the feminist librarian reads

So, you’re anxious, you’ve been diagnosed with psychotic depression, and you also did really well on an IQ test 20 years ago. Moving forward, I think it might be helpful to separate your intelligence from the emotional and mood issues you’re confronting. Right now you’re reducing all of your challenges to this one arbitrary test you took two decades ago, a test embraced by people with exactly the sort of rigid understanding of intelligence that gives us ample reason to question their intelligence. Let’s cast aside repeated evidence that people who talk about their high IQs tend to be self-satisfied dingdongs of the highest order; I understand your reasons are very different from theirs. Nonetheless, I think you’re using this arbitrary high score as both a rationalization for your superiority complex and as a blunt weapon with which to bludgeon yourself repeatedly. This may have been your mother’s choice in the old days, but you made it your own, and I don’t think it’s serving you well.

Ask Polly: Am I Too Smart for My Own Good? – The Cut

Source: New York Magazine