Published on 12, July, 2020
Or are you like me? Expecting at any moment to be outed as an intellectual fraud. It's an area of high,possibly pathological,insecurity for me. I think it connects to the bullying related trauma. Being treated as a lesser person by my school age contemporaries, especially as a teenager.
I don’t ever feel intelligent, my IQ is higher than most but I struggle in different ways. I’m not very good at reading or writing, that has often made me feel stupid, I can still remember an English teacher laughing at my spelling of quite simple words. I just don’t see words in the same way as most others, I now recognise that it’s most probably dyslexia not stupidity.
I can do things that neurotypical people find quite hard but then I often fail to understand something like a joke and then feel stupid. I suppose there are many different ways to measure cleverness, I just tend to plod on and not worry about other people too much.
Roy said: I often fail to understand something like a joke
I've never been good at that. With a lot of stand up comedians/comediennes I'm thinking 'what's so funny about that?' Ditto a lot of comedy shows.
Is it that you fail to understand a joke, or that the "joke" really wasn't funny and you're the only one honest enough to admit to it? I'm the same with a lot of comedy, recently there seems to be a trend for humiliation either of others or more often the self, I find them excruciating to watch, fingers scratching down a blackboard painful. I get told I don't have much of a sense of humour, but I do, it's just more QI than Miranda. Plus as so much comedy is about identifying with it, they talk about things I don't understand or have little or no experience of.
firemonkey said:I've never told a joke.
I'm not really one for telling jokes either, but in my case it's because I'm hopeless at remembering jokes. I can tell amusing anecdotes, but whether other people consider them amusing is an entirely different matter.