(Un)Informed

Someone once told me that being smart is stupid.

Granted, it was said somewhere between three and four second after the speaker punched me in the eye, leaving me doubled over in some back, rusty corner of the play structure.

I suppose it was that made the memory stick. The oxymoron and the smell of rusty metal and the way I could still see the impact under my rapidly swelling eyelid.

I’d have that black eye for four days.

I’ve had that memory for nine years.

~~~

I’ve seen enough pictures of starving people in Africa that on days I hurt too much to eat I feel a guilt that matches in intensity the way my stomach rages against the concave surface of my ribs.

I’m a pescetarian and a person of gastrointestinal disfunction, but it’s not that that makes me cringe when my grandmother tries to make me eat seconds.

It’s the guilt of the extra food being served.

It’s the knowledge.

~~~

I have often considered that people might like me more if I was not as smart as I am. If the words “catharsis”, “cacography”, and “billingsgate” weren’t regular parts of my vocabulary, if I wasn’t able to have extensive conversations on the values and properties of the Fibonacci Sequence.

Maybe they’d avoid me less at lunch, and maybe they’d stop coming to me pretending to be friends just to get help with their homework.

Maybe I could be sure that the people who want me around want me around for being me, not for being the way I just happen to be.

~~~

I am all too often the victim of well-intentioned diagnostics. The most common of which being those who try to diagnose me with Aspergers Syndrome. Which doesn’t bother me the way it might bother others. It just bothers me when they try to do it with only media-provided knowledge of the syndrome at hand.

I may have Aspergers Syndrome. I am aware and relatively unbothered by this. I don’t have a medical diagnosis to confirm this, just a friend who does have it and a plethora of reading material should I chose to investigate.

Which I haven’t, not really.

Which is why it’s frustrating when people take that one facet of me, the inability to make eye contact, and extrapolate. And even more so when they go and inform me as to what I have without even trying to consider the rest of me.

~~~

I am not a list of symptoms. I am not a syndrome personified. I am not a lab rat, and I am not an experiment. Treating me as such will not result in friendly interaction

It doesn’t matter if I have Aspergers syndrome. It won’t change me. I could ask my pediatrician. I could ask my neurologist.

But I haven’t because it won’t change me. I’m Meghan.

~~~

I view jigsaw puzzles and words the same way: things that are composed of little bits, and things I can, and ought to, take apart and put together.

I am obsessed with puzzles of all kinds, and have an extensive vocabulary that is not to be trifled with.
And I’m very rarely a victim of cacography, what with the synesthesia and all.

I don’t necessarily believe that these are bad things. I don’t think it’s bad to understand the words I’m using, or use words that I understand.

You can think that if you want. That’s none of my business. But please hold the billingsgate, I’ve had enough of that in my life.

I am not a commodity to be bought and sold. I am a person. Take it or leave it. Take all of me or leave all of me. You can’t befriend my mind and not my heart.

~~~

I’d rather feel guilty about having food when others don’t then not feel anything at all. Having compassion and empathy isn’t something I don’t enjoy. It isn’t something I don’t need.

It’s important.

I’d rather be informed then uninformed of the problem’s in the world. I’d rather be knowledgeable then not.

~~~

Telling something that it’s stupid to be smart is an oxymoron, and thus foolish as part of an argument.

That is all.