As somebody once pointed out about me, “you’re too dumb for your smart friends and too smart for your dumb friends.” This sounds shallow, I know. And maybe it is. But, “dumb” to me doesn’t only mean stupid, and “smart” to me doesn’t only mean intelligent. Dumb/smart are social labels. The smart ones go to MIT and write computer code and get 8 hours of sleep on average. The dumb ones party all night, go to a community college, and lay on the couch for 8 hours straight. Are you feeling uncomfortable by these distinctions? You should. These labels are meant to shove an individual person into a box. The labels make it nice and neat and easy to understand that person in the box. But then you kind of lose a part of the person and you start to only see the box. For this reason, I don’t like these sort of labels on boxes and I want to destroy them. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t fit in with a lot of people, primarily because I am a walking contradiction (Siri, play Green Day). I do things that your average smart person would never do but I also do things your average dumb person would never do. Basically, I am a loser on both sides of the loser spectrum. Because here’s the thing, I feel smarter than my dumb friends because I like to start philosophical discussions which they couldn’t care less about, I like to learn math, to think about how to solve research problems and other “intellectual” things like that. My smart friends think I’m dumb because I can obsessively scroll through Instagram for 4+ hours straight, I love super long fake nails (how VAIN) and short miniskirts and dying my hair blonde. I tend to get a little fucked up on drugs (read: extremely fucked up, but I am on the road to sobriety, stay tuned) and go see Phish. Dancing in the club makes me feel alive, I scream in the parking lot when I’m frustrated, I paint abstract art, and sometimes (sorry, parents) I drive way faster than the speed limit and pull idiotic prank calls and do other degenerate things like that. I have been, on a few occasions, scolded by  a “smart” “friend”: “why do you act so dumb all the time when you’re actually not?” To this I had no answer. I have even been shunned from a college friend group because of the perception that I am not acting true to my “smart” self when I act “dumb”. It hurts to be called out for being inauthentic when you are trying to be unabashedly yourself. 

A hard part about life is figuring out where you fit in. I want to fit in with the smart, stuck-up people, but I fear that my habits, identity and values are too wishy-washy, hippy-dippy-acid-washed for that. I want to fit in with the dumb, cool people, but I get scared that they will think I try too hard and care too much (which, I do). I also get nervous that the dumb side of me automatically takes away from my smartness potential and vice versa. Maybe you’re thinking this simplistic world view of dumb vs. smart is super dumb. I get that, I think it’s dumb too and I am trying really hard to shake this shallow, unproductive view, and there is way more to life than how dumb or smart you think you are. But I wanted to get this out there because it is this weird contradiction inside myself. The value of being productive has been embedded in my psyche by the education system, but I also have these conflicting zero-fucks-given-drive-cross-country-in-a-van-like-a-beatnik-can-you-tell-i-like-hyphenated-phrases values. 

I know I’m kind of defeating the purpose of destroying labels by actively using them, but I want to make a point of how silly it sounds to label someone that way, even though I do it unconsciously all the time. I truly believe we all have both sides of the dumb/smart coin inside us. There are no dumb people and no smart people: we’re all just dumb/smart. We all have the potential for something beautiful, regardless of who you think you are or who you think your friends are or how you choose to spend your time. For me, the important thing is to always, always grow and change and be open to new ideas, and in the iconic words of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “love whoever is around to be loved”. I think we often get stuck inside our own labeled boxes when other people make us feel like we belong there and nowhere else. But I say we fight back, break out of our boxes, and be ourselves more than ever before. I hope to reunite the truest version of me, the version that has been torn apart, folded up, and shoved into separately labeled boxes. We gotta embrace our contradictions because that’s exactly what makes us so interesting. So, I give myself permission to live in contradiction with what other people believe about me. I give myself permission to be dumb and smart all at once and neither one at all. 

post script: maybe this is a bullshit origin story and I just impulsively came up with a blog name that I thought was vaguely witty because sometimes I might write something sorta smart and sometimes I’ll write some dumb shit. Maybe now I’m just backtracking for the sake of “branding” the blog. Oh well, what’s in a name anyway. Whatever the case may be, I thought this was a nice lil piece to share with you. have a nice day!

Citations:

Vonnegut, K. (1959). The Sirens of Titan. Dell Publishing.