When my bilingual 3-year-old gets excited, her thoughts outpace her brain’s ability to shape words into the right language, to the right parent. And she starts to stutter.
“Mamá! Elena se está moviendo a la… a la… a la… ”
Four agonizing seconds pass as her eyes flit, arms gesturing wildly toward the staircase where my 1-year-old is perched precariously, determined to practice her bouldering skills.
You can see the processing in my toddler’s brain as she searches for the right word.
Then, right as the awkwardness of the pause hits a make-or-break moment, a flash crosses her face and her lips curl upward, “La escalera!” she says triumphantly, having retrieved the word.
It’s glorious. And terrifying, if I’m honest. Watching the acquisition of language in real time. It’s this omnipresent reminder of how fragile and powerful the human brain is, all bottled up into a raging, boogered, glorious child.
Watching her wrestle with language retrieval, I recognize the same struggle in myself, except instead of searching for Spanish words, I'm fumbling for ways to express complex ideas.
Last week, as I tackled the graveyard of unfinished books and forgotten project scraps under my bed, I discovered a handwritten note from my birthday a few years ago.
“I still love learning, but am often frustrated by what I perceive as the limits of my intellect.”
It was a reminder that much like my kid, I'm constantly mining the recesses of my brain for understanding, only to discover that I often lack the vocabulary to describe what I’ve unearthed.
That is to say, I often feel intellectually lazy. Between the exhaustion of raising two kids under three and an educational background that left me without certain frameworks, I've convinced myself I'm just not built for rigorous analytical thinking.
But I’ve started to notice a pattern – that the way intellect and deep thinking is expressed in our modern society turns me off. As
said in a recent interview, “I think we’re coming from a place of believing that women are multifaceted and wanting to treat them like they’re smart…[but] for women to talk like they’re smart usually means to talk like they’re men…it’s so finance-bro-y, and it feels like it’s pretending.1”So I've built the perfect excuse fortress: too tired, not smart enough, and besides, who needs another mansplainy hot take? But watching my daughter fight for words has shattered that comfortable narrative.
My approach at this stage is two-fold:
I’m leveraging Claude and ChatGPT to dissect and map how my favorite thinkers critically approach ideas. Here’s a recent example (peak the mechanism deep dive at the end, I really learned something there).
I’m actively reading books that hit on this messy intersection of cognitive functions, processing styles and intelligence. Some current reads include: A Rulebook for Arguments, The Creative Act, Leonardo da Vinci and How To Make Sense of Any Mess.
I don’t know where this takes me, but I am crystal clear that I want to get better at learning. As I was reminded this week by
, there is energy in the emergent process. Of becoming a mom. Of becoming a professional. Of becoming a more attuned human. So I’m trying to capitalize on that.Your turn: Have you ever felt the gap between what you intuitively, internally understand and what you can outwardly express? What resources have helped you bridge that divide?
With thanks to with and for scratching the itch on how I can become a better thinker and storyteller.
https://jacobin.com/2025/02/diabolical-lies-podcast-feminism-socialism
Oof, yeah. This hits!
Some bubbling thoughts that came up for me in reflecting on this:
For me, I guess I try to take comfort in the fact that if you only ever speak and write about what you’re already confident in expressing, then you’re basically just reinforcing that comfort, but you don’t expand your current capacity. But, when you’re in that context of truly wrestling with what feels super out of reach, then you’re actually in the process of real learning.
The awkward edge is a good one to be in even if it definitely doesn’t feel like it. But, I think trying to express what’s complex with others (writing and conversation) instead of grappling at it alone, really matters. The right questions, the right readers and listeners, can actually unlock something you can’t on your own.
In many ways, a big part of the process is probably straight up learning how to be in that awkward edge space, while not judging yourself, and not running from it because it doesn’t feel good. Building the tolerance muscle. I think the more a person can sit in that discomfort, and work through that process, the closer they can actually get to making progress on what feels super fuzzy in the head.
Just like the writing process, it’s an iterative thing. At first, super fuzzy, clumsy, and clunky, then with more attempts, feedback loops, patience, you can access what’s inside you with more ease, clarity, precision, and refine it.
I do think you pointed to something super key: “I still love learning, but am often frustrated by what I perceive as the limits of my intellect.”
That perception that a limit of expression means a limit of intellect. Thought is so nonlinear and associative. It’s hard to translate with language, whether you’re communicating through writing or speaking. Even the deepest thinkers can be slow at articulation or just straight up clumsy. I’m reminded of that whenever I watch or listen to interviews with people I know are smart, but stumble through their words. And if we’re talking about communicating through writing, well, writing isn’t natural, so it’s already inherently full of endless friction.
Language itself is so lossy and ambiguous. And complexity can really be such a cognitive overload, so if you’re holding so much already, trying to also find the right way to say things with a low bandwidth, it's going to feel like a grind.
I do think metaphors and analogies are so helpful for ideas that feel abstract or complex! Generally, starting with images and sensations might seem weird, but I think it can help make space for tough concepts to slowly emerge. Loosens the idea up.
Cris, you’re being way too hard on yourself! You’re brilliant. The fact that you recognize learning new things can be difficult is a sign of your intelligence. I went thru a similar experience during our MBA program when I thought I wasn’t smart enough to grasp the concepts bc I didn’t immediately understand them, and then realized with patience and practice, I very much can understand them and almost anything. It’s one of my most valuable takeaways from Duke.
I didn’t grow up knowing all of the fancy buzzwords used by the finance/tech bros either. But, I believe I can understand these concepts and that helps me flip the narrative so their jargon no longer intimidates me. They codify concepts with jargon to sound smart, but the logic behind them is learnable. You got this!!!