I’m Scared of Being Stupid

Intelligence, insecurity, and identity on the Internet.

It’s fitting that I started the first draft of this post in a notebook I received at a poetry conference in my university town. At an evening reading, I sat in the balcony with my friend Charlie—an incredibly well-read poet and writer—and his wife, Susan—an artist, designer and well-traveled woman who just knows where to go in New York City. We listened to Pádraig Ó Tuama, an Irish poet and theologian, read a poem that honestly went over my head and afterwards I wondered if I’d ever feel smart enough to attend events like these.

I got a tote bag from that poetry conference, and I have to admit to you that sometimes I carry it around like the Northeast Ohio version of The New Yorker tote. Sure, I like the tote bag, but I like what the tote bag signifies about me to strangers: that I am a woman who reads poetry, who appreciates culture, who likes the finer things in life. In reality, I only occasionally read poetry, and when I do, I can struggle to understand it. Yes, I appreciate culture, but I think “culture” is incredibly subjective. And sure, I like the finer things in life, but I also like hot dogs purchased from Sheetz, a Western Pennsylvania gas station. I’m convinced that all of us have our own literal and/or proverbial tote bags we carry around as a way to gain street cred—to signify to those around us that we’re interesting and intelligent.

The Finer Things Club, estimated to have been established in 2007 in Scranton, PA

Blessedly, it was not until relatively late in life that I first worried that I was stupid…or at least much less intelligent than my peers. It began during my freshman year at my liberal arts college, a year when I realized that my public school education had quite a different curriculum compared to my classically educated peers. While I didn’t think of my public education as inadequate, I suddenly felt terribly inadequate as classmates rattled off flawless pronunciations of Greek philosophers and expressed boredom over assigned reading they felt was familiar, but I felt was foreign.

Sometimes, after class, I’d look up words my classmates used during discussions because I did not have the slightest idea what “epistemology” meant. At the time, I didn’t consider how the purpose of going to college is to learn because I was too busy worrying that my peers might realize how little I knew and reject me with insults using words whose etymology (not to be confused with epistemology, entomology, or epidemiology) was unfamiliar to me, a plebeian of middling intellect. Even the major I selected plagued me with insecurity about my intelligence; I was a Communication Studies major, or as others at my alma mater liked to claim, the easiest major.

A few years after graduating, I seriously considered pursuing a master’s degree. While I wouldn’t say I’ve ruled out going back to school entirely, I realized that a big motivating factor for seeking additional degrees was that I wanted to be respected. I liked the idea of being a learned person—of studying something long enough and hard enough and valuable enough to society to be deemed worthy of labels like impressive or smart or accomplished. I wanted to be useful to society. But more than that, I wanted to be admired by people.

It’s no surprise that in my early twenties, I was deeply attracted to a sentiment popularized by Christian social media influencers: “You are enough.” “You are enough” was admittedly theologically problematic (of course, I am not enough—I am a sinful human being with a profound need for Christ), but the message resonated with me. My college and early postgrad years were marked by the struggle of constantly feeling like I wasn’t measuring up, or that I could be doing more, or that I needed to squeeze every ounce of my potential out of myself. I was fearful of appearing foolish and scared of seeming stupid. I understand why I latched onto the sentiment of “You are enough” when I was 21, and find myself at 31 still struggling with to build a healthy framework of self-esteem as a Christian who believes in the gravity of sin but also in the generosity of the Gospel.

If you were a woman attending a Christian college in 2014 and didn’t have this sticker on your laptop case, what were you even doing

I reckon that all of us want to feel like we are enough—to have others think of us as intelligent and impressive and interesting. Admiration and adoration are the currency of social media, and many of us are hoping for a gold rush we can cash in on. Really, any insecurity stems from this fraught feeling that we’re a fraud, and one day the people who claim to love us will find us out and turn their backs on us because they’ve finally discovered who the real us is. The real me? She is a writer who is codependent on spell check, a Christian who has never read Augustine’s Confessions, a graphic designer who gets tracking and kerning mixed up in her mind. She is a woman who is constantly one step away from sending herself to a self-imposed prison for the crime of being a fraud.

Will it ever end?

Sometimes, I even wonder if my internet acquaintances would like the real-life me, or if they would be disappointed that I'm not smart enough or funny enough or cultured enough. Would they enjoy the person sitting across from them, or would they prefer the version that shows up on screen? It is humbling and horrifying to realize how much we size each other up in the Age of the Internet. While “finding our people” is certainly a fun aspect of internet community building, the path to do so can be perilous. Without interacting in any substantial way, it is incredibly easy to write people off as too much of this and too little of that, ultimately categorizing them as worthy of our warmth or not. This is why dating apps can be dangerous, why Instagram can invoke envy, why Substack can suck us into a toxic comparison trap.

I do not believe that having a public social media presence is evil, but I have experienced how easy it is to use it for the wrong reasons: for approval, for admiration, for attention, for affirmation. It can be addicting to feel like you’re in with your preferred internet in-crowd, especially when that in-crowd is full of people who others seem to have deemed important, smart, admirable, funny, beautiful, etc., etc.. This desire to be a part of the in-crowd can even influence the choices I make on these platforms; I can’t be the only one who has considered what topics would get me Substack clout if I wrote the right post. Right? Right.

In all honesty, my desire for approval and admiration feels like an addiction I’ll never be rid of. It haunted me as a college freshman when I wanted others to think I’m smart, and it haunts me as a thirty-something adult who thought she’d struggle with confidence a lot less by now. But the first step in recovering from an addiction is admitting you have a problem¹. So here I am. I have a problem with wanting to be perceived as intelligent—with wanting internet strangers to be impressed by my blog posts that I write for fun. The title of this post is, “I’M SCARED OF BEING STUPID” but it should probably read, “I’M SCARED OF BEING PERCEIVED.” And honestly, this is all making me go a bit mad. I don’t want to live this way—writing from the verge of an identity crisis and creating because I have something to prove.

And that’s where Step 2 comes in. Step 2 in addiction recovery is “surrendering to the belief that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” This is why I have recently found a lot of comfort and hope from David Zahl’s new book The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World.

Y’all gotta read this one.

A few chapters into The Big Relief, Dave shares a story about being rejected in high school by his peers when he was not chosen for the position of captain on the water polo team he’d been a part of. The team could vote to select two team captains, and given that only two boys were eligible (Zahl and a peer), it looked like a lock. But then the votes were tallied, and only one captain was chosen, not two. Zahl was publicly rejected. It was a classic teenage humiliation, and I imagine many of us have our version of it in our backstory. I know I certainly do. Years later, Zahl is able to reflect on this experience of being rejected by his peers with a redemptive perspective, writing this:

“God’s approval of you is not subject to any vote or public opinion. It is the subject only to the grace of the one true Captain himself. The rejection we fear—indeed, the rejection we may experience from our peers or from the authority figures in our lives—is not the rejection of God.” (p. 59)

Rejection is such a vulnerable thing, and certainly has been a huge part of my adult life. We all want to be respected, not rejected. But more than respect, I think what we all really want the most is to be loved just as we are. Again, Zahl writes:

“God’s grace, as revealed in Jesus Christ, is not tied to any human criterion of worth. If anything, God inverts our precious hierarchy of deserving and behaves in the most noncomplementary fashion imaginable, giving superabundant attention, approval, and love—his very self—to the wrong sort of people (p. 22)

Yeah, I went to Harvard…last November…on a trip to Boston…as a tourist

It is exhausting living for the approval of others, whether that be here on Substack or by the person sitting across from you at the dinner table. And so I encourage all of us—and I’m preaching to myself here—to continue on AA’s step 3: “Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

And who is God as I understand him? Well, I am to understand that he is patient and kind. He keeps no record of wrongs. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And as the Apostle Paul reminds us, nothing we can or cannot do will separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (That’s Romans 8:38-39, baby!) I can’t help but reshare this Dallas Willard quote from The Divine Conspiracy, which hits this point home:

“We must understand that God does not "love" us without liking us - through gritted teeth - as "Christian" love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core - which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word ‘love’.”

At his core, God does not love us for our intellectual accomplishments, our well-received Substack essays, our degrees, our ability to overcome adversity, or even our contributions to his Church. No—God loves us like a father who is meeting his newborn baby for the first time. He is endeared by our existence and has been working for our good before we even took a breath.² He likes us and he wants to spend time with us. He is interested in who we are and who we are becoming. He is unstingy with his affection, unperturbed by our annoyances, unequivocally convinced that we are worth pursuing no matter the cost. When God looks at us, he is not gritting his teeth—he is grinning.

I am certain my days of saying something stupid, of feeling dumb, of being overwhelmed by insecurity, and of being tempted by public approval are far from over. But I have hope. I have hope because I have given up! I have admitted that I cannot live a life where affection is earned and love is conditional. And so on the day that insecurity rears its ugly head and its whispers turn to shouts, God’s voice speaks louder: “You are my children, you are my heirs!”³ There is nothing to be scared of when you have God on your side like this.

So call me a fool, but I am a fool for Christ. Put that on a tote bag.

This would be a great place to carry a self-congratulatory tote bag.

1. “The Twelve Steps,” Alcoholics Anonymous

2. Psalm 139

3. Romans 8:1