This post is going to be a bit weird so feel free to skip it but since, for me, it’s an important story from 2017, I wanted to make sure to document it. 

My kids go to a school that focuses on “gifted” education. To get in, you need to score two standard deviations above the norm on an IQ test. And while none of us in this house believe in any value that comes from scoring higher on an IQ exam, this school happens to be a very good fit for my kids for a multitude of reasons so we look past the fact that it considers itself to be a school for the gifted. 

Two weeks ago, I was at the school for an all-day Parents’ Association meeting. On the agenda we received, it said that the day would culminate in a talk by our school’s activism teacher who would speak to what it means to be gifted. I figured I would sneak away right before the talk and drive to work instead.

As things worked out, there wasn’t an easy moment to escape so I stayed for the beginning of the talk and about ten minutes in, she said something that completely changed the way I saw my life. (My *own* life from when I was growing up, not my kids’ lives now.)

She put up the above slide on “overexcitabilities” which is a poorly worded name but what it means is that gifted kids/people experience the world in a qualitatively different manner. It’s not better or worse, it’s different. This might have been a “nothing” slide for many others in the room but it was a major shift for me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a story around not belonging and not being like others. Especially around my childhood with my family and friends from that time.

What I realized looking at this slide was that I wasn’t just “feeling” different. I actually was experiencing life differently. It wasn’t a feeling, it was a fact.  I don’t really know how to put into words what this means for me and why it was such a jarring moment. It mostly made me realize that I was different and that was ok. It made me think differently about my belonging issues differently. Like I was trying to belong into a world that I wasn’t even experiencing the same way as the ones in it. As I said, hard for me to explain. 

I also feel obliged to take a moment here and point out that I am not saying I am gifted and aren’t I awesome and all that crap. All I am saying is that I was different. I actually was. And this came with a lot of suffering at the time for me. A lot of trying to reconcile the world people around me felt and the one I felt. Seeing this slide made it all come together for me. 

She then put up this other slide and while I have many of these (rapid speech, major issues with smell and sound, and definitely an intensified emotional connection to the world) it was hard for me to tell how generalizable these are. Maybe everyone falls into one or more of these buckets so I am not sure how much of a “thing” this is. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see a slide that talked about some of the quirks of my personality.

I didn’t get to stay for all of her talk because I had to drive back to work but I am so glad I was there for that one moment. Even if none of this revelation is true, I know that what matters most is not the truth but the way we think of life so if all this did was change my perspective, it’s exactly what I needed.

I will also say that I am not sure if any of this is true for my kids, but if they feel even a small bit of what I did as a kid, I am so grateful that they are going to a school that’s paying attention to the fact that people experience the world in different ways. 

Stories from 2017 is a year-long project for 2017. You can read more about my projects for 2017 here.