Accepting That I'm Not That Smart

and letting go of the identity I clung to as a kid

I’ll just come straight out and say it—I was pretty desperate for attention as a kid.

Attention from my parents would have been my first choice, although that wasn’t often easy to get.

I don’t think they meant to not give me attention, I just think that’s unavoidable when you have that many kids. I am one of six in my family, the middle girl in a three-girl, three-boy situation. One of the babies, fifth in the line-up.

And to be honest, I was not a particularly remarkable or impressive kid. Not the prettiest, not the most athletic, not the funniest, not the most personable, and certainly not the most easygoing.

The only thing I kinda-sorta had going for me was that I was decently bright.

For context, I was homeschooled—my parents have science backgrounds, are well-educated, and are genuinely very Smart; they felt like the American public school system was not set up to cater to a wide array of personalities, learning needs, and academic interests.* My mom is very open and casual about how she felt she could simply do a better job teaching the six of us herself. We didn’t have the money for private school, and she wanted us all to get the most meaningful educational experience possible, so she decided to do it herself.**

Under my mother’s passionate tutelage, I grew into a very good little student. I could read the newspaper by the age of four, fueled not by an inner genius desperate to learn, but by jealousy that my older siblings could read and I couldn’t. I demanded to be taught to read, according to my parents, because I hated that the older kids were having conversations about books that I couldn’t follow. I would not be left out! I would read! And that was the catalyst, I think.

Once I could read, I read everything I could. Every month, my mom would load all six of us into the 15-passenger family van and we would drive an hour to the Williamsburg library, where a person could check out 20 books at one time. Every month, I spent hours picking out my 20 books, and I always finished them with plenty of time to spare before the next trip. The Williamsburg library stopped allowing non-residents of Williamsburg to hold library cards at some point in my childhood; we were all devastated.

But no matter, there was our hometown library and my mom’s personal library to wade through. Since we were homeschooled, my mom would make a personal curriculum for each kid each year, and despite her science background, she made sure to place an emphasis on English class. Each kid read all the classic works depending on their grade and age. That meant she owned them all, most of them tattered and ripped from being found in the trash, at garage sales, or in donation boxes. Why wait til I was “old enough,” I thought to myself. No reason why I can’t just read them all now!

So I did. I read every book we had, often surpassing my older siblings. And that’s when I made this incredible, life-altering discovery:

Adults were impressed and thought I was smart.

—

Honestly………….

Wow.

Finally!

Something that set me apart!

Who cares about being the prettiest, the funniest, the friendliest, or the most athletic—you can be the smartest in the room and everyone will love you!***

Literally life-changing. As soon as adults started calling me an “old soul,” I was done for. This was going to be my thing.

Little Mary Skinner—smart. Thank fucking god.

So I started clinging to that. I read even more. I mispronounced words left and right because I had never heard them spoken aloud, I had only read them in books. I turned 12 and developed Bipolar disorder (undiagnosed until I was 21), which drove me further into myself and made me even more desperate to prove I was worth something. I decided I had to score above average in every subject when we took our yearly standardized tests. I resolved to be in the top 1% on my PSATs and SATs (I made the top 1% in the PSAT, but only the top 2% in the SAT. I cried). I longed for the day I could go to college.

Once at college, I stuck to what I knew best. I majored in English and minored in Linguistics. My mom asked me what happened and what went wrong when I got my first A- as a freshman, and I cried some more. I earned university honors and departmental honors, and then joined several other honors societies for good measure. English was my forte, but I made sure to do well in science, math, and the other humanities as well. I was a well-rounded student, I made sure of it. I worked on-campus and off-campus jobs, often two or three at a time, so there was never a spare second of brain space to reflect on how depressed I was. I made to-do lists for myself every day, breaking down the simplest of tasks into their most granular parts, so the numbness I felt creeping over every part of me didn’t render me unable to function.

Wake up.

Get out of bed.

Walk to bathroom.

Brush teeth.

Brush hair.

Walk back to bedroom.

Make bed.

Open closet.

Find outfit.

Put on outfit.

Put on concealer.

Put on mascara.

Put on bronzer.

Put textbook in bag.

Put novel in bag.

Put pens in bag.

Put notebook in bag.

Put on bag.

Leave apartment.

Walk to class.

And so on and so forth, and no, I am not kidding. I had a disastrous college relationship with someone who cheated on me and literally told me it was because I made him feel inadequate because I got better grades than he did. Ouch, cheating. But oh my god…..I must be really smart.

I worked hard and graduated in three years, due partly to an accelerated schedule, and partly because I had started taking dual enrollment credits at a local community college when I was 16. Summa cum laude, baby. One Bachelor’s degree in the Arts coming right up. I was 20 years old.

Now, if you have any sort of pattern recognition, you might be able to guess what happened next. The end of college meant the end of any sort of academic learning environment where my basic ability to Read The Syllabus and Follow Instructions made me look good. In the real world, no one actually gives a fuck about your GPA or the cords and sashes you wore at graduation. When I look back at my college CV, I can see that on paper it looks like I was Pretty Smart. But now I know that I was just someone who was trying hard, who had made good grades and high performance into a game and had figured out how to play. It never came naturally; it had to be forcibly extracted from me. It was desperate. It was aching. It was short-lived. It was not sustainable and I learned that as soon as I graduated.

—

Turns out I driven myself into a state of burnout—I actually didn’t read a single book for two years after graduating because I had read so much as an English major. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was struggling with deconstructing from religion and dealing with my childhood trauma from that. I had landed a job with the government, but in the eight months it took to get approved for my Secret Clearance, I was working retail and could barely afford to eat. I had a situationship that ended up hurting worse than an actual relationship, I started getting drunk several nights a week, and just when things were getting pretty bad, they got much worse.

The undiagnosed neurodivergence I’d been steadily working through for half of my life decided it was time to be reckoned with. The bipolar came out swinging in a summer of unbridled mania and an autumn of debilitating depression. I had to quit my retail job. I kept myself in a drugged sleep using OTC sleep aids, often for days. I would wake up just long enough to use the bathroom, have a sip of water, and take more sleeping pills. This would last for most of the week, and then I would get up on the weekends so I could go out and get drunk.

I guess my behavior started raising red flags to people, because my loved ones stepped in at some point. I found myself in the doctor’s office getting blood drawn. I found myself on a therapist’s leather couch in the clothes I’d been sleeping in all week. I found myself speaking to a psychiatrist about how yes I have tried to harm myself if you absolutely have to fucking know about it. I honestly have no recollection of going to any of these places, it felt like it all just sort of…happened to me.

Things started zipping along after that. Bipolar II, rapid-cycling. Medication. Talk therapy. The Secret Clearance came in and I started working on base. I bought adult clothes from H&M with my first real paycheck, and I started looking at grad school in Wales.

And then COVID hit. I worked from home. Grad school wasn’t happening. I started dating someone. I started posting on Tiktok.

Okay, COVID lasted longer than I thought it would. I moved in with the new man. I started reading romance novels, my first books in years, and they were the gateway to me reading for fun again. Tiktok was making me money. Oh, Tiktok was actually making me a good bit of money. I hated the strictness of my job and holding that clearance. I quit my job to be an influencer.

More time goes by—oh fuck, what if being an influencer is a short-lived career? What then? Wait a second—do people think being an influencer means I’m dumb? Fuck. Let me get a certificate in editing and publishing really quick. Should I share more about my life? Should I try to be more serious? Do I need a 10 year plan? A 20 year plan? Wait, why am I developing OCD? What do you mean you can be bipolar AND OCD? New medication, new therapist, new apartment, second new apartment, let’s get a dog.

Jesus Christ I’m 25. I’m married. I’m moving to a different country. I’m packing my entire life into boxes and putting them on a cargo ship. I’m still an influencer. I like it a lot, actually. I haven’t missed that gov job a single time. I don’t have a 5 year plan, I don’t even have a 1 year plan. I’m just trying to move.

Okay, I live in Scotland.

Now what.

Wait…..

Now what.

Now what?

Now what-

Now what. Now what? Actually, genuinely, honestly, now what?

—

Look, if the last few paragraphs felt a little stilted and rushed to read, know that that’s how they felt to live. I’m 27 now, years removed from the chaotic girl who would cry at getting an A-. I’ve lived in the UK for over a year, I’m still a full-time influencer, and I still don’t reallyyyyyy know what I’m doing. And in this last year, as I’ve adjusted to a new culture, a new city, and a new life, I’ve gotten to know the ugliest, most insecure, most toxic parts of myself.

There’s something about starting your life over in a totally new place that holds this mirror up to your soul, forcing you to examine every bit. You can be a new person when you move, because nobody knows you. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody has to know that you weren’t the funny kid growing up, because you can be funny now, and then everyone will just think you’ve always been funny. They don’t have to know any different. You can decide who to be. You can decide what parts of yourself to present and what parts to hide away. What a glorious opportunity—and what a sickening truth.

—

I guess at some point, to put it bluntly, I realized that trying to cling onto this identity of “being smart” really wasn’t going to work out. And I realized, with a little knot of dread in my stomach, that it had never been true in the first place.

—

In the midst of figuring out the person I was becoming in my new life, I understood something about the person I had always been. I just…….wasn’t actually All That Smart. I don’t have an inner genius. I don’t have a million unique ideas. I am not a gifted prodigy or wunderkind. It’s not very often that I am bringing something completely radical and groundbreaking to the table. There’s a lot of things I don’t know. I’m absolutely terrible at geography and I’ve almost completely forgotten math beyond long division. I don’t have the best memory, I’m not very witty, I’m not innovative, I’m not impressively analytical. I’m just not that smart, not in the way that I really longed to be as a kid. When I was younger, I thought if there was any way I could be special, it would have to come from my mind. And adults kept reinforcing that with all their talk of old souls, so I thought that was my path in this life, and I drove myself into the ground chasing this ephemeral feeling of intelligence that was never authentic to begin with. I wanted to be the Smart Girl, because if I wasn’t her, who was I going to be?

Don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m good at things. I’m a good reader. I have a decent vocabulary and am a proficient speller, mainly from reading. I am a quick learner. I can follow instructions, which means I can figure out most things that come up in my day to day life. I can build IKEA furniture, change a tire, file taxes, bake bread, use Excel, and write an essay—because I know how to follow instructions. That’s a kind of intelligence in itself, and I know that I have that.

I know I’m good at being vulnerable, I know I’m good at expressing myself. I know I have some savvy surrounding self-employment, building a social media following, and creating content, simply because I am….doing those things.

Maybe most importantly, I am a deeply curious person. Letting go of feeling like I must be smart has given me the confidence to admit that I don’t know most things, so I don’t feel embarrassed asking questions or acknowledging my own lack of understanding. Because I am not That Smart, I get to be curious. I get to chase learning and want to know more.

I used to look at the world and feel ashamed and sick over all my inadequacies, because I was meant to be a smart girl who knew things, but now I get to look at the world and feel excited by a dazzling landscape of unknown possibilities.

So when I say that I’m not All That Smart, I’m genuinely not speaking down on myself. I’m not fishing for validation and I’m not even worried about it—not anymore. I’ve come to accept this about myself.

And it’s so, so freeing.

I don’t feel any need to live up to this fictitious version of myself that was cool and enlightened and interesting, because she never existed anyway. I’ve found worth and meaning elsewhere, and have worked hard to enrich my life in ways that are more authentic to me. Maybe I’m Not That Smart, but I’ve built a life worth having anyway. I love my dog and husband, and I have good friends. I live in an old, beautiful house in Edinburgh. I accomplished my lifelong goal of moving out of the US. I have more financial freedom than I ever had growing up, and I use it to travel and see more of the world. I think the work I do online is somewhat helpful to some people, judging by the positive and affirmative messages I get every day (which I feel extraordinarily humbled and blessed to receive, and have never taken for granted, ever).

I have slowly stopped feeling like I must be something or another in order to be special, to deserve to be here, and have slowly starting feeling significant in this universe simply because I live here.

And I’m not the Smart Girl. I don’t know who I am, I just know I’m not her. I’ll never be her, which gives me the availability to try to be something else.

I was a kid who wanted to be special, and being smart felt like the only way to be seen as valuable. Then I grew up and created a meaningful life anyway.

Mary Skinner, Pretty Average All Things Considered. And actually, quite a bit happier than before.

---

*And to be fair, it isn’t!! Not then and especially not now, not when our fucking MAGA government is banning books, dismantling the Department of Education, and underpaying teachers!!!!!

**Note—my thoughts on homeschooling are extremely nuanced and complicated. I was lucky that my parents had the educational background necessary to do a good job with it, but I have personally witnessed homeschooling and well-meaning-but-woefully-underqualified parents literally destroy their childrens’ chances at a number of careers and futures. Maybe that deserves a separate post. Okay anyway.

***Except I was literally never the smartest in the room anywhere and that’s like the entire point here…but a girl could dream