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Dear Carolyn: My friends think I’m stupid. I’m a high school junior, and I go to a highly academically competitive school, where it is expected by my peers that you are supposed to take at least three AP classes. My closest friends are taking five. They are constantly stressed, overworked and burned out. My peers believe the only way to get into a “good” college (whatever that means) is to take as many AP classes as possible and to get the highest SAT score as possible. This, I know, is ridiculous on so many levels, but I stay out of it.
Lately, however, my friends have been shaming me for only taking one AP class, and for taking one standardized test vs. the other. I am going to college for musical theater, and admissions for those programs rely primarily on auditions, not grades. So why on earth would I put myself through so much stress if it won’t affect my college admissions? I’ve tried to explain this to my friends, but they think they know better than I. Additionally, they equate my taking only one AP class with being stupid. In the AP class I do take, my friend consistently shuts down and mocks my ideas with her other friends.
I’ve tried to mention the reasons I don’t take too many hard classes, but it’s like talking to a wall. I’ve also explained that since I was diagnosed with ADHD a year ago, I am now more aware of what I can handle. When all else failed, I even mentioned once that I have an IQ of 135 (tested when I was diagnosed with ADHD). I am actually quite smart. My friends stared at me and said, “Yeah… I think they lied to you.”
This hurts my feelings and happens so often that I’ve even started to believe I am stupid, despite all evidence to the contrary. Now I’ve started subconsciously playing into the “token dumb friend” stereotype because that is all I’m surrounded with. Should I not respond and ignore it?
— Stupidly Smart
Stupidly Smart: Your friends are not (acting like) your friends. Friends aren’t just the people you kill time with. A friend is someone who cares about you, makes you feel better, looks out for your best interests. Those people stepping on you to make themselves feel better are placeholders where real friends are supposed to be.
No, that’s not right, either — they’re worse, because they’re shaming you, and that’s a form of abuse. Shame is our inner voice that tells us that we’re doing something harmful to ourselves or others. It’s a powerful, toxic substance, like chemotherapy — good only for knocking out a bad thing like cancer. It’s never appropriate for others to use on ranges of being ourselves that don’t infringe on anyone else. Of being born how we are, of looking how we look, of studying what we want, of wearing whatever.
People who use shame for sport, ego or control have problems of their own to worry about. They may want to take them out on us, but it’s not good for us to let them. It’s not healthy for them, either. It’s enabling. Avoiding these “friends” may not be realistic or even what you want, it’s not for me to say. But this is within your power regardless: Never, ever justify yourself to people in your personal life. Admissions committees, employers or casting directors, fine, some of that is necessary. Judges, I hope you never have to, but, okay. But healthy friends or partners won’t make you audition on your credentials — not your college goals, not your diagnosis, not your IQ, none of it.
So if you ever get that sensation of justifying yourself in a relationship, please know it as the first alarm of abuse, control or manipulation, and end it there. Trying to please a manipulator by delivering the “right” answer will never work, because what pleases them is watching you scramble to please them. As for these not-your-friends, start applying this new knowledge and building your self-assurance skills. When they needle your choices: “Works for me.” That’s it. Don’t engage with their pushback, just be you.
Some loose ends:
· Playing the “token dumb friend”? Really? Stop. Respect yourself.
· The culture of your school sounds pretty unwell. Academic is great, but academically competitive undermines that greatness. Can your “friends” write, score, choreograph, light, etc., a musical? I feel bad even for them, because they’re still kids and have been misled into learning for prizes instead of learning to learn. Push yourselves for the rewards of a challenge. Find your joy.
A reader’s thought:
· It might be time to look for other friends. That said, your friends ARE under a lot of pressure — self, familial, whatever. Next time they put you down, try pulling compassion, calling them on all the negatives and asking if they aren’t jealous of your more relaxed schedule? If they actually think on it, then they might still be friends — if you want, and if they are willing to acknowledge taking their own stress out on you.
Lately, however, my friends have been shaming me for only taking one AP class, and for taking one standardized test vs. the other. I am going to college for musical theater, and admissions for those programs rely primarily on auditions, not grades. So why on earth would I put myself through so much stress if it won’t affect my college admissions? I’ve tried to explain this to my friends, but they think they know better than I. Additionally, they equate my taking only one AP class with being stupid. In the AP class I do take, my friend consistently shuts down and mocks my ideas with her other friends.
I’ve tried to mention the reasons I don’t take too many hard classes, but it’s like talking to a wall. I’ve also explained that since I was diagnosed with ADHD a year ago, I am now more aware of what I can handle. When all else failed, I even mentioned once that I have an IQ of 135 (tested when I was diagnosed with ADHD). I am actually quite smart. My friends stared at me and said, “Yeah… I think they lied to you.”
This hurts my feelings and happens so often that I’ve even started to believe I am stupid, despite all evidence to the contrary. Now I’ve started subconsciously playing into the “token dumb friend” stereotype because that is all I’m surrounded with. Should I not respond and ignore it?
— Stupidly Smart
Stupidly Smart: Your friends are not (acting like) your friends. Friends aren’t just the people you kill time with. A friend is someone who cares about you, makes you feel better, looks out for your best interests. Those people stepping on you to make themselves feel better are placeholders where real friends are supposed to be.
No, that’s not right, either — they’re worse, because they’re shaming you, and that’s a form of abuse. Shame is our inner voice that tells us that we’re doing something harmful to ourselves or others. It’s a powerful, toxic substance, like chemotherapy — good only for knocking out a bad thing like cancer. It’s never appropriate for others to use on ranges of being ourselves that don’t infringe on anyone else. Of being born how we are, of looking how we look, of studying what we want, of wearing whatever.
People who use shame for sport, ego or control have problems of their own to worry about. They may want to take them out on us, but it’s not good for us to let them. It’s not healthy for them, either. It’s enabling. Avoiding these “friends” may not be realistic or even what you want, it’s not for me to say. But this is within your power regardless: Never, ever justify yourself to people in your personal life. Admissions committees, employers or casting directors, fine, some of that is necessary. Judges, I hope you never have to, but, okay. But healthy friends or partners won’t make you audition on your credentials — not your college goals, not your diagnosis, not your IQ, none of it.
So if you ever get that sensation of justifying yourself in a relationship, please know it as the first alarm of abuse, control or manipulation, and end it there. Trying to please a manipulator by delivering the “right” answer will never work, because what pleases them is watching you scramble to please them. As for these not-your-friends, start applying this new knowledge and building your self-assurance skills. When they needle your choices: “Works for me.” That’s it. Don’t engage with their pushback, just be you.
Some loose ends:
· Playing the “token dumb friend”? Really? Stop. Respect yourself.
· The culture of your school sounds pretty unwell. Academic is great, but academically competitive undermines that greatness. Can your “friends” write, score, choreograph, light, etc., a musical? I feel bad even for them, because they’re still kids and have been misled into learning for prizes instead of learning to learn. Push yourselves for the rewards of a challenge. Find your joy.
A reader’s thought:
· It might be time to look for other friends. That said, your friends ARE under a lot of pressure — self, familial, whatever. Next time they put you down, try pulling compassion, calling them on all the negatives and asking if they aren’t jealous of your more relaxed schedule? If they actually think on it, then they might still be friends — if you want, and if they are willing to acknowledge taking their own stress out on you.
no subject
But yeah, LW needs better friends. They need to go halfway between ghosting and fading on *these* friends, and get a whole new crowd. That may mean getting new friends that aren't connected to school at all.
And hopefully these friends mature real fast once they're in college, and without any spectacular flaming burnouts, because this attitude of theirs is only going to harm them in the real world.
On a side note, if you have some reason to know what your child's IQ score is, please don't tell them. When we got E's results from the neuropsych all we said is "Yup, confirms what we already knew, and no, you cannot see the details until you're an actual adult". She one time asked about intelligence and we pointed out that a. you can't get her diagnoses without an average or above average IQ and b. IQ is a poorly understood metric at best. Nobody benefits from having those digits floating around in their mind.
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The fact that you're trying to qualify your PhD-having brain as "maybe not super brilliant genius smart" is absolutely wild.
Granted, there are many factors to who goes for post-secondary education (or higher!) besides raw intelligence, however we're measuring that today, but still.
That said, it's not just the fact that this is a Smart Kid School that has me declaring it a toxic cesspit. Actually, the bulk of it can be summed up with this: "My peers believe the only way to get into a “good” college (whatever that means) is to take as many AP classes as possible and to get the highest SAT score as possible."
I don't know where to start with this, but those kids didn't pluck those ideas from the ether. There's something in their social environment that's spreading those ideas around, and when you put those kids together and actually allow them to cater to their worst academic impulses then - whoo, not good. (My sophomore year, my school actually had to take the - controversial! - step of forbidding students from having a 0 - 9 schedule and no lunch.)
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Yeah. I mean, I grew up in a college town (as you might have guessed from the "nearby elite private college"), so higher education was the "factory" in a "factory town". Lots of my peers cared a lot about higher education. But this was before the AP exams went wild, so there weren't many offered - I think AP calculus was the only one my school did offer, and the really smart Seniors, as I said, were taking actual college calculus classes. But I think because there were enough kids whose parents were actual professors that we didn't fall into the AP trap, and the "regular" college-track classes were good, but not crazy.
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Look into 4H, your area's 4H might include teen groups with all sorts of projects--sometimes including theater.
Or double down on being a well-rounded person and volunteer somewhere, meet other teen volunteers there.
But for heaven's sake NOT THESE PEOPLE, not at this stage of their personal development and maybe never.
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LW, you have your academic and personal priorities straight. You are not the token dumb friend of the group. You're the token mature friend. You do not need to be their punching bag. You could be their sympathetic sounding board if you want to help them, but only if they treat you better.
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"Smart" is a subjective metric, and I'd wager that LW is significantly smarter than those so-called friends, no matter how their GPAs and SAT scores compare. LW is thinking about their future logically and not murdering themselves chasing some fake ideal that won't actually benefit them. All they need to do is dump these "friends" and find some folks whose company actually enriches them, and they'll be well on their way to being the most well-adjusted person there come graduation.
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I did IQ-testing for my ADHD diagnosis too, and while I can't remember what the number was (if I was even told at all), I do remember most of the actual activities. Some of the testing realistically would not be obviously reflected in any of the classes I've taken. The main aspect that this would apply to is pattern recognition. Sure, it's very helpful, but you can often circumvent the need for it with thorough-enough explanations from others and a good memory, especially early on and depending on the subject. It helps me understand things more easily, but it still relies on me actually having remembered base knowledge in the first place, which sometimes just doesn't happen.
And that's besides the fact that it's unlikely that any given individual is accurately estimating what average IQ looks like in the first place. It's far easier to measure based on your view of your own intelligence — for an arrogant individual, people "dumber than [me]" become "objectively dumb", and I don't think I have to explain how damaging that is, both in the nature of the judgement itself and the method of judgement.
It's not like I don't empathise! I've always suffered with this, but I like to think I've gotten better about judging people for their supposed intelligence. Even still, I can't remember ever having explicit distain for those who simply chose not to do harder work, because I myself only chose harder tasks when I was bored or actually interested in it; I studied for the love of the game, and I didn't expect it to be everyone's jam.
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Indeed, for all of this.
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The alternative is to ditch them and find different friends. Being shoehorned into a role that isn’t who you really are is super toxic. And, sadly, abandoning the social scene where you ended up in that role is often easier than trying to change the minds of those who are stereotyping you.
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