I recently did something that I have wondered about—but also resisted—my entire life. I took an IQ test. I was finally going to answer the questions that I had long pondered: Am I smart? And, How smart?
I grew up a little self-doubting, despite being dubbed smart early on. But everyone was smart in my hometown, a university town where brainpower was the greatest currency. My math-whiz friend Laura used to shamelessly beat me at a math game called Krypto, then run off to tell her neurologist father, whom my mother said was “brilliant.” He was also benevolent enough to deflect his daughter’s glee, which however, only made me feel worse.
He was also benevolent enough to deflect his daughter’s glee, which however, only made me feel worse.
Later on, my high school friends took college classes and went onto the Ivies. Their parents were professors, and in their families, intelligence was a given and academic achievement expected. This was not the case for me. My dad managed and sold farms, and my mother was a nurse. Their intelligence lived in their hands perhaps more than their heads—even though my mother read voraciously and was even more astute at reading people; and my father had a wit and wisdom that belied his “dumb farm boy” (his words) demeanor. More than my achievements, they applauded my efforts, which I began to double—to prove myself to myself.
By the time I had completed my first year of college, I was so burned out that I dropped out. It was not the work itself that had exhausted me, but the self-doubts that I had to work through first, in order to actually get to the real work. I’d gone to a prestigious university, where my entrance test scores, at least for math and science, were on the lower end, but my other talents—those not measureable on such tests—made up for it. Instead of feeling validated for the latter, I felt inferior about the former.
It wasn’t until I moved to Italy the following year that I was able to leave behind those self-doubts. In Italy, I was seen as smart simply because my native language was English, which had a certain prestige. In learning Italian, I also gained a new sense of self—more carefree and confident, less burdened by the whole issue of smartness. Italians seemed to recognize more types of intelligence than Americans—without the silliness of affixing labels to these, such as “emotional intelligence.”
When I returned to the U.S., I sailed through the rest of college, and then moved back to Italy. After several years, I returned to the U.S. armed with enough skills and self-confidence to navigate life feeling “smart enough.” I was not only unfettered by, but proud of, my super-smart childhood friends who’d achieved impressive things, such as becoming a presidential advisor, and one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard. My path was different, and so long as I was on it, I was happy. Knowing my IQ seemed largely irrelevant.
Italians seemed to recognize more types of intelligence than Americans—without the silliness of affixing labels to these, such as “emotional intelligence.”
But when my daughter Julia was asked to take an IQ test for her school’s gifted program, my curiosity and motherly instincts kicked in. I wanted to know what she was up against. And, I’d once read an article about how intelligence is largely passed down from the mother, so I figured knowing my score would help contextualize Julia’s. I took the test one day on my lunch break, when I was short on time and eager to get it over with. I finished in less than the allotted time and awaited my results with the same anxiety that I feel when I’m at the doctor’s office, getting my blood pressure taken or having my cholesterol checked. In a word: measured.
When the email with my score came, I opened it quickly and stared at the number. I was only a little surprised, albeit pleasantly. The accompanying information said that I was smart enough to be a professor, lawyer, and doctor, but maybe not a surgeon. This gave me pause, since during my brief childhood phase of wanting to be a doctor, it was a surgeon I’d aspired to become. A brain surgeon, no less. In retrospect, it was not the brain so much as the mind that fascinated me and still does.
Then I called my partner, who alas, comes from a family of surgeons. But instead of feeling less-than, I felt more comfortable in my own skin. For the next few days, I walked around with my head a little higher, my mind more grounded. Whatever vestiges of adolescent self-doubt I’d still had were laid to rest. I finally saw myself as not just “smart enough,” but actually, smart.
