Last year, I joined MENSA.
From Chainsawman. I edited this image; Power doesn’t actually say that.
As a joke, mostly.
But also because it was a childhood dream of the Maya who picked up that those in my intersecting social categories were often dehumanized, who realized that she was good at school, who yearned for meritocracy to be a real deciding factor in the world, and who believed that education was the path to a successful and prosperous future.
That Maya religiously read Marilyn vos Savant in the Parade and idolized the likes of Marie “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas” Curie and Rosalind Franklin.
That Maya never set foot in a public school other than the year-end assessments that she never studied for but still completed so quickly that she was often allowed to leave 15 minutes before the other kids.
That Maya wanted to do the crosswords but knew she wouldn’t get all the cultural references, so got really into Sudoku instead. (I also got into Kakuro and Hitori and Kenken/Kendoku and nonograms and…)
That Maya got into classical music because she thought that’s what smart people did and discovered that while chanson, lieder, most opera and the majority of the Baroque and Classical periods were not her taste; Modernist and Postromanticist conductors were actually so good they could make you cry?
(Hearing Rachmaninov or Ravel live is a spiritual experience, I swear to God.)
That Maya tried to get into twelve-tone and atonal music, and even saw Milton Babbitt perform in undergrad—because that’s what smart people listen to, right? But nope, not for me.
That Maya studied Philosophy in undergrad because she believed it would make her writing better.
(Oh, Past-Maya, you sweet, stupid, innocent dumbass).
Power did actually say this, though.
(Remember to read the speech bubbles from right-to-left!) Power’s IQ is at least 500, maybe 1000. Like, wow. I really admire her.
My younger self wanted to be High-IQ partly because she wanted to live against the stereotypes on Black people—although this older, jaded Maya knows that would only make me a token or exception to the rule.
And while the past Maya was too poor for one of those childhood IQ tests rich parents arrange and was too sheltered for one of those gifted-kid referrals public schooled kids get, she did take an online test once as a teen and proudly and confidently raised her hand when a community college teacher asked if anyone in the room had ever take an IQ test.
I was gonna demonstrate my worth. I wanted to be seen and valued! But the teacher chastised me because, of course, an online test didn’t count.
“I meant a real IQ test,” she clarified. Even remembering fills me with shame.
I shrunk, quieted, realized how little contact I had with the Real and wondered if my self-assessment was wrong.
This is from my unofficial biography: Please Love the Useless Me. Fun fact: I got a concussion once and worried for years that it took out some of my IQ points.
That flashbulb memory was one of several formative young adult experiences that hammered into me that no, I was not that smart.
If you were intelligent, you would be able to do [specific cultural practice] without being taught.
You would know [culturally-specific knowledge] by now.
You would agree with [culturally-specific figure] regardless of your background.
Intelligence differs from knowledge, though. All knowledge is culturally specific inasmuch as we learn it from specific cultures and from being in specific places. It's too easy to confuse the knowledge gained through privilege (eg, having a large vocabulary because of growing up with books) with the ability to do something (eg, building that large vocabulary easily/quickly/joyfully, or whatever).
Younger me didn’t know that Knowledge =/= Intelligence, however, and neither did too many of those around me: An art teacher sneered at me for holding a boxcutter wrong, my first supervisor mocked “I thought you were a quick learner” when I used too little alcohol to clean the photostrips, and the other students in my assigned group ignored my suggestions to follow someone’s more confidently-stated idea. I internalized that they were right about my being wrong.
They were the ones out there being normal sociable humans, after all. I was just this sheltered kid with no social skills who had to watch everyone until I knew what was normal. They were right and I was learning. And I learned to make myself smaller and smaller and smaller.
Because even if I were intelligent… so what? There was a stigma against being too loud about one's strengths when that strength was intelligence. You can be loud as you want about being hot or fierce or determined or blessed, but nobody likes a smart-ass. Folks will assume you're looking down on them just for existing.
So when twenty-something Maya took a StrengthsFinder test and got all Strategic Thinking as her top five traits—well, what would I do with that? People didn’t listen to me or see me as intelligent. The traits I most valued in myself, the traits in which I was strongest were ones that would make others dislike me.
I would have to change to be liked, or so I concluded at the time.
I’m done for! 😭😭😭
Ideation? Intellection? Strategic? Learner? Analytical?
Those sound like the strengths of a mega-nerd.
So flash-forward to 2023, right around my 35th birthday and right after I was on an AWP panel about neurodivergence, when I was so floundering in my relationships and responsibilities that I decided to go to the SDSU Psychology Clinic to get evaluated for ADHD and autism. I related hard to autism memes, so it seemed like the clear diagnosis.
I am good at tests so I was also good at that test—and most of it was fun, connecting letters and making patterns with shapes and listing words (which again, has nothing to do with intelligence, only to do with knowledge. I was a goober who liked to take vocabulary quizzes and was obsessed with an obscure-words-dictionary called the Phronistery at a point, so I happen to be good at words, but that doesn’t make one smart. I’m also obsessed with Pokemon.)
I also had to give a run-down of all the Adverse Childhood Experiences I had growing up and I had 5~7. Isn’t that something? Should I be dead or in jail at that point?
(Wait, is this why I get sick so easily and often?)
me at the test-taking center
It was a taxing many-hour, many dollar, multi-session process in a toy-model of a space, sealed off from the outside world. Only once did real life intrude, and it was when I was so busy ruminating over a social interaction that I didn’t hear the proctor’s list of things to memorize and I complete botched the list. We had a whole debrief about that, how external factors can prevent you from reaching your potential.
After a point, there was this ineffable shift in how the therapist and proctor treated me. They would smile more? And seemed more careful around me? Like I was this strange and delicate specimen?
I can’t read people too well, but I came up with multiple hypotheses:
I was indeed on the spectrum and they were indeed being patient with me
my upbringing was so piteous that they felt sorry for the mess that I was
I was doing really well or surprised them or was maybe even winning at psychology with my wit and charm. (Ha, I wish)
When I got to the end of the psychological battery, we had a debrief, in which they revealed that no, it’s not ADHD that makes you a procrastinating mess—that’s probably anxiety. And it wasn’t even social anxiety, it was general anxiety. Oh, and you weren’t on the spectrum either, but you were in the top 98th percentile of smart people or whatever, one of the most intelligent people who ever paid $500+ to do tiling puzzles at that particularly clinic attached to a state school.
"You should have more faith in yourself!" they said, roughly, "You should be proud of yourself! You have skills; you have talent! You’ve overcome a lot."
I… didn’t know how to respond.
I was indeed the person my child self thought I could be, but I’d come to see that person—that goal, those values—as something to discard. I didn’t want to be a Redditor-type otaku loser, no way. It was more important to be likable or pretty or confident or charismatic or whatever got you ahead in this who-you-know-never-what-you-know world. Right?
Was it right to take pride in my intelligence? Could intelligence bolster one's self-worth? Isn't the common view that intelligence without clear financial outcomes a bad thing to value? I didn't even believe in IQ any more! I knew the racist history of the concept & the Nazirrific origins of its tests.
So sure, I struggled with a sense of intrinsic value, but would it be okay for me value this particular intrinsic trait? Shouldn’t intelligence largely be useful and/or in service of productivity? Or was that too capitalist of a viewpoint? Could I just be smart for the sake of it, learning for learning's sake, being all arete and eudaimonia because I wanted to and not because it makes me money?
I probably just laughed awkwardly at the time. “I can try.”
While I was still rethinking my whole self-image, an educational YouTuber (ie. a modern documentarian) released a vide on what IQ tests studied. My partner linked it to me, and we discussed it, the dirty eugenicist history of IQ, the useful aspects of it, the fact you can train for the test, the Flynn effect, the weird faces Mr. Tasium makes when he gets a high score but realizes he could have done better…
I recommend watching the video if you are at all interested in the concept of intelligence!
I distrusted Mr. Sium for a while for being a Google shill in that one video about self-driving cars, but I think this is a well-rounded, nuanced look at the concept. He’s def not shilling for anything here.
It was a good defense of the salvageable aspects of a flawed concept, and one that helped me be more at peace with my talents, traits, and their immeasurability. I had gotten so into devaluing myself in the ways others have devalued me that I started to think that IQ was only as meaningful as your quickest 2048 solve-time. IQ was a dumb concept, sure, but I was an evidence-driven person and this was the kind of evidence I needed.
I didn’t need to buy into the idea of IQ wholesale, I just needed to accept that there was hard evidence I have the traits I value.
I did not and will never view IQ as a reason to devalue others, but it’s nice to think of intelligence as something like processing power or just specs in general. I have a powerful processor, and that’s pretty cool! But one spec in one area does not make for superiority.
And maybe there isn’t be a clear correlation between being smart and becoming rich and famous—just look at who’s in charge of all of the world’s nations and corporations—but did it there need to be? All those dead philosophers I loved so much cared more about thinking than ruling anyway. I was likely cut from the same cloth. My talents do not lay in exploitation, so sadly I will never be a billionaire.
Meanwhile, my intelligence has been making itself useful by protecting me from cognitive decline, allowing me to see the world with richness, and maybe even protecting me from the full brunt of those ACEs I mentioned.
And that’s one of the aspects of intelligence that I’m most intrigued by: mine had to come from somewhere, so either my dad or my mom or both have uncles and aunties and cousins with genius potential just running around Detroit and Chicago, doing their thing.
Maybe some of them are also underestimated because of how they sound or look.
Maybe some of ’em didn’t get into classical music and obscure words and have developed less culturally-valued forms of knowledge.
Maybe some of thems got HIT too hard with toxic stress and they no longer test well.
Maybe, during their assessments, they got even more distracted than I did and got unrepresentative results.
I truly believe that the world is full of Black kids with genius potential—because if a rando like me is smart enough for MENSA, why not anyone else? But because we mistake knowledge for intelligence, many of them are going unseen.
I have a two-part wish for these kids: I want that humankind to value all Black people intrinsically as humans. I don’t want other kids and young adults to grow up thinking, like I did, that you need to earn worth through intelligence. But also, I want Black kids who happen to have intelligence to have their skills valued and their talents recognized. I learned this stuff over a decade+ but it would be nice if others didn’t need to.
excerpt from convo between me and bae, with a literal photo of literally me at the bottom. #bimbopilled
convo with bae excerpt. As you can see, I am so proud of my high Brain Number that I have chosen to confer similarly high Brain Numbers onto people I admire, people who have taught me things, etc
final bae convo excerpt. He calls me out whenever I claim to be too gay to do math, because he believes in me. Pretty cool, ngl. I could get used to this “loving openly and openly being loved” thing.
So yeah, I joined MENSA after qualifying last April.
I sent them a notarized version of results of my psychological battery, paid $65 for a year of dues, and have a neat little card I keep in my wallet. The next time I start to doubt myself too much, I can take out the card to admire and tell myself you know more than think you do. Trust yourself more.
The next time someone else doubtS me too much, I can take out the card to slap them with it!
I haven’t yet gone to their events, but I probably will soon, to network with a bunch of nerds who happened to have won one of the same genetic lotteries. I’m sure some of them will be insufferable, same with any group. I should probably prep myself first by listening to Jamie Loftus’ My Year in MENSA first.
This membership was a gift to that awkward past self who was bad at masking and so sure of herself she was kind of a snob at times. I want to bring back that surety, but discard the snobbery—well, except when snobbery is warranted. “Be ruthless with systems and gentle with people,” after all.
This joke with my past self is sure to intimidate some folks and inspire hater from others, but alright, fine, bring it on! My therapist encouraged me to accept myself, so here I am embracing my bigbrainededness. My head may be getting bigger, but maybe it needed a bit more size.
After all, the psychological battery revealed I didn't have autism, so I need some kind of identity to understand myself. There’s gotta be a reason I have “Persistent difficulties in sustaining relationships;” “Excessive attention to the possibility of danger (hypervigilance); “a negative sense of self involving persistent feelings of shame, guilt, failure and worthlessness;” and…