I’m Messy, So I’m Obviously a Genius

Look out, Einstein. I’m the fucking clutter Queen.

I recently read an article that said several studies have confirmed the link between clutter and creativity and between the mess and your mind. I had heard that years ago, but I wasn’t sure if it was true. It is. It also says if you curse like a sailor, you have a definite marker of intelligence. Fuckin’ A!

Messy, cluttered people tend to be smarter and more creative. Some say it’s the hallmark sign of a genius. Look out, world, because that makes me the most intelligent person alive.

I’m a mess.

Not in the emotional sense. Strangely, I seem to be on track these days, remaining even-keeled. I try to see the world with wide-eyed wonder. To be childlike in viewing my life and the humans in it without being or acting childish. Make sense? Can you follow my brilliance thus far? Oh, good. :)

I’m a certified, shameless, utterly Messy Person. I am hopeless. My desk looks like a shambles, but I know where everything is.

In my family, we have superhero names for our alter egos. My family named me Tornado. The reason? I can fill a room with my energy and light and make you feel better, but you’re gonna have to pick up something I left behind; I can’t help it. It’s like I walk in and swing in a circle, and my physical belongings fly from me in all directions. I leave a trail wherever I go. I am a Tornado.

When I was a kid, I was a guinea pig at my elementary school from the age of five. I started Montessori at a year and a half old, already speaking in full sentences. By the age of three, I could read and write — in print and cursive. (I wish they still taught cursive in schools, along with most other subjects that don’t exist anymore)

When kindergarten came around, my parents decided to enroll me in public school. At the time, my school district was one of the best in the nation. I was even interviewed in fifth grade by Newsweek magazine, which came to my school to highlight all the accelerated opportunities the school offered.

However, at age five, they’d never seen someone with precociousness like me. I showed up to Kindergarten with my latest book, a Nancy Drew mystery. The teacher got right to business and said, “Okay, we’ll start the day with reading time,” so I got up, went to my new cubby, and grabbed the book.

“Elle B! WHAT are you doing?” My teacher positively screeched at me. The rest of the class was sitting down on the carpet, criss-cross-applesauce.

“Getting my book for reading,” I replied. Slowly. Maybe the teacher was dumb, I thought. It was pretty gods damned obvious what I was holding.

“This is NOT PRETEND TIME. I read to the class, not you pretending.” Oh, I had dealt with grown-ups like her many times; they never believed a kid could read for some reason.

“I’m not pretending!” How dare she insult me? “I can read.”

“Oh yeah? Then read to me out loud.”

I shrugged. Began to read aloud. After half a paragraph, she grabbed me by my ear and then roughly escorted me to the office.

“I don’t know why she’s in kindergarten, and she’s disrupting the class,” that sorry bitch of human trash said. She dumped me there and left. The school secretary ran to get the principal. Oh my fucking God, I was getting sent to the principal’s office on the first day of school. I wanted my Montessori, where I could get up and learn whatever I wanted.

Mr. M, the principal, came out a moment later and ushered me into his office. He was tall, spindly, and balding, with brown wispy hair and a brown mustache. He wore a striped, off-white, short-sleeved dress shirt (this was the early 1980s, when short-sleeved men’s dress shirts were a thing, yo), a brown tie, and brown polyester slacks. I explained, teary-eyed, what had happened, and I saw him smile kindly. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sorry she was mean to you. I’ll talk to the teacher. Do you want to go back to Kindergarten?”

“It’s boring. She won’t let me read, and I love to read.”

“Can you read aloud for me now?” I did, and his eyebrows rose, and then he nodded his head. “Has anyone ever given you an IQ test?”

I shrugged, and he explained the test to me. He said he would call my parents and explain that I wasn’t in trouble and see if it was okay to take the test. A little while later, I was engrossed in questions about patterns and reading comprehension. It was fun! Oh shit, tangrams. I wasn’t great at spatial stuff and hated tangrams. We’d done tons at my old school. I could always get the answer; I just had to think a little harder for a second.

Here is something very young, smart kids will tend to do, from my point of view. We get so good at being good we forget to challenge ourselves. We have to be reminded at times. We get comfortable.

Here’s where I’m going to freak you all out, but first, a disclaimer. IQ tests are outdated and very skewed in inappropriate ways that are unfair and skewed against people of color and people from poorer backgrounds. I know there are better ways, but I’m coming from the olden days when they only tested you that way, so that’s all we knew at the time.

Okay. Freak out!! (Le freak, c’est chic) In the movie Idiocracy, they say that as America gets dumber over the years, our IQ drops to an average of 100. Folks, they were trolling the shit out of you. The average IQ in America is 100. Einstein was estimated to be 173. A gifted person, 130 and above. A highly gifted person, 140 and above. Totally freaky, right?

If you haven’t seen Idiocracy, it’s gods damned prophetic, is what it is. It is hilarious, too. Please, please watch it high. It enhances the experience.

100 is the magic number. In Arizona (go on, Google check me), the average IQ is 98. Under a hundred (that’s from the heat; it kills brain cells), and the fact that Arizona is 49th in education. We make fun of like, Florida, but we’ve got the dumb. It’s actually getting better over the last few years, and that is because, according to NPR, 60.3% of Arizona is a transplant. The majority come from California. I’m just saying.

Most of the population falls within the range of 85 to 115, which is 68% of people.

I call the asshole, jerkface humans that are stupid on purpose “Hundreders.” You know who they are.

My parents waited until I was an adult to tell me my “results.” They didn’t want me to say, oh, I only have X amount of intelligence. That’s limiting, no matter where you are on the IQ scale. Plus, they understood things like emotional intelligence, creativity, and who you fucking were as a person wasn’t dependent on the number of brain cells you were born with and didn’t do anything to achieve. My parents called me gifted, but I never got a present for being smart. (Get my Dad joke in there, too?) I got lucky with them, I know. My mom used to say nobody else on Earth could have handled me except for the two of them, and she meant it in both a teasing and complimentary way.

Does that mean I did well in school? Well, yeah. Emotionally, however, I was a wreck. I mean, a five-year-old who goes to sixth grade for reading, fifth for math, and third for this and that, would feel confused emotionally hanging out with different kids of different ages. I would bounce around with a first-grade homeroom. It was an experiment, a Montessori-style try for the “smart kid” at my elementary. Kids would ask me, “Are you the Smart Kid?” I’d nod, but they’d just smile and ask me questions. It was a game to try and stump me. Emotionally, though, I had undiagnosed MCAS, Ehlers-Danlos, and an ultra-rare bone disease called hypophosphatasia. I couldn’t verbalize that I felt like an old woman inside my body most of the time, and it caused a lot of emotional outbursts.

Later in life, I was as dumb as any other young woman in her twenties, thirties, and now forties, trying out the world like the rest of you. I made a shit ton of mistakes, but this is what I personally have learned and believe. You make your big mistakes in your twenties. Your thirties are for learning from those mistakes. Your forties are for applying what you have learned. I think my fifties will just be fun, from what I hear.

So yeah, I knew I was smart, but it was never a pedestal thing. If anything, it was social suicide when I was older, except I think kids are naturally open and curious first and hateful second — until they get old enough to mimic what they’ve been taught.

I was too little then; this was the nostalgic early 1980s. No kids picked on me for being smart. They picked on me for having buck teeth. Get it straight. I hadn’t developed the teeth yet, so I was still passable in public. Sometimes even cute.

Mostly, I spoke like an adult, and it freaked out adults, but it never seemed to disquiet my Montessori friends, who were all ages up to twelve. A lot were kids I could relate to, who were used to learning the way we needed to, not with the rigidity of public school in comparison.

I don’t believe in IQ, but this piece would feel weird if I didn’t include my own. I feel uncomfortable with that, however. Let’s just say it’s above 150 and below Einstein, okay? Thank you for respecting that.

It’s all silliness. I never learned any higher math, really. I never finished college. So, I’m not formally educated and, therefore, won’t be appearing on Jeopardy anytime soon. I was on a game show, and did I win? Read about my experience here.

Instead, my intellect has always leaned toward words. Writing, speaking, conversing, I’m obsessed with how easy it is, for example, to say the exact same word a million different ways and have a million different things. Don’t believe me, dude? Dude!

Dude.

Duuuuuuuude.

See what I mean?