"Renia, you're brilliant."
It's a phrase I have heard for as long as I can remember. That might read as a humble brag, and when I was younger, it would have been. But not today. Today, it's just a statement of fact. There's something I see about how the world and the humans in it work that most do not. And that knowing is labeled brilliance by anyone who values a bit of anticipatory foresight.
Often of late, I don't really want to be brilliant.
I want to be understood.
I want to be loved.
I want to be in a community with others who care about connection in the same ways that I have come to care and yearn for it—an understanding of a part of our humanity mostly lost in the suburban sprawl and urban buzz of individualism-obsessed modern American life.
The label of brilliant, applied to me by teachers, bosses, mentors, begrudging rivals, and well-meaning friends...It used to make me feel proud, like something special.
Over the years, I've learned that when someone calls me brilliant, it usually means that they are setting me apart from them. It means they think I know, see, or understand something they do not, and that makes me an "other."
Of course, it's orders of degrees to be "othered" for something most people admire versus being othered simply for a difference or for something society sees as "wrong."
But it's just as isolating.
There are rare exceptions, beautiful moments when someone entirely comfortable with and embracing their own particular brilliance recognizes mine, and in seeing each other, we both increase our shine. But those are fewer and farther between as the hyper-connected world just keeps getting smaller and smaller.
The thing I don't know how to rectify here is this:
It may or may not be brilliance, but I clearly see the world differently than most people do.
I see the moving pieces and patterns both individually and how they fit together in ways that are difficult to explain to almost everyone else. And most people don't love it when I anticipate what's going to happen before it happens, even if I manage not to say, "I told you so."
A therapist once told me that I would have to learn to accept that only a small handful of other people would experience me and want to be close to me, and that was okay. That I should consider those people my treasures and take deep care of those relationships. I guess I still haven't accepted it.
Brilliance, like heroism, might be something we admire. But we like to put it on a pedestal and watch it from a distance. Most of us don't want to live with it up close.
Not to mention that anything we put on a pedestal will always have a certain subset of people who want to see it torn down.
So please, don't call me brilliant. It doesn't serve either one of us very well.
It's a phrase I have heard for as long as I can remember. That might read as a humble brag, and when I was younger, it would have been. But not today. Today, it's just a statement of fact. There's something I see about how the world and the humans in it work that most do not. And that knowing is labeled brilliance by anyone who values a bit of anticipatory foresight.
Often of late, I don't really want to be brilliant.
I want to be understood.
I want to be loved.
I want to be in a community with others who care about connection in the same ways that I have come to care and yearn for it—an understanding of a part of our humanity mostly lost in the suburban sprawl and urban buzz of individualism-obsessed modern American life.
The label of brilliant, applied to me by teachers, bosses, mentors, begrudging rivals, and well-meaning friends...It used to make me feel proud, like something special.
Over the years, I've learned that when someone calls me brilliant, it usually means that they are setting me apart from them. It means they think I know, see, or understand something they do not, and that makes me an "other."
Of course, it's orders of degrees to be "othered" for something most people admire versus being othered simply for a difference or for something society sees as "wrong."
But it's just as isolating.
There are rare exceptions, beautiful moments when someone entirely comfortable with and embracing their own particular brilliance recognizes mine, and in seeing each other, we both increase our shine. But those are fewer and farther between as the hyper-connected world just keeps getting smaller and smaller.
The thing I don't know how to rectify here is this:
It may or may not be brilliance, but I clearly see the world differently than most people do.
I see the moving pieces and patterns both individually and how they fit together in ways that are difficult to explain to almost everyone else. And most people don't love it when I anticipate what's going to happen before it happens, even if I manage not to say, "I told you so."
A therapist once told me that I would have to learn to accept that only a small handful of other people would experience me and want to be close to me, and that was okay. That I should consider those people my treasures and take deep care of those relationships. I guess I still haven't accepted it.
Brilliance, like heroism, might be something we admire. But we like to put it on a pedestal and watch it from a distance. Most of us don't want to live with it up close.
Not to mention that anything we put on a pedestal will always have a certain subset of people who want to see it torn down.
So please, don't call me brilliant. It doesn't serve either one of us very well.
Lourenia (Renia) Carsillo
Chief Strategist & Founder
Realign Consulting
Chief Strategist & Founder
Realign Consulting