123
I was eighteen. Psychiatric ward. They handed me a test.
One hundred twenty-three.
That's the number that stayed.
Here's what 123 means: top 5%.
Not top 1%. Not top 0.1%.
Top 5% is the uncanny valley1 of intelligence. High enough to see what genius looks like. Too low to be it.
It's like having 95th percentile ping in a game where the leaderboard only shows the top 100 players. You're fast. You're not fast.
Or: you're a senior dev mass-applying to FAANG2. You pass the screens. You fail the onsites. Every time. You know the system well enough to see exactly where you fall short.
I met a writer once.
He spoke the way I write on my best days — except it was Tuesday, and he wasn't trying. Sentences came out fully formed. Ideas arrived pre-structured.
I watched him and thought: this is what I'm pretending to be.
The difference between us wasn't effort. It was that his effort was invisible. Mine leaves fingerprints everywhere.
( Here's the thing about fingerprints: )
( They're proof you touched something. )
( They're also proof you were there, trying, maybe failing. )
In relationships, I got lovebombed3.
You're so emotionally intelligent. You're so different. You're not like other guys.
I accepted it because I needed it. An external validation cache4. Someone else's belief in my exceptionalism, stored locally, accessed when mine ran out.
But caches expire.
A year in, two years in — she's seen me stuck on the same bug for three days. She's seen the TikTok that got 200 views. She's seen me rewrite the same paragraph four times and still not get it right.
The myth can't survive proximity.
( What they saw at the start: a snapshot. )
( What they saw at the end: a git log5. )
( Every commit visible. Every reverted mistake. )
Here's what I never told them:
The thing you loved about me — that "effortless" depth, that sensitivity — it wasn't effortless. It was a curated first release. The version I shipped before you could see the codebase6.
My male friendships work differently.
No lovebombing. No myth. Bartosz saw me try and fail from day one. He's still here.
Not despite the effort. Just — the effort was never the problem.
( Maybe the problem was never intelligence. )
( Maybe it was )
( the belief that intelligence should be invisible. )
The writer I met — I don't know if he's happier than me. I don't know if his relationships last. I don't know if he lies awake wondering if he's enough.
I only know that I watched him and felt caught.
Like I'd been performing a magic trick, and someone in the audience had seen the thread.
But here's the thing about magic tricks:
The audience still clapped.
The trick still worked.
The thread was always there.
Top 5% is enough to build things. Enough to write things. Enough to try publicly and fail publicly and try again.
It's not enough to do it without effort.
Maybe nothing is.
I was eighteen. Psychiatric ward. They handed me a test.
One hundred twenty-three.
Just a number.
I'm twenty-seven now. Still trying.
The number can stay a number.
The trying is the point.
1 Uncanny valley: A concept from robotics where near-human entities provoke discomfort. Here applied to intelligence: close enough to genius to recognize it, too far to inhabit it. The uncomfortable middle ground.
2 FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google—the tech industry's prestige employers. Getting in validates your talent; not getting in despite trying becomes its own kind of data point.
3 Lovebombing: Excessive affection and praise early in a relationship. Can be manipulative, but sometimes it's just someone projecting their hopes onto a curated version of you. Either way, unsustainable.
4 Cache: In computing, temporary storage for frequently accessed data. Here: storing someone else's belief in you for quick retrieval when your own self-worth runs low. Fast but expires.
5 Git log: A complete history of every change made to code—including mistakes, reversals, and abandoned attempts. Unlike a final product, a git log shows the mess behind the polish.
6 Codebase: All the source code of a project. Messy, full of workarounds and TODO comments. The thing you hide until someone earns access. Intimacy as repository permissions.