a couple minutes the whole classroom had crowded around me because of my other, more artistic, intelligence. I can draw, really well, especially when something’s right in front of me and all you ask of me is to ‘draw what I see’. I’d won art competitions in elementary school without breaking a sweat but no one took those competitions seriously and it just added to my weirdness-factor then; but here, in eighth grade, I’d gotten an audience, of oohing and aahhing girls no less (things were looking up).
Basketball got me more oohhs and aahhs because although I suck at sports, my spatial and kinaesthetic intelligences are at a level where if you put a basketball in my hands and ask me to shoot it from anywhere on the court, and if I care enough to actually try my best, I’ll get it in seven out of ten times (granny shots are the easiest to pull off, and I can do as well shooting blind). This never went over as well in middle school in America because I had horrible stamina (still do I suppose), I was short (still am I suppose), considered a trickster and not a ‘real ball-player’, and because I’d made the mistake of revealing my trick to the basketball team by making a bet with them which ended up with me acquiring all the cash they had on them. By the time I was nonchalantly getting straight As in class all the girls in class had an eye for me and I’d started calling Canada the best place in the world (I also had a southerner’s accent at the time which many of them said turned them on). Sure, by the end of the year I had been in multiple fights with most of the guys in the classroom because of my intelligences (fun fact #2: Canada was the first place I fought on ice, wasn’t pretty), but at least the fairer sex wasn’t disapproving as well here in Canada (and on days we had tests I suddenly became everyone’s best friend).
After that, in high school, my life started resembling what it is now, a catch-up process (me catching up to the me I could have been if I had gotten a proper education). In three years, I taught myself how to use computers for more than just laymen affairs, got into hacking to a point where I was coordinating schemes with people in China and Japan (fun fact #3: I also got so addicted and good at Galactic Conquest that I was given backend access and a job offer, but I passed on that, it almost ruined my life), and visited two public libraries and read every single book each of them had (from children’s books to complex technical manuals and reference books, I loved them all), while still playing the “I can’t show these people I’m smart or I’ll be an outcast or worse” game. (My teachers knew, but they left me to my own devices and gently tugged me in the right direction rather than go the whole ‘save the troubled minority from a life of hardship’ route. All my favourite teachers in high school were my English teachers (all women); they all, in their own ways, became great mother figures.)
My interpersonal intelligence really helped me out in high school. I was friends with everyone, from geeks to jocks to gangsters to teachers, so I got away with things like playing Yu-Gi-Oh in gym class (sometimes I even got gang members interested in how the game worked). And the best thing about being friends with everyone is that you’re not actually friends with anyone in particular so no-one ever really pries into the life you’re trying not to reveal to them.
In senior year my spatial, kinaesthetic, and musical intelligences got me opportunities in dance that I pursued to the somewhat detriment, but not doom, of my academic life. Performing nights with hip-hop and dance artists and then partying after in drug-heavy environments as a high-schooler brings your grades down to a level where the only colleges you can get into are the ones that don’t really test your mind (C+ average, earned because senior year was the first year I actually felt somewhat lost in some of my classes, first year I really did homework, and all while failing to show up for my classes for days at a time). I went to college for business but when it turned into high school all over again, I dropped out. I had family issues I was taking care of and I wanted to become a writer and an entrepreneur, two things I figured I’d reach faster on my own without having to wait on the class to catch up.
I’m smart, but it’s hard to brag when you’re just slightly more advanced in all forms of intelligences rather than being incredibly developed in one. I also cringe every time I say I’m smart anyways, compared to everyone whom I deem smart I’m at the bottom of the bottom of the pecking order. I know I’m smart because, after looking back, I realize that everything came easy for me up until my final high school years. I know I would have been smarter than I am now by a considerably discernible amount, but I was never pushed by my peers or teachers to do better in a way that actually worked with me rather than against me, and I developed a horrible sense of determination and grit throughout all of this since I was so unused to being challenged intellectually.
I’m not complaining though, far from it, everything I faced helped to make me who I am today. But if you didn’t get it by now, I do blame my slow progress in intelligence on how I was taught to treat it for the majority of my young life; like a third eye or, better yet, blue fur. Junot Diaz said it best,
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto.