On being a "genius"

(What follows is a bit of a departure for this blog. It is not a piece of fiction, not a funny story—though there is a bit of dark comedy about it. It is a true story, a personal story about how I got to be who I am now. It is a story about the particular way in which I am broken, and about a word that has helped justify this brokenness throughout my life. I can't say that I hope you enjoy this, only that I hope you understand it and, through it, better understand me.)


As a child, the worst thing anyone ever did to me was to call me a genius.

It's a serious word, one that should be used sparingly (if at all) around kids, even if it's merited. Amongst the other baggage it brings with it, "genius" carries certain expectations about the relative value of results and the effort required to attain them.

Early in my life, I was fortunate enough to display an innate aptitude for reading. I say "fortunate" rather than "blessed" or "gifted," or any of the other terms that ascribe any cause other than sheer chance to my being born who, where, when, and how I was. I learned to read and understand text before my third birthday, without any formal instruction, much to my father's surprise. He tells a story of my unexpectedly reading along to a book he was attempting to read to me one evening. Assuming I'd memorized that story, he picked up a previously-unseen book and tried again, with the same results. Similar memories linger, memories of sitting in a hospital bed while recovering from an appendectomy as a three-year-old child, pontificating to my doctors, nurses, and visitors about the various types of dinosaurs and their diets. I remember testing at a fourth-grade reading level as a kindergartner, and at the level of a high school–bound eighth-grader by the time I hit first grade (when I had my own reading group and learned about Orson Welles's War of the Worlds hoax from Reader's Digest for Kids while my classmates followed the adventures of Dick, Jane, and Spot).

Very little of this had to do with how I was taught or what I worked to earn. I just got reading, and had a decent ability to remember details and make connections. I'm not claiming some sort of Rain Man–like powers of retention, nor some Harold Bloom–esque ability to intuit the underlying structure and connections propping up the texts I read. I just had a better aptitude for these tasks than the majority of my age group, and knew how to make it sound like I knew what I was talking about even when I was just making it up. This made school a cinch at every level from Kindergarten through college, and currently makes me a ringer at bar trivia and Jeopardy.

Did those traits make me a genius? I don't know; I never really thought so, though I liked that others did. But being called a genius certainly made it hard for me to appreciate my achievements. All of those years of getting straight As? That was the norm. That's what a genius was supposed to do. It was supposed to be easy for me. The implicit lesson here was that working at something, really trying at something, would undermine this "genius" label I'd been given and show others that I really wasn't as special as I'd been made out to be. So, very early on, I internalized a reward structure that prioritized never trying as a way of protecting my ego from abandoning a label that never really fit. That meant that I grew up not only believing myself to be a fraud, but actually enjoying the thought that I was getting away with something or pulling one over on my teachers and peers.

That sense of impostor syndrome has never really left. As some of you know, I have a Master's degree in Film Studies, a degree I always run down and make fun of because of its total lack of utility in real life. Did it take work for me to get that degree? Yes, of course; I probably did more real work in my one year as a grad student than I'd done in four years as an undergrad English major. But it was still easy, easy enough that I know I got by doing less than my coursemates, yet still managed to graduate with a Distinction (one of only three students at that level in my entire cohort at the university's School of Modern Languages). And part of me still regards that as only doing what a "genius" is supposed to do.

This narcissistic sense of entitlement has even bled over into my work life. Employers value experience over innate ability, results over vague potential. Discounting high school jobs, college summer jobs, and a few meager temp assignments, I've only ever had one real job in my life, and even that began as a temp gig. I can honestly say that I've not done anything to prove myself a genius of any kind, nothing, at least, that could be codified and written up on a resume in support of why I deserve some cool job over somebody with legitimate experience. Never having internalized an ability to work hard and rise over challenges, job descriptions all look like prison sentences to me, interviews like an audition for the role of a character far more motivated and enthusiastic about work than I've ever been. I'm a genius, my brain says, I shouldn't have to start at the bottom and work my way up. I shouldn't have to do this boring stuff; I should be rewarded just for being here!

It's a vile thought, I'm aware, but it's my instinctive reaction nonetheless. I don't know what quirks of nature, nurture, or none-of-the-above shaped me in this way, and I can't lay all of the blame down at the feet of that one word, the despised "genius." Other kids I knew, kids with a similar preternatural braininess, have gone on to achieve, attaining valuable degrees and holding down great jobs, in spite of being conditioned in similar ways. While I am writing here today, over a year removed from being laid off from my only real job, without any kind of concrete plan for my future and with little to no hope.

I always imagined that I'd do something different. I was a genius, or at least did a convincing enough impression of one to fool almost everyone around me. I'd be a lawyer, or a research psychologist, or a famous writer, or an Oscar-winning filmmaker. I'd live far from the mundane Connecticut suburbs in which I'd been raised. I'd be the guy who the others talked about: "Did you hear what he's doing now? We always knew he'd do great things, but this is even cooler than we thought!" Not that I particularly cared about impressing my peers, mind you. That's just what I expected would happen for someone like me. That, I thought, was the standard narrative of a so-called genius.

Now I know better. Now that I'm living less than ten miles from where I grew up, in a part of the world I once couldn't leave soon enough, wondering if I'll have to get a job at the same mall I patronized as a kid just to survive, only now do I comprehend my failure. Yes, failure, another word that ought not be tossed around lightly. Perhaps I am a bit flippant with it, but I don't know what else to call it. I always believed that a "genius" like me would easily escape the gravitational trap of my hometown. I saw no shame in other people, even close friends, who stayed nearby by choice or out of necessity. For some, that's all they ever wanted to do; for others, it was no more than they could expect. But for me, being here is a reminder that I was never what others thought me to be. It's a reminder that, at long last, I've shown my true colors to the world and revealed myself for the charlatan that I've always been. I do not know how to be more than this, I think. For what little effort I have made, this is as good as I deserve.

The thing is, as aware as I am that I've only cheated myself by not working to the best of my ability, I never developed the skills or the work ethic required to do more than that. I quite literally do not know how to try. Trying feels alien to me, or like a waste of time considering that I'm accustomed to doing just fine by hardly trying at all. And twenty-nine years of thinking this way, twenty-nine years spent living with a reward pathway that stigmatizes effort while privileging just coasting by... that's a long history to overcome. It's not impossible to change these habits as an adult, but it is hard, and only gets harder with each year. Besides, how does a person who cannot try learn to muster the effort to change his ways? I honestly do not know.

What I do know is that that word, that hateful, useless word "genius", has no business associating with the likes of me. That word should be saved for people who know how to work hard even when they don't have to. For people who can take the random grab-bag granted them by the synthesis of their of genes, development, and environment and make real, tangible things out of it. And that is not something you can know about a young child. There are no standardized tests, no school curricula, no benchmarks adequate for deciding if a child is a genius or not. The proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes, and the pudding, here, is a life of achievement, not just some nebulous potential or ill-defined ability.

It's not the things one has the capability of doing, but what one actually does that truly matters. An egg can become a baby eagle, in the right circumstances. But it can also be left to rot, or be thrown at a house on Mischief Night, or be eaten up by any of a hundred other animals looking for an edge. Each egg has all of those potential fates in front of it, but only its actual destination matters. Calling an egg an eagle won't stop it from rotting if it doesn't take the steps it needs to take to hatch.

As for me, I have to accept a certain amount of the blame for being a bad egg. I know there's still time to change, to become the "genius" eagle everyone's always expected me to be, to learn to fly as high as I've always imagined I would. I just don't know if I've got what it takes to overcome my fear that I'm just a cuckoo, a changeling dressed in eagle down without the nobility or grace of my "siblings." At any rate, I need people around me who can guide me to whatever that first step may be, people who can help me stay aloft or, at least, teach me that crashing to the ground isn't so bad as long as you learn from it and do better next time. And I need to believe it when people tell me that I'm alright as I am, whether I'm a genius or not. I only wish I'd learned these lessons sooner, or with the same ease with which I learned everything else. But maybe that is the point: it can't be easy because life itself isn't easy, and the sooner you get used to that, the better off you'll be.