Smart or Oh So Pleasant? I Dissociated Into Both
Elwood P. Dowd, in Harvey, says you can be smart or pleasant - not both.
I learned early to be pleasant. I didn’t stop being smart. I just dissociated into kindness until I was safe enough to reclaim my mind.
That’s what this is about - not fawning, exactly. Just a strange tenderness I built around myself like scaffolding. Kindness as camouflage. Kindness as real.
It worked. That’s what hurts.
I’ve always known I was smart. That wasn’t the question. The question was what kind of smart. I was perceptive, sure. Articulate. High-achieving. I knew how to present intelligence. But none of that mapped to the inside of my brain.
The way I thought - the recursive loops, the sideways synthesis, the way systems lit up in my chest like constellations - nobody talked about that. They just liked that I was nice. So I made sure to stay nice. It bought me time.
It bought me safety.
Now, I can name it.
I was building my mind.
I was translating bottom-up perception into top-down frameworks. I was internalizing complex systems and re-architecting them from the inside. I was surviving with architectural cognition that never quite landed anywhere - but kept me from breaking.
When it got too dangerous to be sharp, I made myself softer.
I put my brilliance in cold storage and handed out warmth instead.
The warmth was real. But it was also strategy. Not fake. Just incomplete.
That’s what made it so confusing.
When people liked me, I didn’t know what they were seeing. When they misunderstood me completely, I didn’t know how to correct them without sounding arrogant or cold.
So I said nothing. I stayed pleasant. I watched.
When I finally had enough distance from harm to open the storage locker - when I looked again at the intelligence I’d packed away to survive until it was safe for it to come out - I felt something like grief.
I was so good at kindness, I had forgotten that it was systemic cover.
Not for anything bad. Just for something I didn’t have language for yet.
It still hurts sometimes.
But I’m here now.
Smart. Pleasant. Whole.
I don't have to choose anymore.