Dumbing Myself Down

My Response to Being Slightly Bullied

Photo by Walkator on Unsplash

I don’t remember a time after 8th grade until recently when I showed my true self to the world, and that was decades ago.

Eighth grade is when it all got too big for me, and I needed to make a move or crumble beneath the weight of negative expectation.

I had always been a teacher. Some people are just born that way — teachers and leaders — and both would describe who I thought myself to be. If I sensed another person was struggling to understand a concept or fact, I often went out of my way to make it easier for them. It’s just what I was born to do, the same way I was born to write and to paint. It’s part of my fabric to help others succeed.

I never imagined I’d be a threat to anyone else or that being “smart” would become a negative label I’d wear emblazoned across my forehead. Plenty of other people I knew carried different names, like pretty, funny, athletic, and gifted, so “smart” was just another title which should’ve fit neatly on the spectrum without much ado.

But it didn’t.

Not for me, anyway.

Other kids began to point it out and make fun of me because the teachers would call on me for answers more often, would pull me out of class to run errands, and would ask me to tutor…