I had some schooling struggles, exacerbated by being moved double digit times while I was still single digit in age, noting the wildly differing levels of standards for a given grade and subject between state to state, even school to school, and of course I didn't fit in. They told me I had a college level reading ability when I was in second grade (what does that even mean?) and I had memorized the orbital periods and rotations of the planets (back when Pluto was still one and we thought Mercury tidally locked to the Sun), and I had the periods of brief interests: take a box and attempt to manipulate it through all of the shapes it could assume by its folds; count to ten thousand; decide I was going to read an adult dictionary and hit the encyclopedia for anything which thrilled me; odd constructions of permanent magnets, wire, rubber bands, and Tinkertoys to touchlessly transfer force; arranging a box of crayons by hue, and, when thwarted by the limits of a simple circle, using the aforementioned Tinkertoys to hold layers of paper so I could also arrange by saturation. I relentlessly asked adults about all of the mysterious things in my world until they got miffed or shoved a book at me. After a while I turned my inquiries to my social difficulties and found much to learn. The first was that I lived around people and in people and that was my environment, the way a mole lives in the ground. The second was that people lied almost constantly and the point of it was that they wanted you to believe certain things because it was convenient to them for you to have misapprehensions about the world. Some of the lies were about more concrete things: how the presents got there, how babies happened, and the like. More lies were social like what do people actually like.

The third thing was: it turns out that people don't like different. Moved? Got a different accent than the rest of the children. But also? Don't be smart. Fit in. You can act bright, bright enough to help with another kid's homework, but you have to hide the rest of it, as it induces a mixture of envy and fear. Having a grown person in medical school say "You're terrifying" because you casually let slip your immediate apprehension of something which had baffled them means that kind of reaction never leaves. So as much as people mouth litanies like "Being different is okay!" the differences they mean are surface things like the coloration of your eyes or your skin, differences as the Mr. Potato Head model. And so that "helps with homework" turns with age into someone who ends up doing some very dull work, often of inappropriate import. Inappropriate, because you can see further down the line at what would be more important or impactful rather than this task you've been handed, as mindless as another sheet of multiplication problems of decades prior.

One of the equilibrium states is quietness, uttering little of surprise, imitation as protective camouflage. People will still figure out that you're smarter than the average bear, but you get fewer monkey gang-ups and reaping of the tall poppies. Fewer, but not none. Even my oldest friend has muttered "I hate you" three-quarters in jest -- but one-quarter not -- when I casually pick up some skill at which he has been slaving away over years. I've often wondered what the other paths look like and if they are more rewarding in some fashion, but more importantly, if they are any less fantastically lonely, the loneliness of the mutant.