creativity, and the pressures of perceived intelligence

[flamingsword]

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When I was young, I was perceived as intelligent, mostly because I was hyperlexic and loved puns which were considered to be beyond my age level. Whatever. But people had expectations about me because of those talents that didn't match up to the rest of me. Sometimes those mismatches were obvious and I would say so, and other times they were not obvious and I would try in vain to meet those expectations, sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades. I knew that I was never going to be an astronaut because I was no good at sports other than fighting (and I wasn't even great at that). I knew that I wasn't going to be a senator, no matter how good with words I was, because we were poor and my family did not look anything like TV families did, and people disapproved of us. But that did not keep people from having those expectations of me.

And maybe if I had been raised to think of talent as something that happens to you, something that comes from the outside and is bestowed on you, I would not have been so hard on myself. Maybe if our culture had that thought, they would have rested gentler expectations on me, and I'd have borne them easier.

But we can never know.