Day 0567

How do you define intelligence?

I don’t mean a collective you, I mean you, sitting there reading this?

Intelligence is a personal thing: I think a person’s definition of it depends very much on what they admire and how their own brain operates.

Sometimes I think people confuse intelligence with other conditions.

For example, being ‘smart’ is nothing like being intelligent, if you ask me.

Being smart means knowing lots of stuff, taking in information and regurgitating it; that kind of thing.

Being ‘educated’ is similar to smarts but comes with a wider or broader knowledge of many things; basically being ‘smart’ across a wide range of topics like classics and statistics for example.

Being smart is something anyone with the good fortune to read and learn stuff can have. Educated is what the privileged get through reading and learning …

And then there is ‘intelligence’.

To me, it is defined by a person’s ability to connect ideas, to raise their thoughts above detail and see themes and metaphors; something beyond the black and white.

In high school I had this demonstrated when I spoke a boy who was trying to pump me for information to make it look like he’d totally read a book: 1984.

Me: I liked it, it was a cool story about oppression and power

Him: What are you talking about? It was about a bunch of bossy pigs!

…And then he proceeded to spit four feet into the air above his head and catch it in his mouth. What a star!

Now, my Grade 11 self totally mocked this boy in my head as he confirmed that he was a total dickhead.

I like to think I don’t see it that way now; some people see what’s laid out in front of them, some see that only as an entry to something bigger. It’s no one’s fault or shortcoming — one just entertains me more than the other.

Day 0241

Now I don’t want to come across all hippy, taste my menstrual blood here (and thanks to bloody Germaine, I know I never want to do that again) but of the few things I really like about being a grrrl, one of the best is the extent to which my moods and feelings are influenced by my body. I can feel those hormones coasting through my body, making me grumpy or bloaty or weepy or sensitive or really farking angry.

I’m not saying I excuse my moods because of this connection/influence: absolutely not. I take full responsibility, but it is an amazing connection. To hear your body shifting through the days and feel the influence that has on the physical and the meta physical. It grounds me.

That’s partly why I hate The Pill so much (other than that my body seemed to think it was The Devil), because it stopped me from feeling the pain and the pop of ovulation, the heaviness of PMS breasts, the behind-my-eyes anger of a thousand million years of womanhood.

Instead it just put me in a neverending cycle of period after period after period. What fun!

Do men have the same connection to their bodies? I mean, I know they like to connect **wink wink nudge nudge** with their bodies (or at least one gherkin-like part of it) but can they feel it evolving and influencing and inspiring and annoying them in quite the same way as us women?

What a sad thing it would be to be so disconnected from your flesh. To see them as two separate things: this here is my body and this, over here, is my emotion (or emotions  if you’re one of the enlightened few).

Add to that, that lucky Greek prophet Tiresias who transformed into a woman for seven years. When he returned to the world of manhood, he revealed this: that when it comes to sex ‘of ten parts, men only experience one’. Whereas women get them all.

I shall leave it to your own personal experience to decide if you think he is correct.

Day 0030

This is taking me places I never expected to go. I grew up in a family of scientists though I am not one. It took forever just to believe a psychologist was ‘scientific enough’ and I’ve been helped by many. But now, when those scientists keep looking at me like I should have known better, when they see the pattern but don’t think it’s relevant, when they tell me not to have so much faith in people … It’s time to try other things. I still need to translate the touchy feely ‘the world is a great big circle’ language into ‘scientific’ language but I’ve finally found someone who can see the pattern and draw the connecting lines for me. I still don’t think there is a point where really bad behaviour is no one’s fault. I still think people need to be held accountable for their actions.
Actually it’s kind of funny how psychiatry and this type of counselling meet at that point: some people are just injured or hurt and can’t help their horrific actions.
But there must be a point where you can dismiss the individual based on what they’ve done? It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t offer comfort when they cry, just that I no longer see any potential for Goodness. Is that fair?