Sometimes I wonder whether I got into trouble at some of the places I have worked because I am more intelligent than some of the people around me.
There. I have written it down.
It looks bloody awful.
Arrogant, elitist and exactly the sort of thing said by somebody who has recently watched a twelve-minute YouTube video about misunderstood geniuses.
I am not saying I am better than everyone else. I don't believe I should be carried into work on a golden throne while my colleagues scatter rose petals beneath my feet.
I am not even sure that intelligence is the right word.
Still, the thought has returned often enough that I cannot dismiss it completely.
I seem to notice things that other people do not. Cracks in plans. Contradictions between what somebody says and what they actually do. Problems sitting quietly beneath the surface while everyone else carries on as though everything is fine.
Sometimes I can see where something is heading before there is enough evidence to explain it properly.
It is a feeling.
Something does not fit.
Something has changed.
Something is being left unsaid.
I have learned not to ignore that feeling because it is often right.
Not always.
That is where the trouble begins.
The thing beneath the thing
I rarely seem able to accept things entirely at face value.
Tell me that a new procedure will make everything more efficient, and I will immediately start looking for the part that makes everything less efficient.
Tell me that a decision is being made for one reason and I will notice the three other reasons standing behind it, trying not to be seen.
Tell me not to worry, and I will begin worrying about why you felt the need to tell me not to worry.
This must be exhausting for other people.
It can be exhausting for me.
I seem to work in the spaces between spaces.
Between policy and practice.
Between what people say and what they mean.
Between the official explanation and the one everybody quietly understands.
Between a small problem today and the larger problem it will become if nobody deals with it.
That does not necessarily make me cleverer than anyone else. It might simply mean that my brain pays attention to different things.
Some people can receive an instruction, complete the task and go home.
I want to know why the instruction exists, whether it makes sense, what will happen when it fails and who will be blamed when it does.
Usually the answer to the final question is the person carrying out the instruction.
Funny, that.
Something does not feel right
I rely heavily on intuition.
I trust the slight tightening in my stomach when a conversation shifts direction. I notice changes in tone, strange pauses and explanations that contain the right words but somehow fail to feel true.
I can often sense when somebody is performing a version of themselves.
We all do it, of course.
There is the workplace version, the family version, the public version and the person who lies awake at three in the morning wondering where everything went wrong.
I have my own facades.
Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to them because I know what it feels like to maintain one.
The danger is that intuition feels like knowledge.
Something feels wrong, so I begin trying to explain why. My mind joins the available points together. A pattern forms. The pattern becomes a theory and, before long, the theory begins to feel like fact.
Sometimes it is fact.
Sometimes it is a fairly convincing story assembled from incomplete evidence.
The two can feel exactly the same from inside my own head.
I need to remember that.
My gut feeling may be an alarm, but it is not a completed investigation.
It tells me to look more closely.
It does not give me permission to convict anybody.
Doing the job properly
Much of this comes from wanting to do the best job I can.
That sounds suspiciously like something a person says at an interview after claiming that perfectionism is their greatest weakness.
Nevertheless, it is true.
I find it difficult to do something badly when I know how it could be done properly. I do not enjoy cutting corners and pretending not to notice. I become frustrated when people accept avoidable problems because dealing with them would require an awkward conversation or slightly more effort.
βThatβll doβ is a phrase that has kept much of Britain functioning for centuries.
It also drives me up the fucking wall.
The difficulty is that not everybody experiences work in the same way.
For me, doing the job properly is connected to responsibility, self-respect and sometimes safety.
For somebody else, the goal may be to get through the day with the least possible trouble.
They may not be lazy or stupid. They may have learned that excellence is rarely rewarded, while drawing attention to problems creates more work.
That is not an irrational conclusion.
Perhaps they are the intelligent ones.
The crack in the wall
The pattern usually begins with poor judgement.
I see a decision that does not make sense to me. I question it because I believe that somebody has missed something important.
In my head, I am pointing to a crack in the wall.
Look. There it is. We should probably do something about that.
The person responsible for the wall may hear something quite different.
You built this badly.
You failed to notice the crack.
I understand walls better than you.
The conversation stops being about the crack.
It becomes about tone, attitude, authority and whether I know my place.
This is the point where I usually become frustrated because I do not feel understood.
That matters to me more than I realised.
I do not always need somebody to agree with me. I do need to believe they have understood what I am saying before they dismiss it.
When I feel they have not understood, I explain again.
Then I explain the explanation.
I provide another example. I point out the contradiction. I return to the original problem, perhaps with slightly more force than before.
The other person experiences this as persistence, argument or refusal to accept an answer.
I experience it as an attempt to finish a conversation that never properly began.
Eventually, I am no longer merely identifying a problem.
I have become the problem.
Personal dynamics
This is where intelligence becomes a poor explanation.
The conflicts are rarely about raw reasoning alone. They are about personal dynamics.
Status.
Trust.
Pride.
History.
Whether somebody feels respected.
Whether I feel respected.
I may enter the discussion believing that the best argument should win. The other person may be thinking about authority, loyalty, inconvenience or the consequences of admitting that I have a point.
Workplaces are not laboratories in which neutral observers calmly test ideas.
They are groups of anxious primates wearing branded fleeces.
Being correct is only one part of being heard, and sometimes it is not the most important part.
I know this.
I still struggle with it.
When I see something clearly, I find it difficult to wrap the observation in the correct amount of reassurance, deference and social padding.
I want to talk about the thing.
The other person may first need to know that I am not attacking them, challenging their position or quietly announcing that I am cleverer than they are.
The problem is that, somewhere in the background, I may occasionally believe that I am cleverer than they are.
People can probably sense that.
Not through some mysterious sixth sense. It may be visible in a pause, a raised eyebrow, the way I phrase a question or my failure to pretend that an explanation has convinced me.
I might believe I am calmly observing.
They might feel examined.
Nobody enjoys feeling examined.
Seeing through people
I have sometimes thought that people dislike me because I can see through them.
That is an appealing explanation.
It makes me the perceptive outsider surrounded by people who fear being exposed.
It also places nearly all responsibility for the conflict somewhere else.
A less flattering possibility is that people dislike the feeling that I have already reached a conclusion about them.
Perhaps I sometimes confuse perceptiveness with certainty.
Perhaps I spot something genuine, then fill the remaining gaps too quickly.
Perhaps my determination to see through facades prevents me from noticing the frightened, tired or complicated human being standing behind one.
A facade is not always a deception.
Sometimes it is armour.
Sometimes it is the only way a person knows how to survive the day.
I would want somebody to remember that about me.
I should probably remember it about them.
More intelligent?
So, do I get into trouble because I am more intelligent than the people around me?
Sometimes, perhaps.
Intelligence is not distributed evenly. Neither are experience, judgement, curiosity or the ability to recognise patterns. Pretending that everybody sees and understands the same amount would be dishonest.
There will be moments when I genuinely notice something that somebody else has missed.
There will also be moments when somebody else understands the situation perfectly well but has chosen a different response.
They may value harmony over correctness.
They may know which battles are worth fighting.
They may see consequences that I have overlooked.
They may be better at keeping their mouths shut.
I am not sure intelligence can be separated neatly from temperament anyway.
What I experience as deep thought may sometimes be rumination.
What I call intuition may occasionally be anxiety.
What I call high standards may look like rigidity.
What I call integrity may sometimes contain ego.
What I call seeing through people may be a reluctance to trust them.
That does not make the original perception false.
It makes me human.
Annoyingly.
The spaces between spaces
I still believe there is value in the way I see things.
I notice connections. I question explanations. I care about doing the job properly. I can sometimes sense a problem before it becomes visible enough for everybody else to acknowledge.
Those are useful qualities.
They have protected me before.
They have also made my working life more difficult.
The challenge is not to stop noticing.
I could not do that even if I tried.
The challenge is to recognise the difference between noticing a crack and knowing exactly who caused it.
To treat intuition as a signal rather than a judgement.
To understand that being right does not automatically make me persuasive.
To accept that some people have heard me perfectly well and still chosen not to agree.
And perhaps to stop demanding that every person understand me before I allow myself to move on.
That may be the hardest part.
I want people to know that I am not trying to be difficult. I am trying to prevent difficulty. I am not questioning something for the pleasure of an argument. I am questioning it because I can see where it might lead.
But intentions do not cancel impact.
Sometimes, while pointing at the crack, I make the crack wider.
Perhaps that is where I really work.
Not above everybody else.
Not beneath them either.
In the narrow space between what I intended to say and what another person heard.
The space between seeing and knowing.
Between intuition and evidence.
Between being right and being understood.
The spaces between spaces.