Anyone feel they are not smart?

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I keep wondering if I really am a slow learner. I needed help through school and my work had to be modified so I could so it because it was too abstract and I am more concrete. I have never gone to college and pursued in anything because I was told collage is harder and of work was so hard in high school I will have a harder time in college and I don't want to go and waste money and find I couldn't do it because of too much stress from all the school work and studying and too much thinking. I also still have a hard time understanding what I am reading sometimes and comprehending but yet if it was more simple, then I don't have a problem at all understanding it so it feels things have to be dumb down for me to comprehend what I read. I will go to different web pages when I read things to understand because some things are more simpler and it's hard to get my mind to concentrate on what I am reading when my mind is somewhere else especially if it isn't my interest.

Also my dad has no patience to explain things to me. He gets mad and he assumes I am not listening. I feel am am slow in understanding so maybe I am a slow learner since it takes them longer to learn things I've read and I fit the characteristics of a low IQ person but then again those characteristics are also found in autism.

But yet people say I am very smart but they probably mean I am smart because I know lot of stuff and even a low IQ person can have good knowledge on things they are interested in. I know someone with an IQ of 86 or an 87 and he sounds very smart because he knows a lot about music and singers and knows what goes on in politics and he knows a lot about history of capital punishment and the inmates who have been executed and he also knows about how kids are treated in orphanages over seas and is savant in geography despite being close to being a slow learner and in the movie I Am Sam, Sam had very good knowledge about The Beatles so he sounded very smart in it despite having an intellectual impairment. I think when people say I am smart, they probably mean book smart and because how fast I can learn when I am shown how to do something so it doesn't take long to train me at a new job but then they assume I can just go off to college but they don't realize how different it is to do homework than it is to just read and know things and have knowledge and then they seem to find it hard to understand I was in special ed and had help through school to do my homework or else I would have dropped out.

Then there are some people who say I am not very smart and I am close to being ret*d. My ex even thought that too of me and he said I only sounded smart when it came to movies. He never said directly I wasn't smart but he said I sounded smart when it came to movies.


Anyone else here think they are slow?

Last edited by League_Girl on 16 Feb 2016, 5:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I do.

Me, too.

I have always considered myself to be quite slow. My brain seldom retains information; I always misread things, and my thought processes are usually just a vortex of disconnected thoughts. I actually hate the way in which my mind operates. It's just a head full of complete nonsense. It's like flipping through the multitude of TV channels only to find that there's only one tediously boring show being broadcasted.

In fact, I am so dumb that I have recently been trying to convinced myself that "teached" is correct/and "taught" is not. How I managed to get into a prestigious grammar school all those years ago is truly quite baffling.

I used to be really smart in middle school. It was like I had the intellectual abilities of a 12-year old when in reality I was 6. The material was just too easy for the level I was at. If the average kid scored 70%, I was 95%. At any given time, no matter the subject. Then in high school I still had a relatively easy time keeping up my grades in the early years, but my fellow students had started catching up on me. I'd say I was at 85% while they were at 75%. Eventually it got to a point where they averaged 80% and so did I, around the age of 16-17. But unlike them I had to work really hard for it at that point, around 100 hours a week including the classes I attended. I knew they had surpassed me by then, especially after I went to college.

Right now? I'm not really sure. I think I'm more intelligent than the average person (my IQ is 131), but my ASD is holding me back a lot. Especially my insight is poor, my memory was always really strong. That became really apparent to me when taking maths classes in college. I truly believe anyone with average intelligence could handle those courses, but I could not. And my fellow students were way ahead of me. They were the type of people that got scores like 100% in high school without breaking a sweat. For them getting a BA in maths or chemistry or bio-engineering was relatively easy.

You express your thought processes well. I get that same TV show in my head.

I'm smart in some ways, stupid in others.

I feel as if I'm slow sometimes because I often have to look at something more than once to get a basic understanding of it. If it isn't spelled out, drawn in a diagram, or else organized into a group of things or ideas that make sense, I don't get it.

IQ is a very flawed measure of intelligence. Mine's 133 and I know I'm far from the sharpest tool in the shed. You're not too dumb for college. Go pursue whatever field you're interested in. You'll make it.

Same here! And I'll bet that holds true for everybody else.

I know that I am smart. I have always done well in school, and am able to remember and understand things that the other students aren't. But sometimes I do feel stupid. I really struggle with labs in science class, because I need a really clear set of directions to know what to do. Everyone else seems to know what to do, and I'm just standing there, lost. I also don't fully understand the material in math or science. If you give me a process to follow, I'll do fine, but I have trouble figuring things out for myself because I don't really understand the concepts. Then, in languages, I'm bad at understanding things spoken or written. When I first read Shakespeare, I hardly understood it at all. But I always get good grades despite all this.

I put myself in the "smart in some things, dumb in others" category.

Yeah, I've been having major depression issues about this lately actually. I go through periods of not believing in my academic abilities. I got academically dismissed from college recently, I was in my junior year. I try to build myself up because the only reason I failed was because I didn't attend class because I was having anxiety issues about classmates and group work. I also had the misfortune of knowing a narcissist in high school who made me feel really bad about my abilities.

You seem pretty effin bright academically to me!

Probably, in some ways, more accomplished than I am.

I think I am very stupid sometimes. Othertimes I feel like a (relative) genius.
If something is said outloud, and I can't translate the words into a picture I can imagine... well, you can repeat yourself until the damn cows come home go back do a jig and come home again. I will NOT in any way comprehend the material. It is about as useful as talking to a wall. I think the wall would understand more

However, give me a mental representation or "pictures" and I'm golden!
I will remember it for too long maybe.
Sometimes I think I must some kind of idiot savant (I don't actually think this) because I can memorize things that ... scare people.
Example, (most memorable one) l I was in elementary school and we had to study for a book-report test. I kind of liked the book- thought it was okay.
Although, I was determined to do well- I intensely read it uninterrupted for hours about 6 I reread the entire thing from front to back cover to cover, and finished with that.
(I never knew how to study really..)
The important part here was I was able to imagine a story in my head I had an HD 4k movie going on in my head ....

Anyway, I memorized, verbatim, the entire book.
I was able to rewrite from memory with correct dialogue for entire sections of the book- which ever they asked about for a long time after the fact without reviewing it again.
I ended up getting a 100 and literally everyone else in the class scored below a 65. (terrible teacher ... we didn't really ever go over the material... it was quite bad honestly.)
The teacher asked me how I did it, I said I don't know I just read the book.
Still don't know how I did that....
Sometimes I would replicate it- see something once and just BAM completely memorized word for word. However, this skill disappeared once I got nervous and afraid to show other people because it made me look different.
I don't know if that counts for anything.
My skills are completely imbalanced though.
I mean it- I remember a score I got in math once (one of those big national tests) and there two different math sections: Math A & B and then English A & B
and I remember I scored literally about 96-99th percentile on both sections A (whatever they were) in both Math and English and then you look right next to it and I got about a 35% in the B sections.
I didn't understand that either..... Not sure if that means I'm "bad" or "good" at either English OR Math
I'd be curious if anyone had an idea of what that means......

People in forums say I am really intelligent. But I have a hard time figuring out most things and am way below average in most school subjects. I call myself stupid a lot.

My memory isn't that great, so I don't feel like I can retain information all that well. I at least can learn the basic gist after reading something, though.