With me, people generally waver back and forth, and that can really spin me in circles. Ask any member of my family, and they'll probably tell you I'm a genius. I mean Mensa-level. I assure you I'm not. I'm no brighter than most of my family is, but somehow I'm the one who ended up with that "smart kid" label, and it's not always a good thing. The trouble with having that label is, a lot of times people don't give you basic information you need. Then when things go wrong because you didn't have that information, they say they didn't tell you because they thought you knew it already, or they thought you'd be smart enough to figure it out without being told. Without that label, they would have just told you what you needed to know, and that would have been that.

On the other hand, it grrrrs me very much when people act surprised that I can do something most people my age can do, such as drive a car. It's a long, complicated story why I came into that later in life than most people do. For reasons I still haven't quite sorted out in my head yet, people in my life didn't expect me to be able to learn to drive, so they didn't bother trying to teach me. It wasn't until I married my husband, ten years ago, that things started to change. Now I have a car and a license, and if I need to go somewhere, I can take myself. Yet it continues to surprise people that I can drive, and I'm not talking about people who have known me all my life. I'm talking about people who only know me from church, for example. That happened just this morning. Because my husband had to work today, I drove myself to church, and it's not the first time I've done that. But at least two people were surprised that I had the ability.

What about me causes people to just assume I probably can't?