Confessions of a Former “Smart Kid”

(otherwise entitled: “Grangers in a Strange Land”)

The first confession is, I’m not sure if “former” is an accurate description.

What’s she trying to do, you’re thinking, make it clear that she’s still smart? Or is she deluded enough to think she’s still a kid?

Well, I’m definitely no longer a kid, and I don’t actually think I’m smart… okay, I do, but I also think you’re smart, and you, and you, and you. And not just in the stupid way where that’s what I say so you don’t feel bad that we got different marks on the test because you have other skills, but really. I really think that you are innately at least as good as me at anything I do. Probably better.

But what I mean by “smart kid” is someone whose feels his or her whole social identity hinges on being perceived as one of the smartest people in the room. In school, the “smart kid” isn’t the one who thinks she’s the smartest in the class. She’s the one who feels like everyone else — teachers, other students — thinks she’s the smartest in the class.

A good fictional example is Hermione Granger, Harry’s bookworm friend from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Everyone, including Hermione, expects her to have the answer to every question the professors ask. Everyone expects her to write longer, better essays, to read all the readings and also the rest of the library, and to master tricky spells before her peers. Her worst fear, as we see when she confronts the Boggart in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is having an authority figure tell her she’s failed all her classes, and, worse, she’s unable to master that relatively trivial terror by gaining the perspective to laugh at it.

I don’t actually think I’m much like Hermione the way she’s portrayed in the books (except maybe the bushy brown hair), but she’s a pretty good example of what a “smart kid” is supposed to be.

Let me diverge for a second here to point out that in what follows, I’m not trying to say that “smart kids” have it toughest. Ayn Rand can eat soup with an icepick; it’s a good feeling to feel good at things, and even if the experience isn’t 100% sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, on the whole, it’s a way more pleasant experience to feel good at things than to feel bad at things.

But just like the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, there’s an unpleasant side to being “the smart kid” too.

Mostly, it’s the same unpleasant side to being “the” anything in your social group. You feel like your whole identity — your entire sense of self-worth and distinction from others — is tied up in this one trait you have. If you aren’t “the smart one,” then maybe you don’t know who you are anymore.

That makes little mistakes have much stronger emotional resonance than it seems like they should. For example: was getting one C on a spelling test a big deal for you in elementary school? Maybe, maybe not. It definitely was for me. Not because I cared about my marks or was worried for my future or anything like that, but because I cared about my place in the social world of the class. I didn’t like the equal and opposite emotional reaction I got to balance my classmates’ thrill.

I think that dread is also why I hate competitions in which I feel like I’m expected to do well. For instance, although the actual experience of playing trivia at Reach For the Top and SmartAsk competitions was fun, and although I was grateful for the mutual support and confidence my teammates and coach and I shared, I dreaded sitting down at my buzzer. No thrill of winning, I felt, could compete with the possibility of losing and the jarring sense of not being the person everyone else seemed to think I was.

As I get older, the biggest hurdle is facing the fact that no one can be “the smart kid” forever. The older and/or more mature you get, the more you’ll gravitate toward social and professional settings where you meet people with skills similar to yours. Some will have talents clearly better than or equal to your own. And that first time you have to learn to deal with it can be pretty tough.

So some situations where you might find yourself when you’re a “smart kid” that really ought to be great can feel threatening instead. Grad school. Intellectual contests. Debates about interesting things with other smart people.

Even situations that have nothing to do with intelligence can feel threatening. As a kid, you tend to meet peers in the context of school: everyone your age is a student. Everyone can compare the overall gist of their report cards and classes and homework. Even when someone doesn’t say anything about grades, it’s pretty easy to get a feel for whether they’re a “smart kid” or not by the way they talk about planning their time and dealing with academics.

But when you get old enough that most of your peers are out of school and in the workforce, suddenly the identity you didn’t have to work to cultivate in the classroom crumbles. When there are no longer grades or gifted classes, no more quantitative, heuristic ways to measure intelligence, it’s anyone’s guess what people might think. And sometimes, in the absence of such clear markers, people whose identities depend on being “the smart kid” search for new ways to demonstrate intelligence.

We all know the person who has to correct everyone on trivial matters of fact, even in social situations where that’s inappropriate. I’ve been that person, and I’m sure so have some of you. I’ve also been the person who has to jump into conversations on subjects that don’t really interest me just to prove that, hey, I do know something about chemistry or programming or who’s just dying to ask that one question to show that I’m intellectually interested.

Worse, when other people make those exact same faux pas, I get super annoyed — because I can see how much it derails the actual social interaction, but also a bit because I feel the gauntlet being thrown. Oh, so you think you can show you’re smart by saying that, eh? Well, if it’s a fight you want, wait until you hear this obscure fact I can dredge up!

Part of the trouble is that actual intellectual conversations also sound a bit like these: when people are genuinely interested in a topic, they tend to start throwing facts around and arguing about it. But occasionally being able to get away with it is no excuse for sneaking in stuff that puts my emotional insecurity above the group’s social interest.

The worst part is, I’m not really sure what to do about it. Obviously, the key is recognizing the problem and wanting to solve it somehow, but the question remains: what somehow?

First of all, for me, personally, I need to lose this mindset that doing well in school or academic work is the only thing I have to offer the world. I’m lucky to have plenty of loving friends and family, and I seriously doubt a single one of them would stop caring about me if one day I woke up unable to do all the “smart” things I do as an academic or hobbyist. And when I think of how I feel about them, although many of them are indeed very intelligent, that’s usually one of the last things on the long list of qualities I admire in them. I am going to stop the bad mental habit of treating myself worse than I treat other people around me, and that’s that.

But of course, since breaking a habit like that is easier said than done, in the meantime, I have a contingency plan. When I was a kid, I used to like the axiom, “The wise person speaks because she has something to say, the fool because she has to say something.” Then I got old enough to realize that I definitely wasn’t the wise person in that scenario. Keeping silent is tough, particularly because, being the age I am and the gender I am and just generally the person I am, I have a second, concurrent learning curve about needing to speak up sometimes. But I know I can learn to distinguish between the cases when each is appropriate, and, what’s more important, I’m going to try.