I recently had a psychological assessment that led to ASD and ADHD diagnoses. Part of it was intelligence testing and it led me to have some additional context I didn't have before. I always knew I was "smart" - at the very least I had the numerical data of always doing really well in school. As an adult I continued to have people tell me I was really smart, and my response was usually (internally) like "Sure, Jan" or "K" like, maybe in some ways but it seemed like kind of a pointless thing to think about. I've never felt any amount of superiority about being smart - my brain is what it is and I didn't really do anything to earn it so it seems weird to feel any certain way about it.

In my assessment, there were 6 intelligence factors that were measured. In 4 of them, I scored 95-98th percentile, one around 80th, but the last one I scored exactly average. That last one was processing speed. According to my assessor, it's more or less true that a brain wants to be similar levels across the board. Otherwise you basically have perceived bottlenecks in your processing. And I thought that was really interesting and resonated, because my brain can do some really cool things, but yeah it always feels like when it comes to actually articulating and thinking in certain ways, I basically have to slam the brakes. It was helpful to explain certain things, and apparently having a discrepancy with processing speed can be caused by unmedicated ADHD. I'm still unmedicated but hopefully that will change soon.

No idea what I'm trying to say about this. Maybe I just want to shout out to the void lol. But the meme definitely resonates. I guess I have some nuance in that, I agree with what I read to be the intent of the meme, that IQ is just a measurement that doesn't mean anything in a lot of ways. But this lense was new to me - that there are several axis of intelligence, and it's more typical that people are similar across all axes (whether low, high, or average), and spikiness on these axis can lead to dysregulation and other issues.