Wow, some pondering; from hay procurement to fathers to feeling misunderstood and not understanding the relationship between intelligence and personal, emotional or mental problem solving.

Intelligence is like hay, a raw resource. You have some hay and you feed it to your horses and they turn it into health and energy. There are several steps in there that have to be taken; if a horse has a bad digestion system, it is not going to be able to convert the hay into as good a health and energy product as another horse might but that does not make the hay any less potent!

Somewhere in you there are various personal difficulties and issues that are getting in the way of you using your intelligence to address what you see as your problems and getting a good result; one difficulty I see off the bat is not being sure of your intelligence! If you don't feel you have the resource, the hay, you aren't going to be able to deploy it to work for you, are you? If you think the loft is empty but you have several bales left in the back, where you can't see them from the ground, you can't use them to feed the horses, can you?

I would inventory my resources. I would take what other people see in me as "fact" (how can they see what isn't there?) and go about trying to see what they see instead of staying stuck in that particular spot.

Believing you are not intelligent enough to fix your problems means the problems must stay unfixed since they are your problems! Believing you are intelligent enough lets you move along to concentrating on the next step toward fixing the problems instead of not having any hay to feed the horses in the first place when you actually do.

What's with the hay procurement? I suspect there are more farmers with hay; can you find five and rank order them by price, location, ease of getting the hay? Can you pay a bit more to have it delivered, if you do not have the time or means to collect it or can you hire a high school kid to drive your truck over and get it or trade someone's mother picking it up for horse time for her child, etc.?

I remember when my father first felt "old" to me; I had a problem with my car and called him and instead of coming to my rescue he replied, "What do you want me to do about it?" in such a way that I truly realized he had no clue and was no longer the man who had the father resources to help his daughter, the daughter was an adult now and it was time for her to learn to take care of herself and her own problems as an adult. It wasn't that he did not love me anymore or would not like to help me but that our relationship had changed, our life paths and roles were not the same anymore.

Staying with the car stories; 20 years after realizing I had to learn to work on my own problems as an adult, I was married and my husband trusted me; told me how much he trusted me and how good my judgment was. I was a bit like you with your T telling you how intelligent you are, that I was so trusted to make good decisions for my husband and myself, etc. felt daunting and like it was too much. Then came the day my car (the next car that replaced the one that broke in the previous story :-) died, smoke or steam pouring out from under the hood in the grocery store parking lot. My husband was off on an adventure of his own and there was no way to contact him.

Next door was a full service gas station. I walked there and talked to the owner and his mechanic and we decided I could probably drive it the block to the station (no dash lights had come on yet). I did that and they looked at it and decided it was a major fix; would be more expensive than the car was worth just to look and see if what they thought was wrong (they would have to take the engine totally out and that was expensive and if the part they thought was broken was a certain type, the car could not be fixed at all (but I would still owe a zillion dollars for taking the engine out!).

As the mechanic was looking at it I was chatting with the station owner and someone came up to him and asked about a car the owner had for sale; I looked over and it was the car of my dreams, seriously, the car I told myself as a teenager I wanted! This was used, had been his grandmother's who had died and he had refurbished it and was selling it for a very reasonable price.

I remembered in the back of my mind that my husband said he had paid off my credit care and suddenly realized that I could charge that car on my credit card, if I wanted, I could afford it. It was a startling, scary thought! It was then I thought about my husband saying he trusted my judgement, "We're on the same team!" he'd exclaim. I riffled through my mental filing cabinet for other things I had decided and saw, through my experience, that I did make good decisions, that my judgment was "sound". I decided to buy the car! Here I was, all by myself, making a multi-thousand dollar decision. Scary stuff.

My reasoning went that the gas station was a prominent one in the community, the owner could not get away with lying to me, selling me a lemon, it could affect his credibility and standing in the community. I had no car at the moment; how was I going to get home from where I was without transportation? The repair on the old car was not worth its cost and was iffy if the part was not repairable; I could okay the repair and end up owing money for nothing and then having to pay to junk the car from the gas station. If the car could be repaired, it would take a couple weeks; I'd have to spend even more renting a vehicle to get to and from work. It was the car of my dreams, a very reasonable cost, the car was relatively low mileage, and, my husband could fit in it comfortably and drive it (he could not do either in the broken car).

I used my intelligence on myself to follow through on making a decision for me and my husband. I rank ordered my problems and looked for solutions and used my logic (intelligence) to figure out support for my decision. Nobody else was directly involved :-)

I would not worry about other people misunderstanding you; I would make sure you are talking or understanding yourself well.