Smart enough to know better

School was not a good place for me. It wasn't a good place for my kids. It was a place where I was given the label of gifted so I was obviously smart enough to know better. But I was a problem. The same was true for my kids. Five days a week, for nine months out of the year, for seven hours a day this was the underlying message my children and I were taught: You are a problem, and you're smart enough to know better.

I remember back when my youngest was in elementary school the biggest issue with him every year was that he was not fast enough at multiplication. You wouldn't think something like that could do enough damage to a kid that he would think he was actually incapable of learning and stupid from age 6 until an IQ test at 16 finally showed him he definitely is not stupid, but it totally did. The objective was to do multiplication fast and because he couldn't do it he got in trouble. Shamed in front of the class. For years. His slow processing and calculations were seen as defiance, because he is, obviously, smart enough to know better.

Something similar happened with my oldest. She likes to know why. Not as a way to question authority (she doesn't see the hierarchy), but because if she knows why things make more sense and she can see the usefulness of doing something. And she was fast, finishing most assignments with painful amounts of time to spare. Most teachers saw her quickness as careless, and her questioning as rude. She was also, clearly, smart enough to know better.

I don't understand how when some things come easy it means it should be easy across the board. How when some things are hard for people who find some things easy we label them with names like defiant, disruptive, uncooperative, and problem.

I am personally processing what it is like to reconcile that just because I was "smart enough to know better" it didn't mean I could do better. I want to lash out at the system that teaches there is only one way to be a good human, and if you are seen as smart you'd better have it all the way together. No matter how hard I tried I could not understand how to get all the way there. I imagine myself as a little girl and I feel how hard it was to arrive at school, then sit in class every day, go to lunch, go to the playground, ride the bus home.

It feels like I was in another country, one where I didn't speak the language or understand the customs, but appeared to fit in. Usually in the movies or tv shows when characters act like they belong somewhere they don't it only takes part of the movie or one episode for the person to get found out, because it's actually so obvious they don't know better, instead I was in a fifty-three year long day in day out movie marathon where the denouement kept getting postponed.

It's been about a year and a half since I first started thinking that I might be autistic. In wintertime 2024 I took all the online autism assessments recommended to me by my therapist and then when I told her how definite they all were she backed away from it and pointed more strongly to anxiety and depression, once again delaying the big reveal. Once again me just needing to try harder. Five decades later, I was still smart enough to know better.

But the momentum was there, and now, well. Now I know. And it hurts. It hurts so much to look back at my life and see me being tossed and thrown by who I am and how I was labeled as difficult, too much, a problem- and how much worse it was because I'm "smart enough to know better". I leaned in to fulfilling that problem label- growing more frustrated, angry, and confused year after year. Proving them right because no one would tell me exactly how to know better. I believed what I was taught: it was me. I was the problem, and I searched so hard for a solution because I believed I should have known better. I can touch the intense longing for the answers in my memory, it zips right to the surface because I feel it every single day. I should know better, but...HOW? WHAT?

And. I have also managed to build a beautiful life for myself. I feel incredibly proud of the fact that I figured out how to be sober and whole and healthy before my diagnoses because it confirms the deep belief I have always had in myself- that all along somewhere I knew that I was not a problem. That I didn't need an answer, I didn't need to figure out how to know better, I needed to know how to manage living. I mother my children with all of my heart because I know how hard it is to hold yourself up when nowhere feels like home. I am incredibly proud of the fact that I learned how to mother the people they are and not try to make them into who society wants me to believe they should be- problems that need fixing, ashamed that they are smart enough to know better.

I am learning to mother myself that way too. The patience and care I have gained in the past year or so has been relieving. What is most remarkable is that by changing some big things- my own internal ableism, how I think about the instructions of institutions, getting a new therapist, the way I work- I am actually getting smart enough to know and feel better. I'm learning when I need to cancel plans because I have had a week that was more full than I'd thought it would be. Or not say yes when I know I need to say no. Being understanding with myself when I feel overwhelmed. Kind. Firm. Honest.

Two places that are still really hard are asking for help and receiving care. When you're smart enough to know better, asking for help isn't in the order of operations. They make it sound so simple- Here's a thing. Do the thing. And if you don't know, You should know, you're smart. For me being cared for feels like the person is saying "You should know better." It feels bad. Logically I know that isn't the intention, but my system is not made of logic only. It's made worse by the fact that the way you're supposed to react when people are caring is with gratitude and warmth, but I feel angry and annoyed. Another thing I'm smart enough to know better.

But how do you get beyond smart enough?!? The idea that all knowledge is absorbed by osmosis, perpetuated by a world full of institutions that are too intolerant and rushed to take the time to teach ...it has created a world full of people just trying to get by, ashamed to speak up when they are unsure or don't know how to do the thing because one of the best things you can be is smart and one of the worst is to not know.

I often wonder what my life would be like if I wasn't so afraid to lose the one thing I had going for me- being seen as smart. Being seen as smart meant that I was making a choice to not know rather than just not knowing. That was different than being stupid. Being smart enough to know better was far more acceptable than being stupid.

But there were many ways I was and am stupid. And I knew it. But even my old therapist would chide me when I called myself stupid, like I was a child. Have you heard parents tell their children that stupid is a bad word? But stupid isn't a bad word! It just means all the things I experienced sometimes: being slow to learn or understand, obtuse. Showing poor intelligence or judgement. Lacking common sense. As smart as I am, I am also stupid. Both are true.

The thing I actually should have known better was that. I can be two things at the same time, and neither has to be a judgement. No one can know everything, life is full of questions, not knowing, and needing help too. Instead of thinking people should know better, we should stop assuming that because someone is great at one thing it means they're great at everything. Assuming I was smart enough to know better set me up for a lifetime of hiding and shame when I truly just didn't know or understand.

I think this assumption comes from the fact that we are in such a hurry that we need people and things to be the same for the sake of efficiency. Gross. We need people to be less complex and more compliant. Gross. If we insist that you're smart enough to know better then the blame falls on you, not the broken ass system. We really need to slow down and pay attention. The way we do things is what breaks people. People are not broken.

The way my life began is not the way it ends. This makes me so happy, that I can be a grown up with the freedom to be a curious being and investigate and learn and grow and evolve instead of be just smart in the ways that have been deemed acceptable. The freedom to be in and express the wilds and tames of my mind and my body -not to fit in- but as a life that belongs. And to do that out loud so other people see it makes sense for them to not be smart enough to know better too.