When I was little, my dad worked for a large food company in market research. He used to bring home all kinds of merch (mugs, for instance) with the brand name on them, but also he brought home old survey forms for us to use as scrap paper. The surveys had checkboxes and Likert scales. I wallpapered part of the attic with those surveys, because the attic was one of my hiding places.

Other hiding places included the linen closet, the basement, the back yard, and the recess field of the elementary school near us. I don’t specifically remember burning pieces of paper in the attic, but given that my parents built me a little Belgian block fireplace in the back yard so I would stop setting fires on the top shelf of the linen closet, I probably did. My poor parents had to deal with a lot from me.

Which is to say, like many young people, I had an early interest in (a) surveys and tests and (b) trying to figure out why I was so peculiar.

Based on my observations of various social media platforms, figuring out your identity is a national sport, and once you find out what it is, you get to ascribe all kinds of normal human behaviors to the official identity you discover as a result. People like to take tests and declare the results, then rush off to bond with other people who got the same results.

Here’s some things I know as the result of various tests: I am a universal donor, because my blood type is O. The weird cough and regular bronchitis I have, that’s asthma. My genetic makeup is largely English, Northern European, and maybe a little French, so I’m very, very white and it makes up for my lack of money.

Oh, and based on other tests: I am not male. The test was I had periods, got pregnant, and raised a child. I have a higher voice, and a bosom. That’s test enough for most people. People rarely mistake me as male, despite my refusal to wear female drag and my lack of makeup, though it’s happening more and more as I get older. “Sir!” people say to me as I walk by. I think it’s the baseball cap and the short hair.

I’m also a genius, if you believe in that shit. You don’t want to know my IQ, according to the tests, because it’s statistically meaningless. Let’s just say that once, during an inservice at my school, they kept putting up puzzles for the assembled faculty to solve, and I kept muttering the answers involuntarily. “Are you used to being the smartest person in the room?” a man I didn’t know asked me. I replied, “Yes,” before I could stop myself.

Being really good at tests helped me get into college despite horrible grades, and made my doctorate free, because it got me a full fellowship. Being smart didn’t help me with the entrenched misogyny of my primary workplace, which was an elite private boys’ school; an insufferable colleague who had tormented me for years once complimented me for my “wild intelligence,” which made me feel rather like a gorilla in a cage with a glint of humanity in my eye.

Probably the most relevant test for me was one I didn’t take myself, because I already knew what the results would be. My mother, at the end of her days, took an online ADHD test on my behalf, along with my sister. “You really are,” she told me in blank astonishment, the next time I saw her. “I thought you couldn’t be because of the way you watched TV.” Yeah, mom, I really am. I really, really am. I’m lucky I can function. I am impulsive, even violent, I interrupt, I cannot concentrate on anything unless I’m hyperfocused, and I’m really, really annoying, but fortunately I’m also obsessive.

My Ph.D. advisor once refused to believe I had ADHD. She was horrified at the idea. She had two reasons: 1. it was often a diagnosis used to shunt kids into special ed and to avoid teaching them 2. I was too smart and accomplished, because ADHD people often test poorly and can barely survive. My advisor was very driven by dogma, despite being very accomplished and brilliant. It took me a very long time to write my dissertation, and I was devastated by the experience, but whatever.

Oh, yeah, and I took the test in an AA pamphlet once, when I was 22, and I really, really qualified. I had been drinking since I was 12 and probably before, and I met all of the requirements for alcoholism. It was how I managed my confusion, my despair, my various traumas, and my repeated failure.

A young friend said to me once, “I have a lot of trauma,” and I replied, because I’m impulsive, “Everyone has trauma. What matters is what you do about it,” and she didn’t take offense, thank god.

The thing about all of these testable characteristics is that I still don’t really fit in anywhere. Whenever I read some discussion forum nattering on about teaching, femininity, genius-level IQ, attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder, hypergraphia, marriage, or even asthma, I am vaguely interested, but it doesn’t strike me as any kind of real identity. It’s just sort of nice to know, and then I move on.

My asthma is well managed these days (except for February. February was bad). I have a lot of systems in place to manage my attention, so I function pretty damn well, and my house is tidy. I’m smart enough to pay my bills and handle being retired. I don’t set fire to things any more. Also, I haven’t had a drink for 52 years, and weirdly enough, that’s the one thing that made all the difference. So I cheerfully hang my hat on that particular identity, and I declare it home.

As long as I don’t drink, I can do anything I want, it turns out, and then I can be an ordinary weirdo like everyone else in the world.