Bill Clinton has a photographic memory. Bush, had the highest emotional IQ of any other president. Abraham Lincoln taught himself law.
I am none of those people. I am smart. Compared to some. I am a complete moron, compared to many. All of my life I knew that I was somewhere in the middle. I desperately wanted to be smart. My parents told me I was no genius. I knew I was no genius. But the only way that I could get some form of approbation from my parents, was to be perfect. It meant not making mistakes, it meant to do what they say and succeed even if it was the wrong choice. It meant to be a genius, a genius I wasn’t born.
I knew I wasn’t a genius because I went to school with people smarter than me. Being GATE certified placed me in classes with smart people where I was barely average. Where I had a few good test days and I could count them on one hand. I knew I was smarter than regular classes but only because of the challenges and development created in me by the classes and the natural gift of DNA that isn’t dumb.
However, I didn’t want to be not dumb. Not dumb didn’t get me a sense of value. A sense that I wasn’t waste on this earth. A sense that I belong to be alive. A sense that I am valued by my parents. That I make them proud.
I know they are proud. I know that they love me. However, a sense of pride is fleeting in parents as it is in us. We are only as good as our latest accomplishment and our accomplishment is only good to them so long as they had a hand in it.
I am thirty-five years old. By all accounts, I am a grown man who ought not to care what his parents think. But I am human. No one in the world is as important to us as our parents and try as we might to not care what they think, which is humanly impossible for most normal people.
And that’s what I realized. I am normal. Not in what I’ve done or lived, I am unique in my experiences and my talents. I am not a genius but I realized that had I been born a genius, I would not be who I am. I would not relate to others the way I do. I would not live the life I do. I would be a slave to my genius and to the people who need it.
No one needs me besides my family. No one needs my talents. People can use my help when I give them a hand but because I am normal, well educated, and normal, I have a unique life that allows me to do good, to make mistakes to be human. That may not make my parents proud or happy. That may not make me wildly successful. But it makes me happy with who I am, what I have seen and done and it is honestly, enough for me and for those who care and love for me.
We are brought into this world by our parents. We are their biggest hope and aspiration. But we can only do as much as what we were born with. We can only hope to meet our potential and that is dependent on them and us and in the end, we all try to do our best with what we have. We must be happy with that and I think I am. At least for now.
not-rushin 