Sometimes I get depressed with how dumb I am.

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Yes, I sometimes do.

I know that may sound weird to people who know me or know of me. But seriously. Okay, I had this point in my childhood where I was able to push myself really, really hard and get to a level of doing things where I could do what other people considered "very intelligent" things. They didn't know I was pushing myself to the brink of shutdown. They just knew that I (sometimes) could do things that are considered to be markers of intelligence. Including using my hyperlexia to do well on a few standardized tests.

But then I hit a wall. A massive wall. All the abilities that I'd been able to push myself to do (or to fake) just... they vanished. And they vanished in a spectacular and almost violent way. Because I was seen as intelligent, though, at first everyone thought the hitting a wall thing was boredom. So I hit that wall in seventh grade. So... they skipped me to ninth grade the next year. I lasted three months before crashing and having to be homeschooled (which amounted to doing almost nothing, the way it was done in my house) the rest of the year. That gave me a bit of a break to recover my abilities. But then the next year I ended up in college because it was thought I needed a challenge. And that led to such a massive crash that in many ways I haven't been the same since. I just can't jump as high cognitively as I used to be able to do, not in the areas that most people consider intelligence.

And the thing is, I know better. I know that this doesn't make me worthless. I know that this doesn't mean I can't do some things that some people will call "intelligent" (for me it's such a loaded and complex word that I mostly avoid it). I know that really what happened to me was almost as if my brain recognized that I was heading in a direction it couldn't sustain, so it wrested control back from me and decided to push me in a direction where I really had abilities that would work for me even if they're not conventional intelligence skills at all.

But that doesn't stop me from feeling stupid a lot of the time. Especially when I compare myself to a friend who I met when I was still considered gifted (I now have a below-average IQ, so I've lost that designation in a big way). She's really good at all those abstraction skills. My cognitive skills are incredibly concrete. They're about sensory input and the patterns between sensory input. I even handle most language that way rather than as an abstraction. I have too little ability to do abstraction now without it falling down around me. So anyway, for a really long time whenever I talked to her I just felt really stupid, because I couldn't follow her. I've learned to just sort of ignore the parts I can't follow and never try to climb up into abstraction-land with her. But it still sometimes affects me. (And I feel "stupid" compared to most people too.)

But the thing is... despite feeling stupid, I know on another level that I'm not stupid. Because to me stupid is not about what kind of cognition you've got, it's about whether you use what you've got in whatever way you happen to be capable of. (Which makes a lot of "gifted" people "stupid" in some definitions.)

And I do have other cognitive abilities (my sensing-based ones serve me incredibly well, actually), but I try not to use those as a reason I'm "not stupid" because that would mean that some people are stupid just based on what cognitive abilities are available to them.

I feel it incumbent on me to say that the reason I said what I said is because I struggle with it a lot. I place a lot of self-worth on my intelligence, even though I don't use that criteria for anyone else. It's only on precious rare occasions that I get to realise how much self-worth I pin to intelligence, and it's very frustrating because it's so hard to do something about it.

I figure there are two ways to tackle it: talk about how it should be enough that it eventually sinks in, or do things that overtly reject the part of me that relies on intelligence.