Loneliness

I really hope I'm not being an ass here; these are just my personal experiences. I am privileged in ways relatively few people are, and I don't lose sight of that. White privilege doesn't make my life harder or alienate me. Cis privilege doesn't make my life harder or alienate me. Upper-class privilege doesn't make my life harder or alienate me (indeed, one grows used to living in a comfortable, fashionable little bubble of small-minded people). Being able-bodied and able-minded doesn't make my life harder or alienate me. This...I suppose you might call it a gift...does alienate me, and it does sometimes make my life harder.

I try not to be conceited or boastful, and I suppose I frequently fail, but, well, I can see things and make connections that other people miss...I'm not psychic, people call it intelligence. Now I make a box of rocks look like a Nobel laureate, but for some reason people think I'm smart, and it's not just through faking it. That or I must have fooled myself.

People ask "What's intelligence?" and I suppose my answer to that, in one word, is insight. It is the gift - for lack of a better word - of being able to understand things more clearly than others and notice things that others are quite blissfully unaware of.
"Folks use [sic] to say that Abraham Lincoln could get more out of a book then [sic] anyone they knew - I think smart is like that, its [sic] a vision thing, just see things other folks never notice"
That quote, I suppose, explains insight and intelligence very well to me (as well as bringing up memories from a time that left its mark on me when I was younger, softer and more impressionable). But it's a dry quote, a short one, one that can tell you what intelligence is but not how intelligence is lived out day to day.

Don't get me wrong; insight has a simply ridiculous amount of privileges and perks. I am far, far luckier than any poor soul whose right to reproduce is questioned, or who can't make sense of the world - but insight is very much a mixed blessing.

I can quite quickly pass over things like bullying, not because they're unimportant (they really are not), but because they're well-known. What I can't pass over so quickly are things that you might not even know if you live with an insightful introvert (and believe me, I have seen friends and immediate family mess up too many times to think that they know what they're doing).

Insight is isolating because there are few people who have similar experiences and therefore there are few people who relate. That isolation can (quite naturally, since being ignored and abandoned or having no-one to talk to is painful to say the least) help lead to unhappiness, and...oh...perhaps I shouldn't have talked about this, because I'll only end up digressing.

Believe me now, if I knew how to make people happy, truly happy, to help them wash away their pains and attain eudaimonia - then I could call myself wise. Other people, bless them for their efforts, I suppose, think happiness comes in platitudes or in being intellectually dishonest - but I at least see through the platitudes and insist on being intellectually honest; I hate lying to other people and I draw the line at lying to myself. I'm also stubborn and can't think a way out of my own unhappiness, so people tend to give up on arguing with me and leave me alone - which makes it worse. It really doesn't help that the insight allows, nay, it forces one to see things that others can ignore, things that are...well...unpleasant to say the least. And it isn't particularly fun to get lost in one's own thoughts.

Insight is a gift, I suppose, but an isolating and at times painful one.

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