Mensa & Me... Page 2

The Mensa test didn't seem all that difficult... which convinced me, of course, that I must have really screwed up! After all, shouldn't one have to sweat blood to be formally admitted to the ranks of the really smart types? Oh well, I gave it my best shot. I'd just have to wait and see, I supposed.

I don't remember how long we were told it would take to get our scores - maybe 10 days or 2 weeks or a month; it was a long time ago. But I do remember that the time came and went and I had still received no word. I waited, patiently at first, then with increasing apprehension. My God, I thought, my score was so low that they're too embarrassed to even tell me what it was. Some psychic person at American Mensa knew what a horrible blow it would be to my damaged psyche to find out I was, indeed, too dumb to have wasted their time grading my test.

And the humiliation I was increasingly prepared to face at work! I had mistakenly told some people what I was going to do. Now I'd have to 'fess up... flunked! Failure!!

Before putting myself through any further self-castigation, I decided to call the local Mensa chapter. I explained that I'd taken the test weeks ago and had never heard anything regarding my score. The man I talked to said, much to my surprise, that they'd had my name on the books for weeks as a newly qualified person and they all wondered where I'd been. He arranged for the notification to be resent.

I'd passed! I'd actually made it into the 98th percentile. Well, I guess I'd always been there, but now it was official. I tried not to crow too much. Just told people who asked if I'd 'passed' my test.

Then came the letter from Intertel. Not only had I made it into the 98th percentile, but Intertel informed me that I'd also made it into the 99th!

I find I'm always a bit embarrassed to talk about it, maybe because I realize how much I don't know. And maybe because I'm increasing aware of the dumbing down of our society and how people seem to view the highly intelligent - I wanna' be loved! Please don't hate me because I'm intelligent. Pleeeaaase... Others recognize and acknowledge some of my abilities and talents before I will acknowledge them in myself. And now that I've reactivated my membership, I still don't talk much about it. I missed a couple of meetings/gatherings/sigs that I wanted to attend... weather, two serious family crises that came one on top of the other, and a minor health crisis of my own.

But when I tell friends of my intentions, I still say I'm going to an event with this 'club' I belong to. Still slightly embarrassed to announce that I intend to go to a Mensa gathering! Isn't that amazing??? Aren't I supposed to be crowing about this or something? I suppose that my main satisfaction - other than the enduring search for intelligent life on this planet - is to constantly reassure myself that mother was indeed wrong.

One of the points of this narrative is to communicate to any parents out there how long it takes even a highly intelligent person to recover from years of negative input and a lack of intellectual stimulation. The negative input went on for years, until my mother died when I was 45 years old. She never told me she was proud of me, or that I was smart or pretty, or anything else positive. And she let me know, in no uncertain terms, that nothing I did was ever quite good enough. It was supposed to encourage me to try harder, be better. It had the exact opposite effect, I can assure you.

On the other hand, she was a primo stage mother, bragging to any friend or stranger who would listen, that the beautiful and talented little girl or young woman on the stage was her daughter. She took me to the theatre and the ballet, provided dancing and acting lessons, read and sang to me from the time I was an infant, took me to exotic restaurants and art shows and most of the missions and museums in Southern California.

But she wouldn't let them jump me ahead in school. All of the intellectual stimulation she provided did instill in me a love for learning almost anything. There is nothing I find boring if it's communicated in a way that arouses my curiosity. But I wasted so many years learning that about myself because I stayed with my class in school and got terminally bored, didn't learn to study until I was 30 or so, and had so many failures that I simply stopped trying to succeed.

Happy ending, though. When I was in my mid 40s and was laid off from my Geological Technician job, I left the upstart theatre company of which I was co-owner, returned to Ohio, and completed my theatre degree (with the intention of returning to Denver and my partner and our artistic endeavors). I graduated 11th in a class of 500+, cum laude, got my Phi Beta Kappa key, and was told by a friend that my 3.85 GPA might be too high and I might have trouble getting into graduate school - too studious and all that.

What they didn't know is that as a Performance Major in the Theatre Department I spent most of my time either on stage or backstage, working on every production (required for performance majors), and held down 2-3 work study jobs at a time. I did a concentration in French (it would have required delaying graduation for a year to get the one class I was short for a minor in French). I worked as a seamstress and Dramaturg in the Theatre Department, and as a tutor and a T.A. in the French Department. Not much time for studying, I'm afraid.

I found that by doing the class reading, taping the lectures, and then transcribing the tapes, enough stuff made its way into my brain that - along with some deep breathing and relaxation techniques - I did well on exams. The studio art and costume design classes took a little more effort - or at least most of whatever time was left over after classes, my jobs, and hanging around the theater 'til the wee small hours most nights.

So I'm back in Mensa and have renewed my Intertel membership. It's taken years, but I'm looking forward to meeting the local folks and to finally getting a life (I spend entirely too much time in front of this dumb 'puter. It's such a wonderful escape from the big, bad world.).

If you're interested, you can continue with the tale of my first time as a Mensa member... totally a bust! Or you can get out of here and head back to my Home page.