People on PC (and in real life) tell me I am intelligent but the seemingly endless struggles I experience understanding what I am learning or being taught appear to refute that claim.

Intelligence is significant to me because it is the single characteristic of mine that I have ever been valued and respected for, since I have, for as long as I can remember, failed at about everything else. As a child, when I used to reflect on relationships and why it was that I was abused and disliked so much, I noted the connection between academic performance and relationships when I observed that the children whom excelled in school were treated better than the ones who did not. Later, I concluded that the abuse I was forced to endure was a consequence of low academic scores (i.e., being stupid). It was this that motivated me to attempt to master and learn everything I could to be less stupid and reduce the abuse in my everyday life; to a degree, I was successful in this, because as my scores improves staff at school treated me better, I was bullied less, and while abuse still occurred in my household, it was of a different kind. Academic scores and intelligence thus became critical to how I see myself and the world around me.

But when I recurrently encounter situations that I feel reflect negatively on my intelligence or lack thereof, it is a threat to all of what I value and wish to achieve, thereby making me feel anxious and contemplate suicide. Indeed, in 2011 when I drafted plans to commit suicide out of issues with university, I believed (and to a lesser degree still do) that failing to achieve a formal education would forever condemn me to failure, especially with regards to relationships - how could a woman, or anyone for that matter, accept me if I failed at that? While that might seem absurd to those reading this now, I feel like I am regularly treated with disdain for exactly this reason, and it was because of this that originally prompted me to delete my Facebook account.

When I am told I am intelligent I can never sure to believe it because I always see intellectual shortcomings of mine that make me feel like I am stupid: chess loses, having difficulties understanding reading material, issues with schools, and even intellectual games. On the Internet once, I was challenged once to a geography game, where contestants were provided with a satellite image of the world (no borders, no words, all natural earth) and then were provided with a clue of a location on Earth and 30 seconds to click on where they thought it was. Points were calculated based on how fast a choice was made (ex. 5 seconds, 4 seconds, 25 seconds, etc.) and how close in distance it was to the correct answer (ex 200 miles, 600 miles, etc.). Say the clue was "I am the world's tallest waterfall," you would need to be able to locate Angel Falls in southeastern Venezuela (Guiana Highlands) in less than 30 seconds from memory. But even in such a competition I still couldn't make 1st place, and that is supposed to my my area of expertise. In chess, I lose a considerable amount of games against the computer and other players, and that's a game based on intellect and memorization. When I started to study Aron Nimzowitsch's theories earlier in the year I wasn't able to understand them well enough. School was always another area of hardship for me too.

How can I be certain if I am stupid or intelligent? If I am intelligent, how can I still have all these shortcomings, which I wouldn't think an intelligent individual would have? Whenever I am told that what I aspire to is impossible, I am inclined to describe the various polymaths in history, as surely they have accomplished all of this.

Apologies for this long rant. Needed to vent some of this frustration.