The Kintsugi School for the Gifted and Talented

(I used to be a part of the Gay Straight Alliance club in high school and there was this gay couple who'd make out and it was the hottest thing my innocent little 15 year old self had ever seen and I'd just be like "hello wall. what a good wall" *glances over at the boys again* *then back at wall* "HOOO BOY. I'm not objectifying them, that would be bad, I'm NOT getting off on this ohgodwhydoesithavetobesohot"

We never got anything done in that club tbh. We just cracked raunchy jokes and generally had a blast.)

(My dad: "You're on the straight half of the alliance though, right?"
Me: "HAHA, OF COURSE." *tries not to look too bisexual*

I'm not sure he'd care though. Not now at least. Not sure. If he asks I'd probably tell him. My mom knows. And my grandmas. And my lil bro.)

 

@TheSeer are you me? i realized when i was 17ish that i was at least casual friends with basically everyone in my school

(which, really, wasn't crazy, because my graduating class was only 64)

but going up to that, i always thought i was, like, shy but proud loner or something.

...so i'm still working on the whole "definitely extroverted but also overloaded easily because probably some level of autism" thing these days


@bornofthesea670
...my school didn't have a gsa, i didn't know that other versions of sexuality existed until freshman year in drama club. and i didn't apply that to myself until senior year
...i'm a little jealous, i didnt get involved in any lgbt org till college, when everyone was insanely political and sort of catty. probably me too haha

 

I wasn't out in high school, though a lot of people guessed, and the GSA was founded the year after I left. And no, I wasn't friends with the whole school, there were big segments of the student body I didn't get along with. (And that's not even counting the boy who, in retrospect, I can only call my kismesis - I thought of him as an enemy at the time but. Um.) But I had a bunch of friends, there were two distinct social circles I hung out in not even counting clubs.

 

@Moss I'm sorry, that sucks :( I was in a relatively open high school and the only time your (edit) gender preference was held against you is if you were a meanie butt. Which isn't very nice but high schoolers are jerks. I always felt bad for the schools that didn't have that club tho it was great

I knew I was bi because I had a good friend in middle school who knew about that stuff. One day when we were at my house I showed her one of the videos that would turn me on and I was like, "Am I bi, sensei?" *she watches silently for a few minutes. "hon, you are SO bi."
me: "the world makes more sense now"

 

And I was casual friends with everyone I interacted with, at least XD I'm too mild to piss people off I suppose. But I am passionate about things.

I was also the friend who would sit silently at the lunch table playing solitaire on my phone and then I'd think of a question about an STD or sex position and look up in a break in their conversation to ask it. They'd kinda think it was weird but would accept it as part of my quirkiness. And then we'd talk about it.

I basically have little shame about stuff. My roommate and I had a conversation the other night about how weird lady's downstairs bits look and our first experiences looking down at our own

 

Ooh. I was a gifted kid! I was angry all the time from 5-16yo because I was so bored, and I was full of failure anxiety. And I'm still nearly incapable of asking for help.

I spent most of school doing very well with no work. Got kind of shocked when I had to start putting work in around age 15. I always had huge anxiety about writing because I was smart enough to write better than most of my peers, but could never write as well as I felt I should (i.e. published author level). And the concept of redrafting was totally alien to me. You mean...you mean don't do it perfectly the first time?? Forbidden! I still never write creatively. I don't enjoy it enough to be worth the anxiety.

I got straight As at GCSE (apart from maths A* and biology B). Everyone was upset. Apparently they should have been A*s. Which, considering I hadn't done any fuckin' schoolwork all through secondary because I was so bored and furious...I'm not sure why anyone was surprised? Although it turns out my parents hadn't realised that I hadn't been doing the work. Even though I told them. And kept getting detentions.

(...they were busy. I'm fairly sure they both tend towards (unmedicated) depression, especially my dad, and I was at secondary school during the recession. My mum had gone back to uni to retrain from the job she hated, my dad had been laid off from the job he hated. And I wasn't getting hammered or high or arrested, or punching teachers, so.)

Through the G&T org I ended up getting to do some extracurricular maths & science courses, which was quite cool. Not enough to make up for the rest of school. I also used to get sent a quarterly magazine full of awful poetry by gifted children. What a waste of tree.

Edit: Does anyone else hate the phrase "do your best", and related? I mean, what does that even mean? What is my "best"? What will you be satisfied with?
After years of thinking of triggers as something that happens to other people, I discovered a few of months ago that I do actually have one of my own. The phrase "I know you can do better" sends me into a terrified fury. So there's that.

 

Haha, oh boy. WHERE TO START.

For me, being ~gifted~ meant being good at standardized tests and being broadly good at a lot of academic subjects but having weird knowledge gaps that got me in trouble for 'not trying hard enough', and an allergy to repetitive work because of undiagnosed inattentive type ADHD that got people thinking I was lazy. I was alternately bored out of my head or struggling to keep up. If the instructions for an activity weren't explicit and step-by-step, I'd get lost and freeze up. If it had to do with analyzing themes and motivations of characters, I'd be lost at sea.

But because I was 'smart', and good at figuring some things out on my own (which actually meant I'd found a book with clear step-by-step instructions and followed them to the letter), I didn't get help when I was clearly floundering. My mom probably has dyscalculia, and stopped being able to help me with math in 4th grade, at which point she went, "You're smart, you'll figure it out." :|

Spoiler: bluh bluh huge bitching

I really internalized the idea that I wasn't supposed to ask for help, I was supposed to just figure things out. In 5th grade, when the school decided to let me participate in the gifted program - which only amounted to going to a program once a week - they told me to walk to my usual school, then get on a bus to the school it was held. And didn't tell me which bus to get on. The other kids in my class who went to the program were taken by their parents, so I couldn't follow their lead. I couldn't figure it out from looking at the busses - I didn't need to take them so I had no idea which went where - and since I was just supposed to figure it out because I was ~gifted~, I didn't ask. I went to class and told the teacher I just didn't feel like going (which got me looked at like I was insane because the days the gifted kids went to the gifted program class, they were exempt from homework in their regular class). Nobody actually questioned this.

The most obvious example of people expecting that my being 'gifted' should translate into being good at everything without instruction was when I received a guitar for my 16th birthday. ... Just a guitar. No lessons, no 'how to play guitar' books, no pick. I had taken clarinet in school two years before, where I had always read from sheet music - I had no ability to play by ear, and guitar notation is of course a different animal from sheet music entirely. And to top it off? The guitar was TOO DAMN BIG. I have small hands and I could only reach around the neck of the thing by contorting my wrist and arm considerably.

I tried to play it, I really did, but it was too hard, so I just... stopped. I though it was my fault. Years later, after I'd moved out but when I still had some things stored at my mom's, I found out my mom had sold it, because "I'd never played it anyway" (said with an air of "I'm disappointed you just didn't try harder").

I'm just glad my mom wasn't into pushing me into being more ambitious with taking extracurriculars and the extended family had no traction about that - ADHD and the social stress of school meant that if I hadn't been good at schoolwork I would have done very poorly, and as it was I spent most of my free time holed up in my room recovering from the school day.

And now I feel dumb for still being upset over this. It's ancient history at this point, geez, why am I not over it. (Probably because I'm a huge fuckup! Behold the legacy of expecting a smart kid to just be good at everything by default.)

 

Fun fact, i did my final year thesis about this very topic. If anyone ever fancies reading about this stuff, google "Carol Dweck" and her studies on "self theories"

Doing research on this bit a little close to home for me, since yep, also a "gifted" kid, with the addition of parents who got excessively angry when I didn't get something straight away. And simultaneously held up their hands and wondered aloud, oh why does our daughter freak out and cry herself stupid when she isn't immediately good at something? WHAT IS CAUSE AND EFFECT HUR DUR.

I still do this :') I've been in on and off therapy for several years trying to unpack all the shit of linking my self worth to how smart I am, or how well I do something. Or the huge amounts of shame associated with "less than perfect" performance. My counsellor at the time was utterly horrified that I talked about completing my degree with a 2:1 like I had failed and should be shamed. In my head I still need to be perfect, or I may as well not try at all.Don't think I'm really any closer to sorting that out, really :-T

(Damn there's even a wikipedia article about this stuff these days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_theories_of_intelligence)

 

More specifically.
I managed to get a 76 on a paper on a book I had not read in over a year.
But apparently this translate to skill in fucking physics lab reports.
And people still assume half the time saying something again counts as explaining

 

Wait, do you mean you are Carol Dweck, or do you mean you wrote a paper based on her work? Because if it's the former, I feel kinda silly for infodumping at the expert I'd gotten my information from.

 

Whoooo.

All the kids in my family were "gifted." I was diagnosed in first grade as having "attention deficit disorder WITHOUT hyperactivity." I was also my dad's favorite, because I was soooo much like him. Except that he's, like, a doctor, and a prodigy, and never failed at anything in his life that he couldn't later dismiss as stupid and useless anyway.

So. Both my sisters went into ELP (extended learning program) in grade school. I didn't, because they didn't think I could handle it. Which was pretty much true. In fact it turned out I couldn't handle the intense pressure of regular third-grade classes. So, they switched me to a local private school for kids with "learning differences." Not a euphemism, exactly, except in the cases where it was. They had both accelerated and delayed students there. I was a little of both.

That only went until high school.

... I did not do well in high school. Too many people, too close. I ended up in a program where I only took two classes a day, spent the rest of the day hiding in the councilor's office. My mom got in a fight with the psychiatrist who tried to diagnose me with Asperger's, and I pretty much rejected the diagnosis, partly because it came with a condition of "And that's why you should force her back into regular classes" and partly because the way my mother explained it was, "You know, like what (Anna) and (Jeff) have!*" Anna and Jeff both being people I found actively unnerving (like there was anyone who wasn't,) but additionally, I was like, no, that's not what they had, Anna was explained to us as having high-functioning autism and Jeff as having non-verbal LD. But also, I didn't have what they had, because I might not have any friends but damn it I knew "that time I bit my mom so hard she was bleeding and we had to go to the emergency room" was not appropriate lunch-time conversation material, and also "You don't understand people or feel empathy or respect other peoples' personal space" was not a thing that I felt was accurately descriptive of me, in fact I felt the opposite- I had too much empathy, and my personal space bubble was about three times wider than anyone else's I knew of.

So, for years the Asperger's diagnosis was something I associated with feelings of upset and confusion and personal insult, and also the threat of being forced back into the normal box because it was What I Really Needed and I shouldn't be allowed to get away with just running away from everything.

Knowing what I know now... yeah, i totally have Asperger's.

I passed the GED in my freshman year. They didn't let me take it officially then because that meant I wouldn't have been allowed to go to high school at all. Honestly I would have been fine with that, but what the fuck ever. I took it again my senior year, got out, got into college on early admittance. Six years and an episode of psychotic mania later, after turning in a lot of stuff late and crying in front of almost every professor, and by the grace of my-dad's-a-doctor which meant he could pay for the extra years and I didn't go into debt, I got out of it with an art degree, which still felt like a failure because I wanted to go into science.

And after that I've done jack shit. I'm 32 now.

And the thing is, throughout my education, I was told it was OK, because I was sooooo smart, sooo talented and gifted and a genius, everyone knew I would do great things some day. My grandmother liked to say that it was good that I knew what it was like to struggle, because it meant that I would understand and be able to help people in the future. People with real problems. (Never mind that interacting with people gave me panic attacks and I didn't even feel like I could help myself.) Everyone went out of their way to help me and accommodate me, because i was sooo supersmartspecialtalented, it didn't matter if I needed a little help now because later I would be Great.

I was handed everything on a silver fucking platter, and I blew it all. I knew I didn't deserve it even as I was getting it. It all should have gone to, what, some smart ghetto kid who never got a chance but now that they had it they would work really hard, and do good things, and make the world a better place, the way I knew I wasn't going to.

I mean. Fucking hell. The credit, the positive regard from my dad, should have gone to my sisters. Still should. My younger sister got her masters in social policy and volunteers teaching English as a second language to refugee kids. My twin sister has been a paramedic, a respite worker, she's worked with kids in inpatient psych, she worked stabilizing homeless youth and then adults in long-term inpatient care, she's getting her masters in social work. And my dad still can't praise her without making it sound sarcastic.

Meanwhile, I've... gotten on disability, and last year got my first real job, which is an hour a week of data entry at the place where they help disabled people find jobs. Been kicked from parents' spare rooms to low-income housing to a disastrous experiment with a randomly-assigned roomate in a Regular Apartment, and then back to being shuffled between my parents' basements. My dad thinks this is beneath me and I should just stop being afraid of everything, that he knows I can break into the sciences if I really want to but since I'm older now I'll have to work harder for it, that's just what happens if you leave things so long.

And just... god, I feel like shit even posting this here, my family is so upper-middle class, when did I ever have real problems. I didn't, it wasn't anything but me being praised and helped and supported, people paying time and money and effort to make up for my shortcomings and it still not being enough to make me worth it.

*names changed

 

Haha oh christ no! I just did a thesis on her stuff, yeah. Don't worry :P I've spoken to her over email a few times though when I was doing my research, she's very nice.

 

Uggggh. I'm so sorry. All your difficulties were OK because it's OK for things to be difficult. It didn't matter if you needed help because everyone needs some amount of help and every student deserves the help they need. You don't have to pay it back. You don't have to prove you deserved it. And like Discordian and I have been saying, getting "praised" in the way you were is a problem. Maybe it was well-intentioned but that shit hurts kids and it sounds like it hurt you.

 

it sucks to feel guilty for things other people have done "for you", because it's a toss up between
"but I didn't want or need that"
and
"but you went through so much trouble"

...at any rate, I think it's creepy when parents do all this shit without ever making sure the kid knows what's happening and/or wants it.

like, if I right now decided that you were cold, so I bought a jacket with my own money and walked all the way to your home and then it turned out that you weren't cold and it's sort of weird that I showed up with a jacket gabbling about you being cold, but I went to so much work
that would be pretty fucking dumb of me basically. I could have just asked if you were cold

...I am also really bad at guilt, which weirdly enough probably saved me from a lot of gifted trauma. if I never told you I wanted a thing, and you do it anyway, I have no sympathy for any work you went through for it.

(see also: I continuously tell my mom that I have enough sports bras and the brands I have are fine, specifically because they don't have form or that shaping foam, they are literally fabric and stretchy stuff. every single time we go shopping, she tries to get me to buy shaped & supportive sports bras.)

...the old thing about "finish your plate, there are starving children in africa" confused the hell out of me for years until I figured out that it's an attempt at a guilt trip with some elements of "thank god I'm not those starving children!". my response was always "so why don't we send it to them?", which was heartily ignored.

...and now I'm going into nonprof haha

 

It's tricky though, because part of parenting and educating is deciding what the kid/student needs that they don't know exists or have the experience to judge. On the other hand, that's tough, and the parents and educators can easily make mistakes. And as the kid gets older, and more able to know what they want and need, the authority figures should be grateful for the help "from the horse's mouth."

 

Moss are you me?

I´ve ranted on skype about school a bit, may type up a coherentish post about my experiences later.

 

(urrgh now i'm feeling stupid for crying my eyes bruised writing out all that stupid whiny shit. the self-loathing train, it do not stop. even when it's dragging out stuff that hurts someone else. No, see, I know me, other people have disabilities, I just have excuses.)

*edit* that is to say, i would love to be able to actually participate in this conversation in an active and positive way, but it turns out I've triggered myself into a stupor.

 

I think one of the reasons I have problems turning papers in is I feel like they need to be perfect and I have high expectations for myself and criticism, even constructive, scares the living shit out of me.

Spoiler: no lie, also gross

It's really icky but when I'm really getting scared of something I've done wrong or that I have no control over/ extreme anxiety in general, my bowels go kablooie and then I need to change my undies it's pretty bad

doesn't happen too often thank goodness.

So I put it off and I put it off and I put it off...

and then fuck, there goes the due date. And I don't ask the teacher if I can turn it in late because it makes me feel like I look like a bad student if I do, only, funny thing is, I AM a bad student because I haven't turned anything in.

And fixing it is hard as hell because it's been ingrained in me for so long and I find it shameful and I ignore shameful things about myself unless I'm in a bad mood and I pick at it like a scab.