So I have this

So I have this cousin. Specifically, he is my double second cousin – our grandfathers were brothers who married two sisters. He disputes the notion that he is smarter than me, and I dispute his disputation, largely because:

* He was smart enough to leave our home state for college,

* He was smart enough to go to a Division I institution of fine academic repute, and

* He was clever enough to find and marry HIS lovely blond Catholic girl from far away before the age of 30.

However, he moved back to our home state, while I moved to the Bay Area, so maybe he is onto something.

In any event, he asked for my perspective on going through the “gifted experience,” so if you will indulge me, I’m going to speak about myself in a rather un-humble manner. Again. Sigh. Apologies in advance; content beyond the jump:

Being a boy genius in the rural South is sort of like having a Bugatti Veyron…and driving it through rush hour traffic in San Francisco. Yes, it can be done, and people will say how impressive it looks, but the fact is that no matter how powerful and fast you might be, you are stuck in the same slow piddling traffic as the guy in the El Camino.

What really comes through down South, though, is the presumption that “the smart kid” will naturally be “the good kid.” The old saw about the rowdy troublemaker kid who gets bored because he’s actually brilliant and the work doesn’t challenge him, who acts out as a result and is just a pest and a pain? If only. You don’t get that in the old country. Instead, it’s the “teacher’s pet” routine. Or worse. Yonder alumnus of the Wreck put it like this:

“…there’s a distinct part of me that regrets the set of expectations that resulted from going through the “gifted experience” at a young age. I’ve felt (more and more, lately) that being “the golden boy” denied a sense of satisfaction and (more importantly) contentment as early adulthood came around.”

He’s not wrong. I too have had the sense that I somehow missed out on the “little bit of young and whole lot of crazy” years – in fact, just before embarking on my relationship with the girl who cost me my academic career, she send me an elaborately stylized note that read only “So…you DO get tired of being responsible.” She was right about that – maybe the only thing she was ever right about. The pressure to be the mature, to be responsible, to live up to the expectations of others for good or for ill – the same stuff that got me fifteen and a half years of report cards without a C was what kept me in a toxic relationship until my entire livelihood was piled in a big heap and lit on fire.

The other problem was that, well, it was Alabama – I didn’t have to study all that hard. Or even at all. I did the homework, obviously, but that was to make sure I got full credit. Because I didn’t have to study, I didn’t – and as a result, when I finally landed in Nashville, it was without any of the sorts of skills that you have to have to be successful in a real school. I came to grad school with an abbreviated attention span, little ability to read beyond skimming, and oblivious to the fact that being a successful PhD scholar requires patience, endurance, and a dedication to the field that, if I’m honest, I was simply not capable of. My friends who went the distance – and they know who they are – get to be called “Doctor” as much as they like, because that’s something you don’t back into, you don’t stumble into – you carve it out of granite with your fingernails. By contrast, I’ve always felt ambiguous about my second degree as anything but a laundering program for my first – three years of seminars, no thesis, and three flunked prelims are hardly the stuff a proper Master’s is made of.

I think a lot of times, when you’re a grownup at last, there’s a sense of relief that you don’t have to go through that kid shit anymore. For me, though, it’s coupled with an uneasy sense that I somehow missed out on that kid shit in the first place, and missed something important as a result, something I’d need later in life. It’s possible that being the mature one from the outset means that you don’t learn how to become mature, which is the sort of thing that can bite you in the ass later in life. Or worse, lead to unexpected fits of immaturity as you try to make up for what you think you missed. Or you learn the wrong lessons, like if at first you don’t succeed, flounder in despair and be lost. Or, if you’re really a self-absorbed prick, you just fret and blog at length about how that ship has sailed and how the kind of stuff you wish you’d done is stuff you really can’t do anymore and you just have to live with the gaping void in your soul and WAH WAH WAH WAH, even I’m sick of myself now, shut up and take some more pills. =)