Smart

I thought Tam's post on the weird role the idea of "stupid" played in her childhood and the way it continues to be an issue to her now was interesting, in part because of how hugely it differs from the way "smart" operated in my childhood. I really can't recall "stupid" being much of an issue at all, though I assume we used the phrase an average amount and in typical situations. It certainly was not the primary evaluator of whether something was good or bad. (Although I will admit as a teenager thinking specifically that it was "stupid" that my grandmother had a house rule against using the word "stupid.")

My mom took the position, "Great, you're smart; what are you going to do with it?" And I responded very well to that because I've always been extremely achievement-oriented, which should not come as a surprise to my dear readers. (My high school calculus teacher sees my mom at the public library sometimes and he still has stories to tell about that.)

Don't get me wrong - I don't have any extreme, grandiose feeling like, "With my intelligence and talent, it is my duty to humanity to work to solve the major problems of the world," but that's probably as much about my not feeling like I am actually up to solving those problems as it is about recognizing where the limits of one's obligation to apply their abilities lie. And I mostly think of it as my duty to myself rather than to someone else.

It's interesting, this removed from my childhood, to realize how little it was ever said or implied that being "smart" should give me a pass for anything at all. I know one very smart guy (RM) whose mom told him that he was "too smart" to do the worksheets assigned as homework (sort of like Tam's mom and the fact that writing the spelling words was "stupid") so he didn't do them, and, generally, was a complete underachiever in school. Several times over the years I have had reason to recall how my early attempts to justify to my mom that certain homework assignments were unnecessary for me to do or a waste of my time because I already knew the material were met with my mom's basically unanswerable reply: "If you already know how to do it, then it should be very easy for you to do, so there's really no point in complaining about it. You're luckier than the other kids who will have to work harder at it."

I remember in sixth grade, when I became the school's first top-graded "mathlete" in the weekly competition, a reporter came to the school to interview me for the local newspaper. Among other things, she asked me if I studied or practiced a lot for the competitions, and it was really difficult for me to know how to respond. Truthfully, I didn't do diddly-squat but show up every week and perform, and my default response was to be honest and say no, I didn't study very much, but (1) that felt arrogant to say, (2) I was already specifically feeling sort of bad for a girl in my class who worked really hard and desperately wanted to win but wasn't able to beat me, and I felt like having to read how effortlessly I won would make her feel even worse, and (3) even though I knew that this particular task was not one in which my putting forth a lot of effort was necessary, I had a generalized feeling almost of embarrassment of having to admit that I hadn't really put much into it. So I lied and answered simply "yes" but I was also a bit uneasy of what my mom would say when she read the article. I don't remember what her response was, but I didn't get into trouble for lying.

I will say that under my mom's influence, I was a nicer and less judgmental (about other people, I mean, not in general) person than I became later on, though I believe that I have, in recent years, made some progress toward being more accepting and rumors of my ruthless lack of niceness are exaggerated. But there is no way I will ever be as non-judging of people as my mom is. (That is definitely one of her defining characteristics.)

It has been surprisingly hard to think of what characteristics I feel are central to my identity in the way that "smart" is so critical to Tam. It seems that I value a sense of being competent (perhaps in general, but particularly in the spheres that are important to me) at least as much as, if not more than, being smart. For example, the exchange in one of the Gap Series novels in which the uber-capable female character tells this new super-woman who has joined them "Until you came along, I was the most competent woman I’ve ever met. If you don’t count Nick and one or two other men, I was the most competent person I know." probably resonated with me more than the typical person, and I actually felt a sort of relief that my identity is not as wrapped up in a feeling of competence as it was for her. (And her life was 8,000 other kinds of bad, too.)

Robert suggested that important to my identity is "being right." There's truth to that, though it is much more the process (the way of thinking) that I care about than it is the outcome (the correct judgment). Of course, it's best when you can have both, but I'd rather be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong ones. I'd much rather have my facts shown to be untrue than my reasoning process to have been faulty, although I probably dislike being wrong in either way more than is normal.