Oh you’re not a narcissist, you have a high IQ.

It must be one of the most commonly misdiagnosed conditions in the world, confusing a high IQ (including a high talent for something) for a narcissistic personality disorder. The fact is that people who cannot measure up to someone much higher in capacity than them will get a narcissistic reaction in themselves, and they want to explain the other person’s talent away or at least take some back from them: “They’re a narcissist.”

A narcissist is a person who CANNOT measure up and who needs to tell tall stories about themselves to themselves and others to measure up. This includes normal people in low-capacity people; if you are a person of low IQ and low talent, you’ll live your life trying to convince yourself you’re as good as other people; this is narcissism. If you’re a regular person surrounded by artists and philosophers, you try to measure up by coming up with BS about your own talents and skills. Living with people who are much better than you is not a nice thing to experience; this is where narcissism usually comes from – combined with white lies and well-intentioned encouragement from others, which can completely warp a person’s perception of self and give them a very unrealistic self-image.

Another form of a narcissist is a talented person who has suffered a guilt-based trauma. They’re hiding something they’re so ashamed of they don’t want anyone anywhere near themselves emotionally, and they will even use physical violence to hide their emotional trauma. (They do want someone who loves them to break through, but very few people know how to do it without getting themselves hurt in the process.) (Amber Heard apparently committed vehicular manslaughter of a friend, and if that doesn’t mess an empathic person up for life, nothing will. The fact her record was expunged as a minor probably made matters worse, as she felt she had to hide this from people.)

When neither of these things applies to you, the more likely scenario is that you’re simply smart, and people dumber than you don’t know how to handle it.

Smart people don’t necessarily go around looking like university graduates, either. They can be the drunk at the local pub, they can wind up homeless, they may be in the unemployment bracket – the reason being is that they are a threat to everybody, and they are systematically minimized, pushed aside, and vilified, attacked, and pathologized whenever possible. It is also not a sign of stupidity that a person with a high IQ couldn’t understand “big words,” but they should be quite able to learn a bunch without much of a hassle if their interest takes them there.

Smart people usually feel self-reliant; they don’t like to be taught and fed ready-chewn thoughts and ideas, making them bad students. They often test their teachers, giving them a reputation of a disruptor – but they don’t disrupt classes because they’re dumb and bored – which is also a thing – but because they are too smart for what is being taught. They do not trust the teachers over the logical caps they often leave in, particularly in oversimplified texts aimed at younger students. They are often frustrated and angry, especially intelligent boys.

It may also be that the intelligence that a person with a high IQ has is not geared toward books and academics but is highly skilled in something else, and their brain is going haywire trying to focus on the texts. They may be innovators, practical trial-and-error engineers, so to speak. They like to figure things out for themselves and are frustrated with waiting for others to tell them how things work.

They may also have a high emotional IQ which allows them to be less frustrated intellectually because in a glass full of people, there’s a lot of material to occupy your brain with without actually wasting it on books that much. An artist maybe sketches portraits of their classmates, maybe writing stories in their head while ignoring their studies, but making them no less intelligent than Picasso or Hemingway.

What do you think? You?

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