NOTE: All tests images and questions in this piece are from vintage Weschler, WAIS and Stanford-Binet tests dating from 1944 to 1959. They are out-of-print and not in active use.

As you can read in the second-ever How to Live newsletter, "The Tender Architecture of Childhood," I recount how I was taking IQ tests from the age of 11 until I was 19.

The reasons for the tests were to identify why I was performing so poorly in school, and more so why I didn’t test well.

The tests that were administered—all IQ and personality assessments—took several weekends each to complete. I never learned the result, or received any indication from the educational tester whether my answers were correct.

In other words, I never directly learned anything from these tests. But by dint of having to take them, the message communicated to me was loud and clear: I was dumb.

I tried to hide my dumbness by adopting personas. By being funny. By creating innovative tricks to deflect attention from what I believed were my shortfalls. My defenses became well-oiled.

The tests created the false belief that information was equivalent to intelligence, and if I didn't have basic information (which I didn't), then I must be stupid.

This belief was impressed deeper into my brain every year, as I took test after test, until I understood that I wasn't just dumb, I was also defective.

You see, there was another part of me that no one seemed to address: I had a profound sense of separation anxiety, in which I felt like I was going to die, or my mother would die if we were separated.

My agony over being apart from her felt physical; the sensation of the imminence of death was chronic.

I could feel my heart dropping out of alignment, my throat closing in on itself, and the dread, that all-encompassing wooly vibration would separate me from my body, and I'd feel myself lifting, hitting the ceiling, and looking down from the light fixtures onto my skinny form, as I depersonalized.

I believed that I was suffering from something so rare that no test would be able to identify it. Or worse, it was so mortifying, no doctor wanted to admit to what I had. Whatever the case, I knew I was dumb and then something worse than dumb.

Those who read this newsletter probably know by now that I spent the first 25 years of my life suffering in agonizing emotional pain without a diagnosis. And then, finally, it came: I was diagnosed with a panic disorder.

Testing exacerbated my anxiety, which was (spoiler alert) why I did so poorly in school. My relationship to tests is complicated: I despise them and I love them. I am fascinated by them and bedeviled by them.

Next week, I will share my research on the History of IQ Testing, but this week, I thought I would share some out-of-print IQ tests with you, so you can have some visuals before I dig into it all.

Off we go ...

And you?

Have you ever taken an IQ Test

Did it have a negative or positive effect on you?

Also, what odd or off-the-beaten-path-weirdo-thing do you collect? Tell me in the comments!

Until next week I remain…