If you think about it, intelligence is a physical thing, right? Folds in the brain, wrinkles—something. Some physical feature equips one person’s brain for faster, more accurate processing than another person’s. This occurs to me because of the relief I feel after being diagnosed with autism. All my life I felt ashamed because of my faulty reactions (recurrent confusion, glitchy eye contact) and now it turns out these things weren’t my fault. I’m just built that way, that’s all. But somebody dumb can say the same thing—they’re just built that way. So where am I?
Decades ago, when I was young, a psychoanalyst told me maybe I’d suffered some sort of brain damage in the womb, and hence my clumsiness and my trouble with simple mechanical relations. He was surprised that I liked the idea. Who wants to be defective goods? But I’d rather be someone who’s built wrong, not someone who chooses wrong. All my life I felt I could get my head straight and function like everyone else if I just tried hard enough. I kept on not getting my head straight and not functioning, so obviously I wasn’t trying hard enough. And what a flaw that is, to be someone who won’t do what it takes. Now I have my diagnosis and I can feel that I do my utmost just like any person of good character. The problem is that my utmost, or anybody’s, can’t shift wiring inside the brain. So I’m a defective piece of goods, but I don’t have a defective character. That’s how I see it anyway. The same for dumb people? Okay. Your dumb person doesn’t slack off from the effort of thinking; they do what they can with what they have, which isn’t much. And if they don’t, they commit the same error as many smart people, that of being a fool.
You pass a long night on a hot sheet, and at three or so you roll over and the sheet is cool—for a while. Maybe if I’d started with the idea that my brain wiring was screwed, I might feel relief on deciding that I hadn’t been shortchanged, that I hadn’t been doomed by nature, that I might finally get somewhere if I just made the decision. Or that I would’ve got somewhere if, etc. I’d feel rueful about my lost chances but content that I was intact, a complete human edition. But no, I’d kick myself to death.
At the heart of being a neurotic is the idea that you keep making the wrong choice over and over. You’re helpless because of fatal programming from long ago. But you’re implicated because there isn’t a force moving your hands, there’s just you making your dumb choices and you’re doing it because you can’t overcome your dumb thinking. A circle of wrong lessons surrounds you, and you can’t jump it because… Because what? Oh, you know. Out there lies the life a full-fledged person could enjoy and you stay inside, too scared to make your move.
But I’m surrounded by something else, physical circumstance. Without an MRI no one can see the circumstances, so my situation reads as the situation of the helpless neurotic. No, I’m the plucky disabled person. Still not full-fledged as a person, but I’ll take it. I could be pluckier, sure. That’s my regret in life: that I didn’t get together a load of pluck back at 13 or 14. But I do have some pluck. I’ve got a misbegotten, absurd condition wrapped about my head and I’ve managed to stagger on and live my life. I’m not weak, I’m disabled, and for now that’s all I know.