My full life story is written in the footnotes of the experience of other people. My human experience is, like most often are, reliant on the human experiences of others. As people trudged their ways through the ho-hum of their daily lives I was sometimes there, experiencing their same moment in time in a (mostly) different way.

The way we experience things differs from person to person. It accumulates, building up from a cracked foundation, and forms what will eventually be the sum of our lives: What we saw, what we did, and what we said when we were alive. Some people will achieve what others consider to be great things, and some will only achieve what is generally agreed upon to be mundane. Sometimes, though, the most mundane things are the ones that have the most impact. They strike with the most oomph, because more people will experience things within the realm of mundane than great.

It’s kind of interesting to think about; that by doing something simple you can reach more people rather than if you were to do something large and intricate. Sometimes, though, the fact that all we can accomplish is things considered to be mundane is because our lives are, at that point, truly mundane.

Something akin to monotonous, but I don’t like using that word so much when in reference to life.

Lately my life hasn’t even been a footnote of someone else’s life. I try to be sociable. Really, I do. I try talking to people, but it never turns out quite the way I want it to. I get lost along the way (like I’m drifting on the wind) and end up losing sight of what’s going on. I lose my grip, and I fall to the side. I can’t seem to connect. With anyone. Or, at least, that’s how it feels.

I drift away, fade into the background, becoming a constant hum until I am tuned out altogether.

I lose me.

People lose me.

I lose people.

I am misplaced.

I don’t deal with silence very well. I don’t deal well with the feeling of abandonment. I’m sort of like a plant, really. Water me once a day and I am good. I am golden. But if I am forgotten, if I am ignored, then I wither up. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I don’t actually wither up. Sometimes I do cry, though. I cry when I’m alone for too long, without actual human contact.

I guess I’m more of a cat than a plant, really.

But in the same respect, people scare me. They literally scare the shit out of me. I can’t know what they’re thinking unless they tell me. I can’t know if they’re still there, or if I’m talking into a void – my mouth (or fingers, in the event of text based communication) acting as a mode of propulsion and pushing me further and further away until all that’s left is the big empty space.

I fret. I wonder, to myself, if I did or said something wrong. If I should have acted differently. What did I do?

It’s me. It’s always me. I am the one always left behind. It’s silly, really. I didn’t use to react like that. It didn’t use to matter. Sometime, though, in the last handful of years, I developed an abandonment complex. Funny stuff, that.

My voice could be absent and hardly anyone would be around to notice. Where there was once endless nervous chatter – because that’s what it is, nervous chatter, because I don’t know how to be with people anymore – would be blessed silence. I can’t blame people, in the long run, for their decision to tuck tail and run.

Being around me, it must be exhausting. All that useless knowledge, all that pomp. How has anyone ever done it? There’s a soft gooey center, it’s just in a pillow fort. Inside a room. Inside a home. Inside a castle. Inside a fortress. Inside a cave. At the center of the Earth. So hard to get to. No wonder no one tries.

Did you know that genius, like most things, is a concept of relevance? Take two people – any two people – and think about their knowledge base. Think how much more about a subject one knows than another. Now, think about Einstein and yourself. The comparison is the same, you see? Each person is a genius in their own way, about their own thing.

People say that genius is based on IQ, but I disagree with that. Did you know that you can have a high IQ, but be dumb as a box full of hair? It’s a surprising concept, to most, but they’re not actually thinking about it in the right terms.

They say that your IQ is relatively static, and only changes within a few points from the time you are a child to the time that you are an adult. Now, children haven’t learned nearly as much as an adult. So, how can this be, if it measures your intelligence? Your IQ is more like a number that tells you what you’re capable of learning. Higher IQ’s mean more open doors to you in the world of knowledge. Lower IQ’s mean that you won’t learn as much.

School is, essentially, constructed to teach you as much as someone with a standard IQ level would be able to learn. College and institutes of higher learning are, of course, an exception. They are geared for someone with an IQ just a bit above average, but not quite genius level.

And, even if you have a high IQ, it doesn’t mean you’ll learn useful things. You could potentially use all your potential to memorize music. And I don’t mean to play – I mean that you could recognize a song based on the first three notes.

Intelligence is strange, isn’t it? And we haphazardly categorize it, when it’s much more complex than we like to think (or admit).

IQ – genius – is relative.