The Fear of Being Unintelligent
My whole life, I've been told that I'm a very mature and smart person. Maybe it sounds self-centered, but I do agree to an extent, and I am proud of my intelligence, especially my literacy. However, I do still acknowledge that I don't know everything, especially when it comes to social situations.
I have a fear of not knowing everything. Because I've been told I'm smart, I always feel like I have to completely and fully live up to that title, be the kind of person that can answer any question with a well-articulated response.
I know I can't know everything, but I do want to. I've always had a thirst for knowledge in various fields. The thing is, it feels like the fields I mainly excel in aren't enough to help me get through school, which is my main priority right now. I know a lot about miscellaneous topics rather than the general ones that are discussed in school. Ask me about the lore of The Legend of Zelda franchise, the history of My Chemical Romance, Alien, World War I and Vietnam history, explanations of various punctuation marks (I went down a rabbit hole one day), extraterrestrial life forms, time travel, tardigrades, and I could talk about it for hours. Ask me about the distributive property or why people walk slow for no reason, and I'll stare at you like my brain just melted out of my ears.
Knowing everything is impossible, and that's a little terrifying for me, in the same way I'm disappointed that it's not possible to read every book or watch every movie or listen to every song.
An issue of mine is that I tend to look down upon other people who I subconsciously view as "stupider" than myself or the smart people I tend to surround myself with. I'm just afraid of ending up like that. It's unnerving to me when I encounter someone who is just overall smarter than me, and jealousy boils up to the point where I want to degrade and belittle said person if I don't respect them.
All in all, one of my biggest fears is being unintelligent or being viewed as such. I want to learn everything that's possible for me to learn and interpret in my own ways, and in the process, be viewed as superior. I definitely have a superiority complex that is rarely justified to the extent that I have it.