I went through my entire life so far believing, even when I felt hopeless about it, that I must have some shred of intelligence somewhere within me. I allowed people around me who didn't know any better to convince me of it, probably partially because I was an (even) dumb(er) kid and partally because of my obviously defective personality. I alternated between struggling and giving up, trying so hard to excel in what I thought were my strengths and totally neglecting what I thought were my weaknesses, to go to high school, to go to college when there was never any point to it all. I can't decide if I hate myself more because I am stupid, or because I feel ashamed that I'm not an intellectual of even the lowest order. It's just so humiliating and it feels so horrible to think that I've been so conditioned to give off a facade of intelligence that's almost convincing, only to have the people around me whose approval I would actually seek to see through it so quickly and look at me with pity or disdain in their eyes when they try to engage me on their level and realize how stupid I am. I don't know what to do anymore. I don't have anything going for me in my life and I don't have the personality or intellectual capacity to enable me to struggle to improve myself. It's getting more and more difficult not to think of my death in the near future as a rapidly approaching certainty.
>>33341423 (OP)You probably are intelligent and it's dispersed among a lot of topics. Intelligence isn't just something measured in your ability to regurgitate book-learned material. What do you consider the weaknesses that you didn't improve on?
>>33341423 (OP)If you were stupid, you wouldn't have this level of self-awareness. You are probably intelligent, but you have not focused on single subjects. I'm a reasonably smart guy, but I tell everyone I'm dumb so I can wow them every single time.
I don't know what dominoes are knocking over in your life to make you sink into this headspace right now. Find a distraction to keep yourself from spiraling. You won't feel much better about it, but you won't be obsessively thinking about it because several other things went bad at the same time
>>33341448At this point, it's obviously everything, it just took me a longer time to realize it depending on what it was. I used to think I wasn't good at natural sciences so I ignored all those subjects. I was good at languages so I focused on that, but I couldn't ever approach fluency in anything I studied nor could I understand the technical side of linguistics. I thought I enjoyed art like books and movies, but I forget them all after I consume them and trying to read or understand theory or criticism causes my brain to shut itself off. I have to try so hard to engage with difficult things but it doesn't provide me any form of stimulation and I forget all of it anyway. Nothing does.
>>33341483Do you have ADHD, or just chronically dopamine deprived?
>>33341467Maybe it's funny but it is true, there was a definite cause to me coming here to make this post. I was attempting to write a paper for college and was overwhelmed by how superior (intellectually) the author I was using as a primary source, and the author I was writing about, were to me. I was reading all of these very dense and complex (I don't even know if they are, but they are to me) writings and hating myself because I spent the last hour, basically, plagiarizing a short one-page biography by translating it and using the same two or three sentence forms over and over again. But I feel the humiliation all the time.
>>33341493I don't think so. I have no idea. I wasn't diagnosed with anything as a kid.
>>33341423 (OP)intellect is something you practice and develop, not a mysterious inner quality that makes itself known randomly one day
>>33341673You either have the capacity for it or you don't, though. I don't, or my effort would have amounted to something.
