I'm not trying to brag, I'm just being real. I wish I was stupid.
I'm in my last year of med school and made it through with flying colours, being in the top 5% of my class consistently throughout. I'm good at most things I genuinely attempt - I play bass in a band and songwrite for it, I draw, I've even published poetry. On the outside, I am an "accomplished young lady" etc etc. But it's not all daisies and dalliances. Being smart often makes me feel alienated because it seems like all my intelligence came directly from my social skills and charisma. As if I was a video game character and I blew all my points on one stat so now I'm walking around with 0s for everything else. As a result, all my life I've said the wrong things, had a hard time keeping friends and genuinely been a social pariah walking around filled with existential dread.
Over time, I've begun to feel like my intelligence is being wasted on me. Sure, I'm in med school, but the passion I originally had for the subject has faded out over time as a result of examination and the institutionalisation of the subject. I used to be filled with curiosity and wonder at the world and I kept this childlike fascination with me until my late teens, guarded it like a flame in a hurricane, but the world is cruel and I realised mysteries and magic are a thin veneer for pain. I don't mean to sound dramatic but everywhere I look is pain. Or someone being too trapped inside themselves and too ignorant to notice the blatant pain - this being the only way to possibly be happy.
I have the skills I need to make a good life for myself. But what the fuck even is a good life? Money, materialism, status. Security. Sustainability. Being a good little slave and contributing to the economy... It bores me. I want to sleep under the stars and drink from rivers and climb trees, feeling the sticky sap cloy between the cracks in my palms. But I'm soft and would definitely starve to death ASAP or possibly die of exposure if I tried to have a go in the wild, our apparent adaptation to such an environment be damned. I would be like a released animal born and raised in captivity, tooth and nail blunt and muscles weak from never having to hunt my own food once in my life. I feel robbed of a beautiful existence by the first human who decided to grow some wheat or some shit. Maybe modern life has its advantages, but freedom is an illusion and at least when existence is constantly a threat you don't have enough time to think about your place in the universe too hard. Family means something because you rely entirely on each other to stay alive, you're not just pushed together by blood and law. But it's pointless complaining. What's done is done.
I looked into
This recently (pollution is causing sperm count to lower and the downfall of civilization, rip) and do comfort myself with the fact that humanity will either need to drastically change or go extinct soon. But I'm not naive enough to say that either option is guaranteed - knowing us, we'll be stubborn enough to stick to our deranged ways and just live out this exact same existence in a Wall-E style space ship, anyone who doesn't make the cut be damned.
