Normalcy

People's attitudes to intelligence can tell you a lot about their insecurities. When I was a kid I learned quite early in my life that people only valued your intelligence as long as they didn't perceive it as a threat, and as long as it didn't make them feel inadequate. I was top of my class for a time, but that position made me a target for bullies to the point where I intentionally dumbed myself down in school. I didn't see the merit in pushing to be first when all that got me was hostility from those around me. This held true throughout my Primary and Secondary Education, I did what I needed to pass each class with a comfortable margin and made little effort to apply myself further.

This drew the ire of teachers who accused me of not taking my education seriously, I pushed back out of spite and sat at the top of my class in a handful of subjects again mainly to shut up the teachers not because I had a vested interest in doing well. I was already being bullied for other reasons at that point, so it didn't make much difference to me.

What this whole experience taught me however was that your perception of how easy or how difficult something is for someone to do, should not depend on their level of success that you perceive them to have in that endeavour. What I mean by this is not to assume the most successful person in a field finds it easy, and not to assume that those with limited success are actually struggling. More often than not, success is determined quite literally by determination. Ability is a factor of course but it isn't the limiting factor.

This whole topic of conversation arose recently when I finished first in the Diamond Tournament on Duolingo the fourth time I've actually pushed to finish first. I pushed because it gave me added motivation to devote to the Spanish course that I am using it for at the moment. I also regularly visit the Duolingo Reddit and I'm very aware of the level of proficiency that most people who use Duolingo have when it comes to their main language focus. This factor has cropped up before when discussing Friend Quests on Duolingo too - namely the perceived effort the other person or people are making.

The irony of this whole conversation is that when you are an over-achiever as the moniker so often applied, your efforts lead you to a false sense of inadequacy. Your extreme focus and achievements become normalised to the point where you project expectations and falsely perceive pressure from those around you to meet those expectations, when in reality what you have already achieved is more than most will.

As a writer this is a particularly insidious thought, I have published six books of fiction mainly centred on Queer characters and their experiences, one textbook teaching people how to program in Java, and a reference manual teaching people how to read Tarot cards and use them for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. My sense of over-achievement kicks in however when I consider the first book was published in 2012, which is now 12 years ago. With 8 published works my mind immediately averages this out and the desire to put out at least 1 book a year as an arbitrary target kicks in and I feel inadequate for not having met that target.

The reality is that writing a novel is not an easy task, my longest work of fiction, The Prince Of Shadows is 98,000 words and 389 pages in length, my Java textbook is 30,000 words and 79 pages in length, and my Tarot book is 74,000 words and 285 pages and involved the greatest amount of research. These are by no means easy tasks to accomplish, the fact I finished writing them in the first place is an achievement let alone publishing them. The default mindset though is to frame what you have achieved against what you could have achieved, but that's a fool's errand because you're always going to be framing it against something more than you have achieved.

In the context of Duolingo, I have a 466 day streak at the moment, I can easily complete practice lessons in under a minute, some I can complete in 30 seconds or so with 100% accuracy, I can rack up 10's of thousands of XP in a week when I push myself to do that but seeing so much feedback online as to how hard it is for other people to do this is serving as a reminder for myself that I expect so much from myself because of what I know I am capable of, not because it's something anyone else actually expects me to achieve.

I am aware this whole post may read like a humble brag but to be honest if that's how it comes across to you then this probably isn't something you vibe with and that's okay. This will resonate with some people and that's who it's written for. The key point is that the expectations you build up for yourself shouldn't be defined only by what you perceive as normal, because normal is a misnomer, normal is relative, normalcy as an objective concept doesn't actually exist because the definition would have to be so broad to encompass a majority that it would render it useless.