Brilliant

This blog started as a facebook post, but, as sometimes happens to me, my thoughts began to flood and I knew a facebook post could not contain them.
I have a dakine circle of friends. I have a big circle of cool peeps, then I have my smaller, super tight circle of people who I'd trust with my deepest secrets. In that tight circle, I've seen some of these friends in every kind of light; we've all been thru sicknesses both mental and physical, divorces, suicides, deaths, and fights together. We've been hated together, and together we've pieced each other back together. We've also had our beautiful days in the sun. When you see a person from just about every angle, you see pretty well what they are made of. Here is one category;
0. Below Average - Average
1. Clever
2. Talented
3. Brilliant
With Horses, for example, I am clever. I'm better than most; it's just a fact, not self-glory. But Shannon, my little sister, is Talented. She's got a gift with the animals- a natural knack that God gave her that gives her above and beyond what I can achieve based on desire and cleverness. I can't say I know anyone who is a full blown Brilliant; but that's the fantastic thing about brilliance- I can see it glimmer here and there. Not everyone has it, and those who do rarely know it because brilliance is a hider. The bad thing about being brilliant is that it makes you different than others, and others have been known to tear brilliants to pieces.
To avoid emabarassing some of my friends in whom I have seen brilliance shine, I will call them Bryan and David.
Bryan is brilliant. I have seen his brilliance shine one too many times to think it just a fluke. He's many things, among them a dancer and choreographer. Bryan frustrates me sometimes because he cannot see what I, what everyone else, sees. I've seen him angry at himself for not being good enough, and devastated to his core at his percieved failures. Bryan, you are amazing! Your talent shocks me whether in a performance or just dancing at a club.
David is brilliant also. David is a writer, and a very good one. He doesn't know it, but some of the things he writes astonish me into reading them again and again, in wonder of how he could he known how to so perfectly pair emotions, views, scenes, or ideas with words into flawless paragraphs. Or he'll write something, an idea that I've never concieved before, and it's entrance into my mind is like music so welcome and fresh, I wonder how I survived the stifletry of thoughts before it.
The moral is this:
Average people generally accept that they are average.
Clever people generally know they are clever.
Talented people generally aknowlege that they are talented.
Brilliant people I have seen over and over wish that they were brilliant, but push away the sugggestion that they are with frustration.
Listen here- If I tell you that you are brilliant or talented, I am saying it because I mean it. Few things insult me more than when I give a sincere compliment and it is taken as flattery or consolation.
That's as far as my thoughts take me.