this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I find treading the line between people thinking I'm talking down to them vs them thinking I'm pretentiously trying to seem smarter than them exhausting. It's a stupid game where I try really hard not to unintentiont piss people off and they get offended and resentful anyway because I dared to try to communicate with them but failed to perfectly thread the needle of how to speak to them on a level they are comfortable with.
I'm at a point where I just don't care anymore. If someone can't appreciate that my intention is to improve their understanding of the matter, then they can suck my nuts, and fuck off.
Sadly I find that the people who I most often come into conflict about this with are the ones who have unknowingly curated their social world to only people with very similar brains to themselves by being an intolerable jerk to those who don't (I suspect their discomfort with someone being "smarter" than them stems from projecting their own feelings and behaviour towards those "dumber" than them) but due to external circumstances of life we are forced to try our best to get along. The fact that they make that unecesarily difficult doesn't change that I still need to do my best to do so. Meanwhile, anyone I don't need to get along with who acts that way tends to very quickly pick up on the message to suck my nuts and fuck off. For those who I must get along with I try very hard not to try to clarify things for them unless it seems either quite important that they have a better understanding or that it would be very easy and non-comtraversial to do so. I still usually try to give them plenty of time to figure it out themselves, then try to give them the least amount of prompting possible. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Meanwhile I'll still happily ask for their help if there's something that exceeds my capabilities but not theirs. It's just a shame that intelligence (whatever that really means) is somehow seen as more important an indicator of someone's worth than most other random traits like height, coordination etc.
As a profoundly clumsy person I've never felt I was being personally insulted by someone else being dexterous for example.