On being 'gifted'
There has been a trend on Twitter of late of someone tweeting something like ‘your gifted friend now does ‘insert some cutesy mental health challenge’ that never strikes me as something to be cutesy about.
But it also mystifies me as a ‘gifted’ friend who isn’t ‘cutesy mental health challenge’. It does recall the secret fear I had as a child that they would realize a mistake had been made, that somehow I had snuck through to be among the ‘real’ smart kids.
I remember so clearly taking the IQ tests in grade 3, certain I had done terribly, even though I got through to the second and third rounds, the last of which was just you chatting with the examiner. I remember just as clearly my parents’ surprise when they got the letter saying I was ‘gifted’, them I guess not realizing that it usually was the weird kids who would be proclaimed as such.
So from grades 4 - 8, I went one day a week to Unionville High School for an enrichment program (and the gifted stream in high school for grades 9 and 10, furious with my parents for making me do it and thereby proclaiming to a new group of teens that I was a huge nerd, as though literally everything else about me wouldn’t have given up the game anyway).
I *loved* this one day a week in primary and middle school though, which felt like a free day away from ‘real’ school. Every year however, there would be a student or two less, disinvited from the program due to a ‘failure to keep up’. I lived in fear of being expelled too, mostly because I had no clue what one couldn’t ‘keep up with’.
We would start the morning with a logic puzzle, give speeches on whatever subject we happened to be obsessed with at the time, get visits from the Unionville Arts program teens (sometimes one of them would be on Degrassi and we’d be starstruck) to ensure that we developed social skills of some kind. We had what felt like endless free time to peruse the library. I read the entire set of the Encyclopedia of the Strange, and developed an unhealthy terror of spontaneous combustion.
You’d think worrying that I would flunk out of gifted school would make me a diligent student, but it was the total opposite. Instead, I was extremely lazy, scribbling off assignments standing at my desk the morning they were due, telling people confidently that studying hard for a test only made you forget things, and in general coasting my way through ‘regular’ school, riding off the reputation of my older sister, who was an industrious and hard-working pupil.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how meaningless testing ‘gifted’ was anyway, that I was probably helped enormously by learning to read at a very young age, and that it was likely almost entirely simply benefiting from privilege and bias.
But I cherish the memories of that one day a week. I absolutely adored my teacher Mr. Albery, who encouraged us in all our weirdness. It was there that I felt the most myself. Surrounded by other nerds, there was no judgement. We were free to be ourselves in all our dorky glory. Mr. Albery died unexpectedly my last year of high school, and I was devastated. I worried he didn’t know the impact he had on generations of kids.
Certainly, being ‘gifted’ definitely didn’t cause me any future stress. If anything, it was the one place I was confident. Maybe that was more a result of Mr. Albery than the program itself. But maybe it’s more because I always knew there are so many different ways to be ‘intelligent’, and that I wasn’t anything special.
I’ve always been in awe of people who can play multiple instruments with ease. Or the people I would meet in South Africa who could slip between 3 different languages like it was nothing. Someone who can assemble Ikea furniture without having a meltdown.
Being anxious, unsettled and uncertain isn’t unique to the formerly gifted kids, it’s the human condition. I might be one of the only people who worry I’m going to meet my end by spontaneously combusting, but otherwise, I think I’m doing okay.