I’ve a confession: I was that kid. Everyone knew ‘that kid’. If you didn’t, it was probably you. The kid that’d take a literacy lesson over a kick about outside, who quietly hissed ‘yes’ when the teacher announced a surprise spelling test.

I know I sound absolutely awful. I was. I used to raise my hand unprompted, eager to share my enthusiasm about knowledge, to define ‘loco parentis’, to tell the class who Oliver Cromwell was, to talk through a maths problem. Add to this equation my funny hair that stuck out in two plaits, and my funny accent that twined round my vowels like vines up a wall, and, unsurprisingly, x = general ridicule.

We once discovered a piece of paper under the teacher’s desk which labelled us all, like we were beans floating in orange-ish sauce, neatly packed into cans and stacked into rows. It designated us into the typical teen film categories; the ‘jock’, the ‘popular’, the ‘goth’. I was the ‘nerd’. For context, we were six.

So awful I might’ve been, and mocked I definitely was, but I was also clever. That’s not my being arrogant; I was just a Clever Kid. Special working groups, letters home, book reports the length of newspaper articles and the like. It didn’t really matter – I managed to underperform in my end-of-primary tests despite this- but it just was. It was an anchor, a thing I knew to be true about myself; I was a Clever Kid.
But what’s a Clever Kid when she’s not a Clever Kid anymore? I’m fifteen now, and in a class of former Clever Kids, some of the loveliest, brightest people I’ve ever met. There’s the budding astrophysicist, the maths prodigy, the person who can cite numerous facts about any period in history.

And then there’s me. I’m quite intelligent, yes, but I’m not exceptional. Suddenly, I find myself floating. How do you define yourself when the only thing you’ve ever been is clever, and you realise you’re not that clever after all? How do you consider yourself worthy when your worth’s always been based on your ability to overachieve?
And the plot’s thicker than that. My classmates have been a blessing, but I still struggle immensely to relate to my peer group as a whole. They assume I’m stuck up, I assume they’re judgemental, they don’t like me, I don’t like them. In a school of over 1,000 people, I sometimes feel so very alone.

But I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way, no matter how I might feel when friends chat with ease whilst I struggle over small talk. Countries with higher average IQs also have higher rates of suicide. Ernest Hemingway once said “happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know”. The link between intelligence and mental illness has been extensively explored throughout history.

And perhaps that’s the reason I write these words now; to reassure other Former Clever Kids that you’re not alone, that you’re not broken, that your existence is worth so very much beyond your test scores. That you don’t have to be perfect. That your best will always be good enough, no matter what you may’ve been told by your parents, by teachers, or by society.
But perhaps- perhaps it’s just to reassure myself that I still can.

That I can still string words together like the beads on the necklaces I used to make as a Kid, even if I can’t talk about wars and numbers and energy with ease and grace. That maybe I’m still something after all.