You know too much

Who was I to reject a gift from God?

“How did you get so smart?”

The reason I’m smart is because I had to become incredibly attuned, well read, and articulate if I had any hope of surviving, and later translating, all of the incomprehensible conditions of my life, conditions which are rarely spoken aloud—incest, child rape, living under your rapist’s control for a decade, forced to treat him with love and kindness, granting his every wish in return for safety, becoming his pet, personal assistant, or sex slave, depending on mood and day. Growing out of these conditions, any chance I had at gaining some sense of personal autonomy later in life was dependent on my ability to make my experiences understandable, to both myself and the world at large. Intellect was my tool of choice, though I wouldn’t call it my top choice, nor would I call it my own choice to make. As a young child, I never cared for intellect—I was a born artist. My sister was “the smart one”, our father made sure to repeatedly tell us, while I was “the artistic one.” And he was right—he saw into the predilections of our souls, in the way that children’s souls are worn on their sleeves. I was an artist, a born artist, with every intention of remaining an artist for life. He didn’t like that very much. In the moments before he raped me for the first time, those fate-altering minutes spent bargaining with a child, he told me, “This will make you smart like your sister,” who was a child genius of sorts, whom I had witnessed him rape before. It all made sense now. His words assured me: this is the thing parents do to make their children smart. This is why my older sister is so smart. This is why I’m not smart enough. This is why Daddy doesn’t love me, all because I’m not smart enough yet, all because he hasn’t done this to me yet. Yet. An easy correction. He’ll love me once I’m smart. Daddy just wants to make me smart.

“This will make you smart like your sister”—a sick, twisted, self-esteem-annihilating sentence, spoken with utter confidence. The final atomic bomb dropped after years of preparation. Not the smart one, not the smart one, not the smart one, now’s my chance. It was as if he knew exactly what he was doing, the perfect moment to strike, his plan executed with the precision of a military leader. As if he knew the future he was creating while he created it, delicately and masterfully, omniscient, predestined. As if he was God, and he knew precisely how he planned to make me—in His image. He’d make me smart, like Him. And he did. I got smart, all thanks to Him. Slowly, gradually, in the subtle way that God’s plan twists and unfurls in cycles, folding in on itself and untangling with time. Or in the way a map for survival gets calloused into your skin from sheer necessity and repetition, or from what was once necessity becoming merely repetition. I needed to get smart, smart enough to outsmart Him, so now I live with hard-earned callouses of intellect. A gift from God, really. I forever have Him to thank. God the Father. He relished in the power, the ownership, the divine opportunity to make and remake us in His image. “This will make you smart like your sister.” He knew what he was making, saw our future, saw himself creating our future—perhaps even saw my eventual future without him, one he wanted to continue making and remaking long after I stopped believing in Him. He wanted omnipotence. Immortality. Any God would.

Perhaps it’s not that deep. Perhaps he came up with the sentence on the spot, intuitively, not knowing why, simply knowing it would work. Perhaps it’s the line any sick, psychopathic pedophile would use, recognizing the subtle discrepancy in his children’s intellects could be weaponized, knowing I needed his love, and knowing that in withholding his love on the condition that I needed to change—that I needed to let him change me—I would let him. Because I needed love, and because I didn’t know what was about to happen to me. Perhaps it was his surefire way of undermining my self-worth enough to convince me to betray my intuition, to convince me not to resist. Could I have resisted? I wanted to. I didn’t know what to resist. I would have just been resisting “that thing that makes children smart”, marketed as a gift. Who was I to reject a gift from God? Daddy just wanted to make me smart. What eight year old child could tell their parent, “No thank you, I’m smart enough as I am”? Children aren’t taught the words nor given the permission to reject the very caregivers on whom their lives depend, and it would be against any dependent creature’s survival instincts to try. Parents have omnipotent power over the fates of their dependents—or something close to that, depending where you stand in the fate and free will debate. If I had said no, force would have come next, or an even crueler verbal degradation leading me into submission. He was determined to own me, to destroy me and create me simultaneously, breaking me down and remaking me into what he wanted—he was determined to make me in His image. Or perhaps it was never about me at all, and God never actually cared too much for individuals. Just the act of creation itself.

So I did as I was told. I let him make me smart. I’m smart now. Smart enough for Daddy’s love. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever dated,” my first boyfriend told me. The words calmed my body, deepened my breath, soothing like a tranquilizer. Finally, the smartest. The smartest, so I’m safe now. The smartest, so He won’t ever try to make me smart again. Never again. I earned my safety. “You have a keen intellect,” the next guy told me, explaining his rationale for choosing me over the other girl. Daddy chose me, which was proof he finally loved me, all because I was finally smart enough, because I earned it, which meant Daddy wouldn’t hurt me anymore, which meant I was safe. Finally. This was where my safety was buried. Here. Over and over. Over and over, I found my safety here. X marks the spot. The way a map for survival gets calloused into your skin from sheer necessity and repetition, or from what was once necessity becoming merely repetition. I needed to get smart, smart enough to outsmart Him. Smarter and smarter, merely repetition at this point, with no end in sight other than the X on the map in the form of a new Daddy, an old safety. And when I eventually outsmarted this one, caught him in a lie, I became terrifying to him. Just as my father feared me when I outsmarted him. Just as God lives in fear of his own creation. God was scared now. So was I. I got too smart, my intellect growing in proportion to my fear, once a necessity, now merely repetition. I was scared smart—scary smart—so smart that I scared people, just like Daddy scared me, just like God scared me, and just like anything with too much power would scare anyone.

So I worked up the nerve to say it out loud—“I feel like you’re scared of me.” It was a drunken confession in the middle of a house party, uttered the first moment I got alone with the new boy I was crushing on. I had been feeling his fear. No reason behind it—we barely knew each other. An unspoken fear. No words for it. An undercurrent. Primal. What was my intention, really? A plea for honest feedback? He paused. Deliberated. Averted my gaze. Toyed with the idea of honesty, or what a graceful delivery might look like. Decided to put it into words. “You know too much,” he told me. I feigned confusion. “We barely know each other.” He looked me in the eyes, then repeated, “You know too much.” And I knew what he was talking about. And knowing that I knew exactly what he was talking about was all I needed to know that I indeed knew too much. And to know why that scared him. It would have been a painful thing to hear if not for his refreshing honesty. Seeing it, naming it, saying it out loud. I’ve seen too much, I know too much, I can’t turn back now. “How did you get so smart?” I made a deal with God. God said he would make me smarter. God said if I was smart, he might love me. The smarter I became, the more he feared me, and the more he feared me, the smarter I had to become. Smart enough to survive. Smart enough to save myself. Smart enough to tell the story. Thank God.