IQ is the Astrology of Colonial Science except it’s less poetic, way more ableist, and somehow still printed in reports like it means something deep.
It doesn’t measure creativity. It doesn’t account for emotional depth, nuance, or trauma. It DEFINITELY doesn’t track how someone makes something that wrecks people and helps them feel like being alive again. IQ could never measure you… at least not the whole you. Yet we generally have accepted it as unshakeable truth (it’s not).
We are experiential, just as electrons behave differently when observed, the same happens with us. We are not quantifiable, at least not as a whole.
I choose emotional complexity, embodied wisdom, and felt perception over a number that can’t account for the different kinds of trauma, cultural context, relational intelligence, or multidimensional gremlin knowing.
Everyone is brilliant. Not just in the ways systems are designed to see. There are people who read a room with surgical empathy, notice what no one says and respond to it tenderly and lovingly, survive shi-stuff that would break most people, or even make someone feel like they belong in a single sentence. Test scores won’t show that because they were never meant to. They were designed for HIERARCHY, NOT HUMANITY.
Everyone is brilliant in their own ways, no matter where they fall on this measurement. We are all fractals diverging and converging and evolving through different thoughts, ideas, and processes.
It’s a test that got canonized because it was measurable, not because it was meaningful (YOU SEE THIS EVERYWHERE TOO). It measures pattern recognition, speed under pressure, short-term memory, and how comfortable you are with white-knuckle silence filling in tiny circles with a #2 pencil while shoving down the sound of your anxiety. It says you can take a specific kind of test in a specific format under specific conditions with specific cultural assumptions baked in AND NOT CHOKE. Being a good test-taker doesn’t mean you aren’t intelligent. It just means that you succeeded at what they measured.
“I’m objectively smart.”
Cool. Grats. Can you hold paradox without imploding tho? Can you be kind while in pain? Can you name grief without killing it? Yeah, sure, you figured out how to solve abstract logic puzzles quickly. That’s great. So can some species of birds.
Maybe like liability and safety and productivity,
we sawed off the parts of us that make us whole
just so money can stay a certainty.