I’ll get right on that.
Cool. But use a better title. I would suggest “When did you realize, vis-a-vis other kids, that you could kick their ass?”
I think it was after I did a flying roundhouse kick by accident, and found some bloody teeth in my shoe treads the next morning.
I don’t remember, but it must have been pretty early. I was reading by my second birthday and writing by my third. By five I was drawing fairly realistically. (That’s how my mom learned I was smart; when the other parents at a kindergarten parent-teacher thing were all standing around marvelling at the self-portrait I’d made, which stood out from the simple smiley-faces the other kids had drawn).
I certainly knew I was smart by the time I went to school; I was far ahead of the other kids. I was in the gifted program until the sixth grade, when I failed a class due to inability to memorize. (I never could memorize, but you can get pretty far by extrapolating from first principles all the time. The times tables were tough, though. What’s 6*7 again?)
College did in my intellect. Some classes I did well in, some I didn’t, based mostly on memorization requirements. Calculus killed me, with all the memorization it was taught to me with. Also, as college went on, I could feel the creativity and brilliance being drained out of me. I lost the ability to draw, the ability to write creatively, and the ability to to basic arithmetic.
By the end of my time at college, I was no longer smart, having been reduced to merely smart*-assed*. I have never recovered; I’m still only a little above average, with at most occasional moments of cleverness. Suffice to say, I am far from the most intelligent person on this board, now.
I was thinking of that McBain movie from The Simpsons - Undercover Nerd.