The Number

I was sitting at the dining room table when the math caught up with me. Not actual math. I was fine at actual math, or fine enough, which was part of the problem. The math I am talking about is the other kind: the arithmetic of expectation, the running calculation that a person performs when they have been told, at a formative age, that their brain is exceptional, and they are now twenty-five years old and have not done a single exceptional thing with it.

Einstein published four papers in 1905, the annus mirabilis, the miracle year. He was twenty-six. The papers redefined physics. They introduced special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, provided empirical evidence for the existence of atoms, and established mass-energy equivalence. He did this while working as a patent clerk, which is a detail that is supposed to be inspiring but which, at twenty-five, sitting at a dining room table in Proctor, Minnesota, I found accusatory. A patent clerk. He didn’t even have a proper academic position. He just had the ideas, and the ideas were enough, and the ideas arrived on schedule, before he turned thirty, before the window closed, before whatever arbitrary deadline separates the geniuses from everyone else who is just smart. I cringe writing that word anywhere near my own name. But the number put me in its vicinity whether I wanted to be there or not, and the comparisons it invited were not ones I knew how to refuse.

I was given the number as a teenager. A quotient, administered in a setting I barely remember, by someone whose job it was to give tests and report results. The number was high. I will leave it at that. It was high enough to set expectations, high enough to be presented as a fact about me, like height, like blood type, a measurement that described a capacity. What no one mentioned, because it was not part of the assessment, was that the brain being measured was also the brain that would try, repeatedly and with considerable creativity, to kill me. The number described what the engine could do. It said nothing about the road.

At twenty-five, the road looked like this: I was working full-time as a programmer analyst at the University of Minnesota Duluth. I was married, two years in, to Melissa, who had signed on for a life with a person whose brain she did not yet know was broken because neither of us had that information. I was chipping away at a computer science degree part-time, course by course, semester by semester, the slow accumulation of credits that would not resolve into a diploma until I was almost twenty-eight. We were also renovating an 1880s farmhouse, tearing out walls, replacing plumbing, rebuilding a structure that had been neglected for decades, because apparently working full-time and going to school part-time and being married was not enough to absorb the energy. I was cycling between mania and depression without knowing those words applied to me, without a diagnosis, with some medication, without the vocabulary to describe what was happening when the energy spiked or when it cratered. I was throwing high-powered energy at the world and hoping something stuck.

‘the fucks wrong with me?

This was the question at the dining room table. Not posed with clinical detachment. Not asked in the spirit of self-improvement. Asked with the bewildered frustration of a person who had been given a number, and was sitting in a house that was undergoing a substantial renovation at twenty-five with nothing to show for it except a job, a marriage, a partial degree, a farmhouse he was rebuilding with his own hands, and the persistent, gnawing suspicion that the number was either wrong or meaningless or both.

I had not discovered anything. I had not invented anything. I had not developed a theory or published a paper or contributed a single original thought to any field. I was a programmer analyst. I wrote code for the university. I was good at it. I loved it, in fact. Loved the logic and the structure and the clean satisfaction of a system that worked because you made it work, but writing code for the university’s academic support and student life department is not special relativity. It is not even in the same category as special relativity. It is labor, competent and useful and entirely ordinary, and ordinary is not what the number is supposed to produce.

The number does a specific kind of damage when you are young and do not know what you are carrying.

It arrives as a gift. Someone, a teacher, a counselor, a psychologist with a clipboard, tells you that your brain operates at a level that most brains do not. The implication is clear: you are capable of extraordinary things. The word “potential” gets used. The word “gifted” gets used. These are words that sound like compliments but function as mortgages. They set up a debt against future performance, a loan taken out against achievements that have not yet occurred and that you are now expected to deliver.

In grade school, I was pulled out of regular class to study mathematics separately. This is the gift in action, the system identifying you, extracting you from the ordinary, placing you in a room where the work is different because you are, supposedly, different. The other kids notice. You notice the other kids noticing. The message is not subtle: you do not belong in the regular stream. You belong somewhere ahead of it, somewhere faster, somewhere that matches the number on your file. You are eight or ten years old, and you are already being told, in the language of scheduling and classroom assignments, that more is expected of you than is expected of the kid sitting in the seat you just vacated.

No one tells you that the brain being measured might also be the brain that keeps you up for five days straight, vibrating with an energy that has no outlet and no name. No one mentions that the same neural architecture that tests well on a Tuesday afternoon might, on a Thursday evening, convince you that the world would be better engineered without you in it. The test measures processing speed, pattern recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning. It does not measure the thing that happens when the processing speed exceeds the capacity of the person doing the processing. It does not have a scale for that.

I did not know what was happening to me in my twenties. I did not know the word “mania” as it applied to my own experience. I did not know the word “depression” as anything other than a condition that happened to other people, sad people, people who stayed in bed, not people who were holding down jobs and writing code and going to school. I did not know what mindfulness was. I did not meditate. I did not have a therapist or a psychiatrist or a diagnosis or a single framework for understanding why the energy came in waves that I could not predict or control, why some months I felt like the smartest person in every room and other months I could barely form a sentence that held together.

What I had was the number. And the number said I should be doing more.

David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest at thirty-three, a novel of over a thousand pages that redefined what American fiction could do, that held addiction and entertainment and loneliness in a structure so complex it required endnotes and a commitment from the reader that most novels do not ask for. He was also a person who struggled with depression for most of his adult life, who cycled through medications and treatments, whose brain produced both the work and the suffering, the two so intertwined that separating them would have required a kind of surgery that does not exist.

He killed himself at forty-six.

Terry Davis built an entire operating system by himself. TempleOS: his own compiler, his own kernel, his own programming language, every line of code written by a single person. It was, by any technical measure, an extraordinary achievement, the kind of project that teams of engineers at major companies struggle to execute. He did it alone, in a room, driven by a brilliance that was inseparable from the schizophrenia that also told him God was directing the architecture. The same brain that wrote the compiler heard voices. The same mind that designed the kernel believed it was building a temple. He was homeless for stretches. He died at forty-eight.

A writer and a programmer. Both geniuses. Both mentally ill. Both dead. I am a writer and a programmer. I am mentally ill. I am not dead, which is either the difference that matters or a difference of timing, and I try not to think too hard about which.

I am not drawing comparisons. The comparisons draw themselves, and I am choosing not to look at them too long. But they sit there, in the periphery, in the space between what a brain can produce and what it costs to operate one that produces at that level. The number measures the output. It does not measure the price.

The paper ceiling is what they call it: the invisible barrier that descends when you do not have the credential, regardless of what you can do. I knew, at twenty-five, that I needed the degree. Not because the degree would make me a better programmer. I was already a good programmer, already doing the work, already solving the problems that the degree would theoretically teach me to solve. I needed it because the world requires documentation. Because “self-taught” and “experienced” are words that get you through the door at some companies and not at others. Because the same institutions that measure intelligence also measure credit hours, and the two numbers exist in different systems that do not talk to each other.

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So I chipped away. Part-time, while working full-time, while being married, while cycling through moods I could not name on a schedule I could not predict. A course here, a course there. Semesters where the mania carried me through: high energy, rapid comprehension, the ability to read a textbook in a weekend and retain most of it, the number doing what the number was supposed to do. And semesters where the depression arrived and the coursework became an obstacle of impossible weight, where assignments that I understood intellectually became things I could not physically bring myself to complete, where the gap between capacity and function opened wide enough to fall into.

I would not finish until I was almost twenty-eight. Einstein had rewritten physics two years earlier than that. The comparison was stupid. I knew it was stupid, even then, even without the vocabulary to explain why, but the number does not allow you to stop comparing. The number is a ranking, and rankings imply competition, and competition implies that someone is winning and someone is not, and I was sitting at a dining room table in Proctor, Minnesota, doing the math and arriving at the same answer every time: I was not winning.

What I did not understand at twenty-five, what I could not have understood, because understanding requires a kind of self-awareness that the undiagnosed do not have access to, was that the inventory I was taking was rigged.

I was measuring myself against people who had one thing I did not: a brain that worked with them rather than against them. Or at least a brain whose particular dysfunctions did not include the cycling, the unnamed episodes, the energy spikes that felt like genius and the crashes that felt like proof of its absence. Einstein had his struggles; the mythology does not dwell on them, but they existed. Wallace had his, extensively documented. The history of genius is thick with minds that burned bright and burned out, with people who produced extraordinary work while privately falling apart. But at twenty-five, sitting at the table, I did not see myself in that company. I saw myself in the gap, the space between what the number was supposed to mean and what my life actually looked like, the distance between potential and the particular mess I was making of it.

The mess, as it turned out, had a name. But the name was years away. At twenty-five, all I had was the number, and the number without the name is a cruel combination. It tells you what you should be capable of. It does not tell you what is standing in the way.

I am forty-five now. The number has not changed. Intelligence is stable across a lifetime, which is one of the few things about my brain that is. But my relationship with it has shifted in the way that all relationships shift when new information arrives.

The brain that produced that number is the same brain that tried to kill me. Multiple times, across multiple decades, with the methodical creativity that a high-functioning mind brings to all its projects. It is the same brain that produced an eighteen-month manic episode so seamless I thought I was happy. It is the same brain that, in an emergency room in St. Paul, designed a suicide plan with the specificity of an engineering proposal, load-bearing calculations included, because the brain does not stop being good at what it is good at just because what it is good at is being turned against the person it belongs to.

It is also the brain that writes code, and writes essays, and holds down a career, and figured out, eventually, with pharmaceutical assistance and clinical support, how to keep showing up. The number describes all of it. The capacity for the work and the capacity for the destruction. They are not separate functions. They run on the same hardware.

At twenty-five, I thought the number meant I should be Einstein. At forty-five, I understand that the number means my brain is powerful in ways that include but are not limited to the ones that show up on tests. It is powerful enough to build systems that other people depend on, and powerful enough to construct elaborate arguments for why I should not exist, and the difference between those two applications is not intelligence. It is medication, and therapy, and a diagnosis that arrived fifteen years later than it should have, and a woman who stayed.

I think about the dining room table sometimes. The twenty-five-year-old sitting there, doing his broken math, measuring himself against dead physicists and arriving at failure. I want to tell him that the number is not the thing he thinks it is. That it describes the engine, not the journey. That the road ahead includes a diagnosis and a coma and a recovery and a career and a life that none of the numbers, not the intelligence quotient, not the actuarial tables, not the clinical odds, predicted.

But mostly I want to tell him to stop doing the math. Not because the math is wrong, but because the variables are incomplete, and the most important ones have not been identified yet, and the answer he keeps arriving at, *I am not enough*, is a conclusion drawn from a data set that is missing the single most critical piece of information: there is a reason the engine is on fire, and it has a name, and it can be treated, and he will still be here at forty-five to learn all of this, which is, by any measure, the most improbable thing a brain of any wattage could accomplish.

The number has not changed. It does not mean what I thought it meant. It does not mean what anyone told me it meant. It means that my brain is very fast, and very powerful, and very dangerous, and mine. It is the same number it was at the dining room table. But I am not the same person, and the distance between those two facts is the only measurement that matters.