Top of Your Intelligence.
By: Maddie Mcclouskey, She They
Tags: Personal Essay, Relationships, Hyperlexia, Language, Intelligence

I have always loved words, yet I struggle to feel understood.

I have consistently been praised for being “Smart,” but what does that actually mean?

…It means societal privilege and sheer luck fell upon me, and I wasn’t cute enough to be praised for my looks.

Being a “Smart kid” is a fluke that says nothing about the kid’s individuality or choices.

I had the privileges of being raised by an educator, being an early reader without cognitive or sensory processing difficulty, and my family could afford the round blue eyeglasses I wore when I started school at Woodward Avenue Elementary.

The fact that I had access to preschool before then was also a privilege.Not to mention, my whiteness and the fact that my mother was often a teacher in my district or school contributed to the fact that I was put in classes for “Gifted” children since I was six years old.

My brain has simultaneously been praised and scrutinized. My mother constantly questioned whether I was autistic, and I was tested many times as a young child. I often wonder what would happen if I were to get tested as an adult with our newer understanding of autism in people who are not boys, but I simply cannot afford it.

As an adult, I have been told that I was a difficult child to raise, usually implying that my mental illnesses, my emotions, and the ways I moved through the world were more intense than the subjective preconceived norm.

I’ve had colleagues praise my abilities as a professional writer one day and tear me down based on how I wrote to them privately the next.

For many reasons, I’ve always had difficulty making friends. One factor was my vocabulary, the way I spoke, and the way I wrote…Especially when I was too young to understand rhetoric in conjunction with word choice.

I try to choose words and phrases for accuracy, and I never assume that I know more than the people I am addressing…But that method doesn’t quite work when you’re a third grader who very well might be hyperlexic.

When you have chess pieces and your opponent has checkers, there is no game to be played. You’re just alone with tiny clutter.

To be honest, trying to write and speak with precision doesn’t quite work when you are often the youngest adult in the metaphorical room, either.

Many Gen X-ers and Boomers cannot stand a Millennial or Gen Z person who uses multisyllabic words, specific terminology, or pointed punctuation — especially if those tools are used in a disagreement or about a subject with which the Gen X-er or Boomer is unfamiliar.

I often wonder if that ire over a younger person’s oratorial and linguistic skill is baked into the racism and misogyny hurled at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I also wonder if part of some older folks’ transphobia stems from the fact that they do not like it when a younger person speaks with confidence using terms and information that seem new and scary. And many young queer people have to take up the task of education, because a generation of older queer people is dead.

One thing has always confounded me: Both schoolyard children and adults alike assume that facility with language is an artificial affect used as a means of condescension.

Is it artifice to speak and write how I have always spoken and written since childhood? When I shift gears and match the lexicon of the person with whom I am speaking, that’s the time when I feel insincere and calculated.

Is it condescending to behave as though my peers are on the same level as I am? I use precise language that I assume people understand, because I am functioning under the belief that they are equal to me as a baseline, if not smarter than I am.

Isn’t condescension behaving as though people are beneath you?

Wouldn’t it be more condescending to speak and write to people my age or older in ways that clearly indicate that I believe their capacity for understanding is limited?

Measures of intelligence like IQ testing, grade point averages, standardized testing for children, grammar snobbery, any elementary school science fair, and the idea of a “Good” college are all based in classism. When I assume someone is a smart person, that’s not to say that they can fill in a Scantron, diagram a sentence, or write and edit an essay.

When I assume someone’s intelligence, I am merely assuming that they have an ability to engage and exist above “Comprehension” on the original model of Bloom’s Taxonomy (or in the realm of procedural and metacognitive knowledge, per the newest model).

Basically, in my opinion, having intelligence isn’t just parroting facts or adhering to the racist, classist academic status quo.

Having intelligence is just the process of taking the information presented to you and being able to analyze, apply, and create with it. These skills are also applied when someone seeks out information they do not know by using the information and tools that they already understand. Facts, like numbers, can be used as manipulatives rather than as an unmoving abstract.

Most, if not all, people have those abilities. I have always believed this. This form of intelligence is not exceptional; it is the rule, and it is how human beings as a species have survived.

Sometimes, people have tried to help me by giving advice like “Just talk to them as if you’re speaking to a child or teenager.”

I understand the sentiment, but the way I speak to children or teenagers is honestly quite similar to how I speak to adults- I just take out the cursing, sexual innuendo, cultural references before the aughts, and my existential dread.

Children are people, and they are just as intelligent as I am. And I’m not just talking about the “Smart Kids.”

Actually, many children are much smarter and more capable than I am. If I say a word or concept they don’t understand, they will ask without taking umbrage, and they walk away from the interaction having gained something.

I cannot say the same for most adults.

My favorite thing about children is that they acknowledge, deep down, that they cannot know everything, and they are able to acknowledge that even the adults in their lives also cannot know everything. It’s an equalizer, and it is unpretentious. That’s why children ask so many questions, and it’s why they challenge hypocrisy when they see it.

Some people find it obnoxious when a child is in the developmental “Why?” stage, but the constant questioning to an adult they trust is using the information and tools they have to try to build upon their understanding of the world.

So, yes, I am saying that I believe four-year-olds are using the abilities of intelligence.

People’s Improv Theatre, where I did not train but performed A LOT.

Training in improvisational comedy (yes, I know, I am a cliché New York multihyphenate) has taught me many concepts that I apply broadly to my life, but one (probably misremembered) quote from a teacher resonates with me the most:

“If you treat your audience like they are scholars, they will behave as such. If you treat your audience like they are fools, they will behave as such.”

This idea and variations of it are often used to teach the idea that improvisers should be behaving at the ‘top of their intelligence’, not through performing knowledge, but through grounded sincerity. The exercises often used to teach this concept are ones that require improv students to be as authentically close to how they speak and behave as possible.

I want to be authentic, but I don’t want to be considered “Difficult.”

I want to be understood, but I don’t want a watered-down facsimile of my thoughts to be misconstrued when my instinctual first draft was most accurate.

I want to be loved genuinely, but I don’t want to be conditionally adored when my talents are useful and then discarded when they feel inconvenient.

When my thoughts refuse to leave me alone, and I can’t sleep or eat or breathe deeply, I come back to my best friend, my lifelong obstacle, my strength, my weakness.

I have always loved words.