Lonesome Town: How This Gifted Girl Unapologetically Navigates Friendship

For gifted people, alone is part of the gig. That’s just math. There are fewer of us out there. But alone and lonely are two separate words for a reason. I can be lonely in a crowded room. And I can be quite happy and alone with myself for extended periods of time. What I had to learn is that popularity is for prom queens and yearbook autographs. Popularity might get you invited out on a Wednesday, but it won’t tuck you in at night or light a fire in your brain.

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'” 

–C.S. Lewis

“It’s Dr. Evil. I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”
–Dr. Evil, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

If I know one thing, it’s that a good friend is worth her weight in La Mer Moisturizing Creme ($180/oz). For the lucky unremarkables out there, making friends is easy. You find someone your age who lives in your cul de sac and also has a bike, or someone who also watches the same reality TV/sports games as you do, or has children at the same school as your child. You go everywhere together: the club, the woods, Costco, brunch, yoga, Vegas. You’re in each other’s weddings and at each other’s Super Bowl parties. You share Instapot recipes and like each other’s Instagram stories of puppies, inspirational quotes, and insipid memes. For me, well, I’d rather take my chances in a Siberian Gulag with the likes of murderers and thieves. 

This world isn’t suited to prodigies. Apart from the few stories that play on the news of a twelve-year-old getting into Harvard or a five-year-old’s piano concerto, no one really likes a genius. When we grow up and stop being cute and precocious, we are merely know-it-all’s who correct your pronunciation and miss your social cues when we’re midway into a lecture on the factual errors in time travel films. We’re annoying. And we remind people of their limitations. That’s why evil geniuses are the bad guys in Bond films.

And yet, no man can be an island unto himself. We all need friends. 

Growing up, I was horrible at making friends, because I didn’t understand how to child. I didn’t want to talk about Rainbow Bright or the Pink Ladies from Grease. My Barbies didn’t swim at pool parties. They were brilliant serial killers and scheming stepmothers to Skipper. So I made friends with the only other highly gifted kid in first grade, Dino. While the other children squealed with glee as they played tag in the schoolyard at recess, we rolled our eyes at the unnecessary, philistinic disturbances. And then we calibrated our trajectory to Mars in our spaceship, which just happened to look to everyone else like a giant tire laying on its side. 

And that is how life proceeded. I thought I’d found my best friend in my high school boyfriend turned husband. We were nerdy punks, and our isolation from the masses was kept solid by a lipid bilayer of rejecting and rejection. We told ourselves we were better than everyone. What I didn’t understand until later was a whole lot: one, self-isolation is part and parcel of abusive relationships; two, anticipatory rejection is not punk, it’s strategically stupid; and three, if you put your eggs in a single basket, it’s easier to snatch away. I was thirty-one when these lessons began to gel, and I was very much alone in my misery.

Lucky for my pretentious ass, for some reason, people like me. I am so fortunate to now find myself friends with people from every chapter of my life. My friends have taken care of me when I have been sick. They have introduced me to life-changing experiences and concepts. They have fostered my career as a writer/storyteller and thrown me in the way of immense opportunity. But only because I opened myself up to the idea that friends come in all shapes and sizes, and people will always surprise you if you only let them. 

I will never make friends easily with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. I don’t always realize it, but being gifted means that my conversation is laden with SAT words, obscure references, limber wordplay, and all sorts of other things that weed out the basics. It’s for the best. But the people who do stick around? They tend to be amazing. And this has increased tenfold after moving to NYC, where the median IQ is demonstrably higher in the general population, and people’s interests are more aligned with my own.

If I know two things, it’s that most friendships aren’t meant to be lifelong. And that is perfectly ok. Some friends will bring good to your life, and then their role is over. When you have less friends, or at least fewer friend groups, you might start to think of friends in terms of scarcity. And that is a terrible place to find yourself. You will hoard friends you don’t need, who treat you badly, and who are bad for you, but you nevertheless stick around because you are afraid of being alone. 

For gifted people, alone is part of the gig. That’s just math. There are fewer of us out there. But alone and lonely are two separate words for a reason. I can be lonely in a crowded room. And I can be quite happy and alone with myself for extended periods of time. What I had to learn is that popularity is for prom queens and yearbook autographs. Popularity might get you invited out on a Wednesday, but it won’t tuck you in at night or light a fire in your brain. 

As I’ve done the work on myself to be a better person, I’ve discovered that I attract all sorts of people into my life who are lured by the energy I unconsciously transmit. Some of those people recognize it as grounded confidence. Some of them are put off by their own insecurity. And some of them are secretly jealous when outshined. I have to be strong enough in my boundaries to know which ones to keep around and which ones to let go of. It has become easier over time as I realize that it is not my job to maintain friendships that require me to pretend I am something other than the best person I can be. I must constantly remind myself to be gentle and kind in how I go about letting the bad ones go. I try and leave doors open if I can, because I’ve learned that people can change and a lot of them circle back round. I know because I was one of them. 

That’s the great part of being the specific type of gifted that I am. I may lack an innate intuition about people, but through my autistic superpowers, I learned to hack human behavior through the accumulation of data honed through encounters with many human beings. I taught myself to human as though I were artificial intelligence. 

Basically it comes to this: Feedback tells me that I’m a good friend. I’m interesting and funny, considerate and supportive. I own up to my mistakes, and I allow my friends to be themselves. As long as I keep being a good friend, I can expect good friends to stick around. So I don’t have to put up with emotional vampires and manipulative jerks. And if I never have to drag my ass out of bed on a perfectly good Sunday for another mind-numbing, spirit-crushing brunch again, I will thank my lucky stars. Life, I’ve learned, is too damn short for compromising my integrity for eggs Benedict and a check split five ways. For the right friend though, I’d go halfway around the world. It’s proven to be worth it. Whatever I put into my friendships always ends up coming back in unexpected rewards.