What happened when I realized I was a genius.

I realized it doesn’t make me special. Every single one of us is born with an immense amount of genius buried within. Bet you thought I’d come here to gloat about how being an artist automatically makes me a genius. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. It just makes me human.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about our world: every person, culture, group, and entity possesses the capacity to channel their genius—for light or darkness, for creation or destruction. It’s the yin and yang of existence. Growing up, I thought genius was purely a force for good, an untainted gift. But life has taught me otherwise. If anything, the state of our world today reflects that genius, unchecked, can also produce unimaginable evil.

Trauma, it seems, has a peculiar way of tainting that inherent genius. Worse still, the powers that be know this and weaponize trauma, hoping to twist our brilliance into maladaptive behaviors that serve our own subjugation. It’s a chilling thought, but I digress…

Genius isn’t just about intellectual acrobatics or streetwise savvy (what some might call “street svettitude”). I believe true genius resides in our emotional body—in how we love, how we connect, and how we choose to engage with the world.

I’ve seen it in animals, too. Their ability to bond, to protect, to work seamlessly as a team—that’s genius in its purest form.

For me, embarking on a healing journey has been a way to cleanse my inner genius, to scrape off the layers of societal gunk that had dimmed its light. And let me tell you, the weight of the world—the struggles that specifically target the melanated—compounds that task in ways only we can truly understand.

But here’s the thing: your genius is still there. It resides within you, unyielding and indestructible. The world may try to twist it against you, but you can reclaim it.

Find your genius. Nurture it. Let it shine.

With love,

Chu