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In this series of posts, I’m putting two ideas together—the idea that smart, creative, sensitive individuals are confronted by special challenges and the idea that journaling is a valuable self-help tool—and turning them into a set of journaling prompts designed to lead you on a personal journey of discovery.
I hope that you enjoy these prompts. Here are five more challenges, and four journal prompts to go with each challenge. Engaging with any one of them may well serve you. I hope you find these valuable! And I hope you’ll take a look at Why Smart People Hurt and at my latest journal, Affirmations for Self-Love.
For a variety of personal, interpersonal, and societal reasons, smart people typically experience the following five identifiable feelings: they feel different; they feel misunderstood; they feel underutilized; they feel alienated; and they feel special, but also small. Let’s look at these five in turn.
- The challenge of feeling different.
Just as a very short or a very tall person is likely to feel different from those around him, just as a Jew is likely to feel out of place in a mosque and a Muslim is likely to feel out of place in a synagogue, just as an African-American golfer is going to experience herself as an object of scrutiny (and maybe ridicule and scorn) at an all-white country club, so a smart person is likely to feel different as he navigates life.
+ Have you experienced the feeling that you are different from other people?
+ Does this feeling translate as “better than other people”? Is this feeling of difference actually a feeling of superiority?
+ What have been the consequences of feeling different?
+ Would like to feel “more like other people” or are you content feeling yourself different?
2. The challenge of feeling misunderstood. For example, if you are ahead of the curve on some idea—let’s say, evolution—and people shake their head and claim that you are anti-religion and the devil incarnate, aren’t you going to feel misunderstood? Maybe you aren’t anti-religion or an atheist at all—but can you possibly make people understand that, given how angry and inflamed they are?
+ Do you regularly feel misunderstood?
+ To what do you attribute that feeling? That others simply don’t “get you” or your ideas? Or is something else going on?
+ What, if any, have been the consequences of feeling misunderstood?
+ What, if any, have been the consequences of actually being misunderstood?
3. The challenge of feeling underutilized. Many, if not most, smart people end up doing routine work that does not make any real use of their smarts. As an estate attorney, they may provide the same sort of advice over and over again; as a painter, they may be obliged to produce their signature work, even if that bores them; as an entrepreneur, they may spend days fulfilling orders and putting out fires and not really thinking about anything.
+ Does your work, occupation, day job or career make use of enough of you?
+ If it doesn’t, have you been able to find other ways to utilize yourself more fully or other outlets for your natural talents and gifts?
+ What, if any, have been the consequences of your limited ability to fully utilize yourself?
+ What new efforts might you make to utilize yourself more?
4. The challenge of feeling alienated. If you experience the people around you as antipathetic to thinking, if you find their conversations banal and their concerns superficial, if you see them more as threats than as allies, and if you “see through” to the void and understand the unreality of their myth-making (say, for example, about Heaven or Nirvana), the feeling that all of that engenders is likely to be one of alienation.
+ Do you feel alienated from other people? Can you identify why?
+ Do you have trouble in social situations engaging in everyday conversation and/or cocktail party banter?
+ Which do you find more alienating, the superficiality of most people or the irrationality of their belief systems?
+ Would you like to feel less alienated, are you resigned to feeling alienated, or are you even quite comfortable feeling alienated?
5. The challenge of feeling special, but small. A contemporary smart person is likely to feel two contradictory feelings, first, that, by virtue of his intelligence, he is special, and, second, that despite that intelligence and its specialness, he is still just a mere mortal susceptible to toothaches, betrayals, pratfalls, and every other exigency of life.
+ Have you experienced these contradictory feelings, of feeling special and also feeling puny and all-too-human?
+ How have these contradictory feelings played themselves out? By, for example, embarking on a large project and then feeling not at all equal to tackling it or completing it? Or in some other way?
+ Do you see this dynamic in play in the lives of the smart people you know? What have you seen?
+ What are your headline thoughts about the five feelings described above?
This is the final post in this series of journal prompts for smart people. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and found it valuable. If you’d like to comment on it or ask me a question, you can reach me at [email protected]
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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