Yesterday someone pointed out, I don't care to mention where, that the sitting President may have just recited the oath of office without understanding what it means. I empathize.
When I was a child I did quizbowl. I won the state championship and came 33rd at nationals my senior year, so I suppose by any objective measure I was pretty good. People said I was smart or that I knew everything. But really, if you had interrogated me on any of the stuff it looked like I knew, you'd find it was a paper facade:
INTERLOCUTOR: What's the Zeeman effect?
TINY KATIE: Oh, that's easy, it's the splitting of spectral lines in the presence of an external magnetic field.
INTERLOCUTOR: Yes, but what does that mean?
TINY KATIE: ...
I think more or less my entire childhood was optimized to appear smart. The reality is that I'm a pretty dumb girl when I want to be. Well, uneducated might be a better word. I have a graduate degree, hence I'm by any objective measure formally educated, and I'm good at the crossword, but I don't really know a whole lot, even about some of the subjects I'm supposed to know. I work as a Professional Math Explainer and very often I find that I've forgotten, say, how to do variation of parameters.
What I think more of us need is someone to shake us by the shoulders. For instance, fact: muons are subatomic particles which decay with a half-life of 2.2 μs. This was the beginning and end of what I knew about muons in my quizbowl days, because I read it off a list of things I was supposed to memorize. But this is no way to learn!
But there was no one to tell me: muons can catalyze nuclear fusion because they're heavier than the protons they replace and so pull in the electrons more! Muons usually come from random-ass protons (cosmic rays) whizzing through space and bumping into Earth like it was the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker's Guide! Muons were one of the first proofs positive of relativity that we observed, because they travel so fast that those 2.2 μs are dilated to almost a millisecond, a length of time barely below the threshold of human comprehension, so there are far more of them at the earth's surface than there should be! (γ = (1 - 0.99972)-½ ≈ 40.8, and γ(2.2 μs) = .90 ms.) We filmed this! We always talk about the dude in the really fast spaceship, but it's right here in front of us! They went up on a mountain and confirmed relativity with a basketball-sized sphere of steam! Why don't they tell people about this?! Well, they do tell people, but not me.
It's not impostor syndrome if you're actually an impostor! Yes, that is what everyone who self-dxed with I.S. thinks, but really, I was putting up a facade of something that I very much wasn't, and affixing to it my whole, entire identity. That's the definition! It goes without saying that I was terribly insecure.
This is what I'm angry about a lot of the time — a lot of my capacity to understand this stuff, to actually be a smart person, was undermined by the very people who claimed to be supporting my education. Literally the day they realized I could read, it became a cudgel to be wielded against me (usually by myself, to save them the trouble.)
Here's the story, as it was told to me, because I was there but I don't remember: It's the year 1999 or 2000, and I am about 30 months old. My mother takes me to a Pizza Hut. At this time, they have a logo proclaiming "THE BEST PIZZAS UNDER ONE ROOF," which is what I read off the menu.
Nobody had taught me how to read.
Immediately, I was taken away to be tested. As it turns out, this is something called type II hyperlexia, marked by abnormally high reading ability without commensurate comprehension ability. Emphasis very much mine. I read about the muons, but I didn't understand what that meant.
Suddenly, I was a gifted kid.