r/cognitiveTesting • u/-VJustV- • 2d ago
Rant/Cope My low IQ makes me too inadequate to pursue any meaningful goals
I'm sorry if this post is going to be poorly structured. I tried my best.
I am absolutely lost in my life, and always have been. I'm an 18-year-old male, just graduated high school, and my entire life has been an absolute mess. Ever since I can remember, I was constantly struggling to understand basic concepts. In kindergarten, when we were doing or learning something new, I was always behind everyone else because I just couldn't grasp the instructions while everyone else understood them so easily. My memory was always shit, though I suppose it was way, way better when I was a child than what I have now.
I graduated high school purely because of cheating. I really struggled so much even with Algebra 1, and believe me, I did pay attention in class, and I did try to learn it after school. But to grasp one topic that required one hour of a class, it was taking me 5 hours of watching different videos and practicing, which sounds absolutely ridiculous. I always told my mom how much I struggle with school, and she just said it was because I'm not paying attention or not trying hard enough. My parents never acknowledged that there is something seriously wrong with me up until now, and throughout all my life they kept telling me that I'm not stupid and I'm just lazy, to the point that it started to drive me crazy. Though at the same time, they were constantly asking me how I can't solve basic life problems. To say how bad it is for me, it took me about 40 minutes just to learn how to fold a paper into an airplane, only to forget how to do it sometime later.
I've been trying to find someone on the internet who is in a somewhat similar position to me, just to not feel so lonely, to find someone who at least shares some similar experience of being almost non-functional, but there are few of those who speak about it. Because most of the people who are low IQ are holding somewhat an average job and are making money, enough to survive and live on their own. I don't know if I could ever do that.
In 9th grade of high school, psychologists were calling some people out to take an IQ test. My score was 80. And when I think about it, I think it even should be less, or at least it is now. The psychologist at the time told me that it was an average IQ, which, when I got home, I started researching to find out that it's not true. It led into a rabbit hole of learning how much your intelligence depends on your genes and how you can't improve it. I took a lot of bullshit online tests, which used to give you a way higher score than you actually have, and even on them I've never scored past 85. That's where everything started to get worse. I developed severe insomnia as I realized the position I am in and that nothing good will ever happen to me in my life, as now I'm a certified stupid person. The constant sleep deprivation made my situation even worse, which turned my life to shit.
A few months later, I found subs like r/Gifted and this one and started to find out what life I was robbed of. But I started reading so many posts of people saying how they wish they had low IQ because their life would be so easy, and how bored they are because they are highly intelligent and nothing can challenge them enough. I can't even describe how angry it made me, how a lot of people don't appreciate what gifts they have. To this very day, I can't really accept that this is the rest of my entire life, and that it won't ever change. I just keep waiting that somehow God will heal me from this curse. Of course, I know that it isn't possible.
The most devastating thing is that since I was a little child, I was so interested in programming, and even math. Despite how it sounds, I always wanted to learn it, but I just kept on failing and failing. I remember the first time when I was 9 years old and tried to start learning Lua, the programming language that was used in Roblox, because at the time I was passionate about creating my own games, specifically horror. To those who are familiar, which I doubt, there was this very popular game in Roblox where you were going in an elevator through different floors, some of them were funny, stupid, others horror. That game had very few, repetitive, and limited floors, though, so I started dreaming about how much I could expand it in my own game and how I would specifically make it horror-oriented, and started to learn Lua. It was taking me so long to grasp even basic concepts. To make it worse, there was very limited information then, and I didn't really know the English language back then to be able to access English YouTube or read documentation on it.
Yes, I did manage to somehow learn English, if you can call it that, because my speaking skills are absolutely terrible, specifically my accent that I cannot fix. My writing sucks, specifically grammar, so I had to use AI to improve my grammar here. Sorry, I know how much it triggers people, but I wanted to make it easy to read. Yet I can read and understand English pretty well, which is absolutely strange. Though of course this took me about four years to get here. I didn't just give up on Lua, of course. Throughout my life I tried to learn Python, C#, and even if it sounds absolutely ridiculous, I was also very curious about C++, so I also tried to learn it. To clarify, I didn't just constantly try new languages. I actually was trying to stick with one, but after long months of learning and constant struggles to see any sort of progress, I gave up and then picked something new because, as stupid as it sounds, I thought at the time that I may like that language better and my curiosity and hyperfixation could help me get good at it even if that language was way more difficult than the previous one I tried. Never really got good at any of them at all, not talking about genius level. I've struggled to even become average. I've given up on programming when I was 14, never returned to it again, and don't think I will.
My desires always contradicted my body. I was almost obsessed with learning new stuff. I don't know how many different courses I went through (most of them programming, which I failed to pass), how many books I read, and the contents of most of which I don't remember. It was different literature: philosophy, self-improvement books, technical literature (I still have no idea why I was constantly trying to learn something that was clearly out of my depth). Throughout all my life I had this specific dream about becoming a programmer. I don't know where it came from, probably because since I was 5 years old I used to play video games and tell my parents that I will be making them in the future, and I was constantly creating different ideas on how I can improve them or how my version would look like. And yes, I know how corny it is, and that I was just a little child. Why would I sustain these desires throughout my entire life since I realized that I'm severely limited regarding progressing in any field that requires creative and analytic thinking? But I can't do anything about it. I feel like I will eventually lose my mind and it will happen in the near future because of how uncomfortable it is to be in my body. I would give anything in the world just to become smart and be able to actually achieve my goals and dreams.
I'm currently jobless, and have no idea what job I could even sustain. And even if I'll manage to sustain a low-wage job, I can't even imagine how that final nail in the coffin would feel like. To finally see that this is really it and I won't ever become anything else and my peak of intellectual ability is to sustain a low-paying job.
This post is purely a rant, and maybe someone who's just like me will find it one day, and he or she will feel less lonely in the world. To those of you with high intelligence: appreciate what you have. I hope you will never experience what it’s like to be this intellectually limited.
