For the Savants* about the Normal Person*

Explaining why things get weird sometimes.

You can be considered a Savants* for your high need to be a success and to carve your own way, to make the world a better place and also, to make your own choices freely and without external pressure or expectation; you deem yourself the best judge of what is best for you and also you hold a strong responsibility of others and sometimes you feel that you either cannot be responsible for others at this time (and therefore leave them to someone more suitable) or you feel if you are responsible for the lives of others, you will need free hands to make your choices; after all, if someone makes your choices for you, then you are no longer the one who is responsible, are you?

You chose this section, because you have a great sense of personal responsibility towards everyone else in a way that you don’t want to be in anybody’s way and want to pull your weight and be helpful to other people without wanting to be helped in return. You stand alone because you feel relying on other’s help would be cowardly or taking advantage of them – hiding behind someone else’s back when you should be taking responsibility yourself. You are happiest when going gets tough, and hate it when your work means nothing or is the kind that “anyone” could do it, or something that has been dictated on you by someone else. You love challenging yourself and you have a great need of achievement. You do like to be praised for what you do – but never without credit, you hate empty accolades and consolation prices that only make you feel like rubbing your failure in your face, but when you have duly deserved your thanks, you love every minute of it, and you also love to praise those who deserve praise themselves. You put more value on (mutual) respect than love, even though you are more than capable of feeling all emotions in the spectrum.

You will find it relatively easy to understand where the Normal Person* are coming from because their thinking is always based in safety first, but the same isn’t necessarily true in reverse. They put such little value on personal achievement, respect, and independence, that people who work towards these things to them seem juvenile and maldeveloped.  The Normal Person* also feel like they have to be a part of everything their loved ones are involved in, making the Savants* feel obstructed, suffocated and observed to the point of feeling like you’re living under a microscope and untrusted… In many ways, like a child.

You work well in teams that are made off other the Savants* who think alike, but you shiver at the thought of being a member of a team that is partly made of the Normal Person*, especially if they are free to interfere in your personal area of responsibility. Every team needs their superstars, and you are one of them (in the making). If the idea of standing on a podium to accept the well-deserved player-of-the-year-award makes you feel like you’ve let your team down, then you are not a Savants* but Grounded. A Normal Person* would feel like they are receiving credit for something that belongs to the whole team, but a Savants* would only say so, but not really mean it – the award belongs to whomever it belongs to, whoever put in the hours, whoever brought in the talent, whoever was in the best form for that year. An Savant* naturally takes a position that the Normal Person* would hate to take; why a bass player chooses a bass guitar instead of the lead, why a drummer chooses drums instead of being the front man – a choice a Savants* has hard time wrapping their mind around and only can explain it thusly: “They are not very good musicians, otherwise they would have insisted on fronting the band or playing the lead guitar…” An Savant* could take the position of a drummer or a bass player only if they are denying that they really want to front the band and feel like someone has to grab the bass. The Normal Person* simply don’t want to be separate from the band, they want to be a part of a band, that’s why they are in a band to begin with! A Normal Person* loves the idea of a choir, and loathes the idea of being the soloist- my Grounded mum always wanted me to join a choir and shivers ran down my back: “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?!” To me, the idea of joining a choir of less than perfect singers who all were doing it “for fun” (as in without personal responsibility to shine and to be the best there is) was not my idea of enjoyment. The idea of a choir to me felt like a pile of rocks strapped in my back, a ridicule implying that I am not good enough, confident enough and talented enough to go on stage on my own – which I absolutely loved to do. My mother suggesting I should join a choir to me sounded as if she would blatantly say: “I am too embarrassed to listen to you sing solo, please join the choir so the others will drown you out.” When what she meant was: “Because you sing so well and you love singing, you should join a choir so you could hang out and spend time with others who sing well and enjoy singing” but to me the others did not sing well enough, and clearly didn’t take it seriously enough because they were singing in a choir!

A Normal Person* loves the idea of unity. They love to pull in together. They thrive on taking on a mutual goal and then working tirelessly and selfishly toward the mutual goal. They love helping each other out and being helped – although a Savants* doesn’t mind helping people out at all (because they are capable doing so without major extra effort on their part) they hate being helped in their turn. LOATHE it. That makes the Savants* feel incompetent, insecure about what is expected of them and whether or not they’re supposed to be doing what they were told to do, because if someone first tells you to do something and then watches over your shoulder when you do it, they should really be the one doing it themselves, don’t you think? The Normal Person* just doesn’t want you to feel left to the job alone, poor thing, and that is what we hate. “If you ask me to do something, bugger the hell off and let me do it! If you have to sit here and see if I do it right, ask someone else to do it, someone who you actually trust to do it or do it yourself!” they think.

The same thing applies with parenting and relationships in general. A very good example would be that a Grounded wife marries a Savants* husband. The day their first child is born, the Grounded wife would helpfully, with an intention to make her husband feel included, advice him on how to hold the baby. Two things happened in the Savants*’s mind right now: “What do you mean ‘make him feel included’? Aren’t I the father and thus already in this whether I like it or not?!” Secondly, because a Savants* never advices anyone until they know they are doing something horribly wrong, he reacts by thinking: “She thinks I’m stupid. She thinks I can’t even hold my own baby! I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but she knows I can’t do it! I’m not cut out for this!” And at that moment, the High Flying husband starts to withdraw from the child and the mother, because he feels he’s not a good enough as a father and the last thing he wants to feel is incompetent with his own child. Remember that the Savants* have a strong sense of responsibility and if they feel they are not cut out for a task, they will quickly withdraw from that position to prevent damage due to their incompetence. “Why did she even marry me if she thinks she has to tell me to hold the head while I hold the baby, what does she think, I’m an idiot or something, what does she think I’ll do, twist the head right off and use it for a football?!” Because he feels such huge responsibility for being a father, he cannot handle the thought of not being capable of doing it, and the more he doubts his abilities, the more his Grounded wife is going to try and help him to overcome his insecurities but in reality makes him even more insecure every time she tries to make him feel better because he keeps thinking: “She wouldn’t say that if I wasn’t terrifyingly BAD at what I’m trying to do here!” At the same time, her the Savants* husband never helps her at anything, because he doesn’t want to make HER feel like an idiot, but rather than feel competent, she’ll feel let down and that her husband is not pulling his weight and insists she does all the work and takes all the responsibility. If she confronts him and accuses him for slacking off, he’ll throw it right back saying “YOU DON’T TRUST ME TO DO ANYTHING RIGHT!!” He is too ashamed to tell her he feels insecure (due to her molly coddling), because as a Savants*, being competent and portraying competence is important, and also, knowing one’s own place in a team without attempting bigger tasks than you can confidently handle is a big no no because doing so is potentially lethal to the other team members, especially when children are concerned. An Savant* expects everyone to be responsible for their own turf, and if you feel insecure you take yourself out of the game before you do something stupid that costs someone’s life or a whole lot of money to fix. And the Normal Person* is like designed to make a Savants* feel incompetent.

As a Savants*, he has to figure out what he’s doing wrong, but since he isn’t actually doing anything wrong, he can’t figure out what it is that he’s doing wrong, but his wife is continually “pointing out” he cannot do what she’s asking him to do by constantly trying to help him to perform the simplest of tasks. As she grows more and more frustrated with his lack of participation in the family affairs, she’ll start asking him to do less and less while taking on more and more on herself to pick up the slack, and he feels he’s not good enough to do anything around her! If you are a Savants* husband with a Grounded wife, you could talk yourself into taking the pants back and giving her guidance rather than the other way around. She would feel better for it because the Normal Person* loves to be helped to do anything, and you would feel like a man again. Although not all women are Grounded nor all men are the Savants*, the chances are that this is the most common configuration. (There’s a reason for that, but I won’t get into it now.)

A Normal Person* wants a lot of help. It makes them feel important and cared for. An Savant* wants as little help as possible, it makes them feel competent, trusted and needed.

The Savants* don’t mind a challenge, but the Normal Person* do. The Grounded doesn’t want to ‘earn’ or ‘deserve’ anything as much as they want to be given to. For the Normal Person*, the most romantic notion is that they are loved for no reason, but to a Savants* this doesn’t even make sense! If the love falls to you without your own merit, what is it worth anyway? Nothing. Not a damned thing, and what makes you different from everyone else around you? Why wouldn’t your spouse simply take off at the sight of someone else if who you are and what you can do means nothing to them? The explanation: The Normal Person* form alliances. They don’t really care with whom as long as that person is safe and dependable and available all at the same time. Once the alliance is made, it is never broken unless the person they have aligned themselves with turns out to be a bigger danger than the outside world.

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