Gifted children

I don’t feel ready to write about the bad weekend but I do feel ready to tackle the gifted children question. As a life update first, though: Noah has indeed taken to walking – and in quick succession, climbing up on the furniture, and opening doors (the ones with the lever handles). My coffee table has been moved against the wall for the nonce. :)

So – gifted children.  Julia over at Here be Hippogriffs has been wrangling with pre-kindergarten testing because her son is testing off the scale on some things, which has made for some really interesting discussion in the comments. The best summary I’ve seen of the whole issue is a phrase someone came up with (I don’t feel up to tackling searching the comments for proper credit; I know, I know) which is: gifted children are gifted learners; gifted adults are gifted doers.  As far as single sentences go, that really hits enough truth for me to want to paint it above my bookcase in my office.  Jody at Raising WEG also hit on this topic in her post on New Addictions and how easy/early mastery of things can lead one to rely on one’s strengths and not learn how to deal with frustration (to make a really gross general summary).

My experience bears both these ideas out completely.  I (using I loosely throughout here) was a gifted child; by IQ probably profoundly gifted, although I will never give out the number and indeed make up ridiculous ones now and then because the whole experience of being a high-IQ-labelled child has made me irrevocably crazy on the subject. And I do mean crazy.

I was also a child who was eager to please and, due to abuse in various forms, at times terrified of failing or displeasing adults.

What that meant in elementary school was that I got the message – intended or not – from everyone around me that my smartness was what mattered. More than anything. Anything. And that because I was smart, I was given responsibility and I had better handle it. And I did, generally speaking.

(My parents were not completely idiotic. They made some choices that were geared towards the whole me, but those were generally overshadowed by the rest of it.)

I was known for being the smartest kid in the school… ever. Where the adults around me got off saying that – teachers coming to my house for lunch (remember when teachers did that?) and telling my parents that it was a rare gift to get to teach me. And other fucking bullshitty crapola. (Err not that I’m bitter or anything.)

In some ways this served me very well – being thrown into a French Immersion (FI) programme, for example, has been one of the joys of my life. Also, although I have a lot of negative things to say about my less-than-ten-percent acceptance rate high school for smart kids, I’m still glad to have gone there and had that experience.

(At high school I was not the smartest kid in the school ever, not by a long shot, and THANK GOD.)

Of all the messages I got about being guilty and having shame, there was a sometimes counterbalancing message that I was smart enough to figure things out, and by and large that has provided a foundation for some paths to self-esteem.

But being an intellectually gifted kid unbalanced my life in profound ways, especially because that’s how other people treated me. As a fluke of nature.

Also, because I was flying through the intellectual hoops at school and elsewhere, I was considered to be doing well when I desperately was not, emotionally and socially and in terms of sports and other things. 

My one reprieve, the basis of so much good in my life, was camp. That’s a whole other essay I write over and over, how camp saved my life.

University was where it all really fell apart though.  Because my high school was so intensive (and a little fake world bubble where, you know, challenging teachers was good and going on long digressions about Hegel was de rigeur) I hit university ready to run. 

My first year I was so fucking bored I actually wrote papers for other students because I was bored (I won’t go into how arrogant and stupid that was, but I will point out that I never got less than a B despite not taking a class or doing any particular research beyond a night’s worth of reading and that just scares me about the whole university system in general).

My second year I got sick. Really, deathly ill sick. I missed 6 weeks of classes. I got a bit behind. And I had no idea how to handle that or what to do; I never asked other people for notes or profs for help because I was, you know, too smart for that. 

I still squeaked through.

Then the next year, possibly because my illness rewired my body chemistry, or because the dissociative barriers were breaking down, I was having flashbacks most nights and not sleeping, and then I discovered the Internet and was on PernMUSH too goddamned much, and I squeaked by on intellect, balls, and sass alone. In my usual way I did really well on the advanced seminar stuff and totally blew the easier survey courses, because I didn’t, you know, study.

And then my fourth year. Ah, my fourth year. My family had blown up; my boyfriend fucked around on me and we broke up; I was treated for depression with Prozac but didn’t refill my precription. All that sucked, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was that my thesis topic – nominally approved the year before – was turned down by the head of the English Department due to ‘lack of faculty expertise in the subject matter.’ (It was an undergrad thesis! They couldn’t have pretended??!)

I flipped out. I. flipped. out.  Why? Because I was that weird combination of scared out of my mind and fucking arrogant. I had spent the summer tracking down every single Glass family story by J.D. Salinger and reading all kinds of eastern philosophy at Robarts and there was no way - no way – I was going to write a thesis on anything else. (I am aware of the psychological weirdness here; Salinger’s little family of gifted children being the topic, etc. etc.)

I already had enough credits to graduate with a regular four year degree, but not with honours. I could have done that at any time. But I didn’t.

Instead, I stopped attending university, but I didn’t formally drop out until January. You can imagine what my transcripts were starting to look like at this point. And I went home, but I had no identity left as a smart girl.  I went home stupid, depressed, and very very bad.

My dad was really kind to me. He had the experience of being a prof and therefore having seen enough kids flip out; he’d also had his own waterloo and switched majors in his fourth year at an Ivy League school.  My mother, less so. She got across that she loved me, you know, despite my having wasted everything god and she gave me and not being deserving of room and board.

I’m trying to think how to describe that time in my life, but I find even now I don’t have the words.  No matter what happened – incest, illness, rape – I had always had a little voice in my head that said ‘well at least you are smart and do well at school and will have a great career.’  (I don’t mean a multiple personality voice, either.)

That voice kind of died and ended up sounding like this: You suck! SUCK! Suck!  And it wasn’t even like “I’m stupid” or “I don’t have the right skills” or “I’ll be okay eventually” or “I will write a great novel about this!”  I got a job at a clothing store that was empty for several hours a day during the week and walked around folding sweaters and jeans while that voice played, over and over and over.

I knew I had once had “A Gift” and that I was wasting it, had wasted it, and that I was worse than a waste of skin on the planet; I was nothing. 

And I think that period in my life really taught me why child actors might end up on drugs and child musicians never touch the piano again and child intellectuals, like me, might end up essentially exorcising from their lives anything that smacks of school or academia; anything traditionally ‘smart’ like discovering a cure for cancer or becoming a brilliant analyst. 

I kind of maintain that in fact, I did drop about 40 IQ points during that 6 months of my life, not because of any drinking or drugs – I was doing neither – but out of sheer willpower.

Because – and god this is fucking rambly but here it is – I had to ultimately decide what was more valuable – me, or my giftedness.

I know that most people ought to be able to have both.

But I could not.

The people whose approval mattered to me saw me only in one way, and I was more – I want to scream that one at the universe; I was more than a brain! – and it seems to me like it really came down to a death struggle between them. 

It shouldn’t have because there should have been room to screw up; to get back on the horse, so to speak, and work hard and stuff. But there wasn’t. And almost every significant person in my life – except Lynn’s piano teacher and my camp director – had, it seemed to me (and I still think I’m reasonably right about this even though I know really it must have been more complex than that) liked me because I was smart and because I was responsible. 

I never got the message from anyone that I was okay just, you know, as a breathing human being. (People may have tried to get this across; I don’t know. I just know that even now trying to look back at it, I still don’t see it.)

All my life I had heard that I was too smart to screw up, and I had screwed up royally. So, at 21 years old, I accepted the screw up and jettisoned the smarts.

I still have the smart kid’s distain for mediocrity, banality, and stupidity, but ultimately - although I too am mediocre, banal, and stupid, I am okay even so.

And I’m glad. Because once I stopped having to be a genius, I got to start to learn how to be a human being.  I did learn, at the gym and elsewhere, that even if you’re not gifted at something you can go through steps to get better.  I learned at work that actually, even though being smart really does help to learn things and figure things out, there’s a whole whack of other things – getting along with people; being willing to do grunt work; asking for help and support; attitude and contributing to the United Way – that can lead to happiness and success.  I learned with my relationships that humility and caring trump ideas a lot of the time. 

And I learned there’s a whole me that doesn’t have to save the world – that can stay home with a toddler and make muffins and write stories and be okay. Mostly. I still occasionally try to save the world in case no one’s noticed. :-) And I really would like to win, say, the Governor General’s.  But if I do, it won’t be because I was a Gifted Young Thing.

So what’s the point? God, I don’t know. I suppose this is a cautionary tale in some ways. I’m not neurologically normal, being multiple, and my family was not normal and there were just a lot of things at play. 

But for me, being labelled gifted was truly a witch’s birth-curse-wish. How much worse would my life have been if I didn’t have the capacity to read literature early, or the “smart girl” label to lean on? I don’t know. How much better would it have been if I had been able to just be myself? I don’t know either.

I’m not sure how I would relate that to parenting. I’m still sort of too messed up about it to have a good handle on it, and fortunately there is some time to just – you know, fingerpaint, and not worry about it in any particular direction. 

But if I had to give anyone advice on it, I would say – gifted children are actually just kids. Kid first, smart second. Be a parent. Let the kid figure out the rest.

But really, I don’t know. I don’t have any answers on this one. I’m content to not have the answers on this one.

~~

* So the fast story of the prof I adore.** I took a writing seminar while my head was starting to explode. I can’t remember what I wrote to get into it; I do remember that the first assignment was to “write about a dead bird.” Most of the class wrote something about birds symbolizing innocence and a dead bird symbolizing the end of innocence, and one person wrote an environmental fable about the phoenix rising from the ashes, unlike the wounded Earth. 

I wrote a poem that (thankfully) is long lost but its central image was a Glad Kitchen Catcher out for the garbage with a dead parakeet clearly visible inside it, ’cause a boyfriend gave it to his girlfriend and when they broke up she killed the bird. So revenge. :)

It’s important to understand that ’cause that was the only assignment I completed out of the entire course and I think I went to 5 classes total.  So I failed the class, or so I thought until I got my grade which was, I think, a B, although it might’ve been a C+, which was mathematically impossible.  So I went to see the prof for the first time since writing the bird poem and I said he’d made a mistake about my grade. He was retiring, which I think accounts for a lot, and he was packing up his office at the time. 

He handed me a two-volume Norton Anthology (which is one of my prized possessions still) and said “Well I couldn’t give you an A, because you didn’t complete any of the course requirements. But you are the only writer in the class. Goodbye, Miss .”  And then he showed me out.

This makes him one of my all time nicest to me ever people and if I were Catholic I might pray daily for him to get out of purgatory or something. Not that this makes him right, although I sort of hope so.

~~~

** I’m aware that at the bottom of a rant on not having to be special, I shared this moment of being so glad for being perceived as special. There’s the gifted child talking, some. 

But paradoxically, he appreciated me in a way that I hadn’t heard before – I hadn’t shown off in his class; I’d written this sort of bizarre/light poem that wasn’t intellectual at all, and he saw that as real. Glad garbage bags, not Einstein. You know? Maybe not. It’s late. Goodnight!

~~~

P.S. And a final P.S. to the Longest Post Ever.

As I was about to turn the computer off I felt that dread feeling… the one a lot of kids who had similar experiences would recognize… the one that says this post was showing off and that somewhere there will be someone who before they got to here rolled their eyes and said “Oh God, she’s just bragging about being smart, and she’s not even that smart.”

That’s the thing about talking about this stuff. If you talk about how smart you were as a kid, it sounds like saying “god, I hate how beautiful I am” – in our society, it doesn’t compute. Talking about it is considered showing off. And maybe it is?

I don’t know. I feel more sick like I was talking about something awful, but unlike talking about being abused or losing Emily I know it won’t be seen as awful.

But I add this P.S. partly to say ‘yah, I know it sounds that way,’ and hopefully stave off a few trolls, and also because I think it is a part of the whole experience of being a kid and being unhappy but people not taking that seriously. 

So much so that even as an adult, it’s hard to talk about in public.

Anyways, bed for real now!