Fascinating. Great find demure!

There was a huge discrepancy between my verbal and performance I.Q.

says William Powell, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook. This line isn't explained particularly except that Powell realized later in life that he probably had a learning disability of some sort.

He doesn't say, but I'm guessing that his verbal IQ was much higher than his performance IQ. What this means is that he can see and imagine and understand far more than he can do. The IQ tests are limited in what they measure, but from my experience with kids who test that way, it can mean that they don't read social cues too well. They can be loud and verbal, but clumsy in other ways. They are often bullied. Recently, maybe in the 1990s, psychologists began to call this NVLD or NLD - non-verbal learning disorder. This means that the kid excells in reading so they are not targetted as dyslexic, but they perceive the world differently and cannot "see" the world the way others do.

Here's the rest of that paragraph:

When Powell was in his late twenties and teaching special-needs students in New York, he returned to White Plains High School. At the school he had struggled academically and socially, and looking through his results from two intelligence tests, he found what he took to be a clue to his unhappiness. “There was a huge discrepancy between my verbal and performance I.Q.,” he says. “That would have been a clear red flag in today’s world that something was going on. But at that point in time, nobody paid attention to it.” Powell thinks he likely had a learning disability of some sort, which contributed to his trouble in school, his alienation as a young adult, and his current work to support learning-disabled students. His memories of being ostracized at school remain vivid and painful. As he wrote in Count Me In!, the Department of State–funded book about developing inclusive international schools, “Our philosophical orientation is that as a starting point all children belong.”