the curse of being gifted pt 1?
Tags: Gifted Child, Self Care, Gifted Chid Burnout, Self Love, Black Women

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

― Audre Lorde

yesterday was one of the hardest days of 2020 for me. and that’s saying a lot because 2020 has had a seemingly insatiable appetite for running fades since february. but yesterday, yesterday was a blanket party. let’s talk. this is a stream of consciousness post, so there will be errors. i’m having a conversation with you, not trying to win a pulitzer.

when i was i don’t remember how many years old, i was tested ( because of my perceived intellectual ability) and placed, with my father’s permission, in the gifted program. it was also suggested that i skip 2 grades, but my grandmother soundly vetoed that idea. so gifted program it was. being in the gifted program was purported as an honorable thing. admirable. i was an elite student. “smarter”. “brighter”. “more”. lies. being gifted meant that i had a class outside of my regular curriculum in which my above average intellect was challenged and honed. i was in the program until middle school. i don’t remember a lot about it, but i do remember not liking it after a point. we’ll get to that.

i’m still trying to process all these revelations in an attempt to heal the wounds i carry. my life wasn’t all trauma, to be sure, but there was a fuck ton, and as i work through it, i write through it. this essay looks a little different from my journal entry, but not by much.

i want to believe that the adults around me were doing the best they could with the information they had at the time, because that’s what iyanla says. i want to believe they felt that being in the gifted program would give me an advantage. i want to believe that they put me in the program to help me be less shy and to give me the kind of intellectual challenges they felt i needed coming from the school system i was in. i also want to believe that they felt it was necessary to give me all the opportunities possible because at that point i had one living parent, and soon wouldn’t have any. i want to believe they pushed me because they wanted to make me better, and keep me from falling into the traps they’d seen other people fall into. that the excellence they wished for me was not just some manifestation of respectability politics or classism, but a deeper desire for me to be able to fly. that they were giving me wings to explore the world outside of my small town in ways they couldn’t imagine. i want, with the fullness of my soul, to believe these things because believing anything else would wreck me. i have to believe them with the caveat that had they known what would transpire in my later life they would’ve just left me alone, or some shit. i have to believe that they believed it was a good thing because i don’t want to believe that this was just about their ego, pride, et cetera. i have to believe it because looking at my life from this point backward, if they did it for any other reason than some form of love for me, it would mean that i did not have anyone who really cared about me as a person but was responsible for my personhood. does that make sense? it would mean that i was a pawn or trophy in some weird game of “look at how great this orphan turned out despite it all”. it would mean, as the similarities in Black experience have dictated, that my life was not my own. that i owed excellence to them as restitution for being born, something for which i did not ask. i digress. what started as an honor, a thing of which to be proud, “my child is gifted”, became for me an albatross and created an emotional minefield that i am attempting to destroy, some i’m not sure how many years later.

this morning, i had to come to a “oh fuck” realization. one of my exes once told me “you know, nikki, you’re not that smart”. i had long touted my intelligence and “giftedness” as a personality trait, a foundational aspect of who i was and wanted to be. being “smart” (read: “smarter” than most people) was, by my own estimation, one of the only things i really had going for myself. it made me interesting, unique, worthy. so when she made the declaration one sunny afternoon as we traveled to who knows where, i felt a kind of injury that until this week i wasn’t able to fully verbalize. the oh fuck came because, at what point do you want your exes, in all their villainy, to ever be right about you?

am i smart? yeah. was i smarter than everyone else around me? probably not. what made me different? i came from a family of educators. i was always being taught. i knew how to read in daycare. i was doing multiplication in kindergarten. i was advanced, for sure, but was i gifted? not in the way that people associated with giftedness. i am a creative. the gifted program didn’t address that, so it was boring. but what it did address and instill in me was elitism. add that to the classism being ingrained in me at home and in church, and boy was i set the fuck up. i was being led to believe that those hours spent in that tiny, cold closet of a classroom doing i don’t exactly remember what was the thing that gave me worth. because my brain was so much better, and what i could do with it so much more exceptional than…let me do this.

let’s get into expectations. mine and others. i expected to breeze through school, with everything coming to me easily and with little effort of my own. and, to an extent that was true. school wasn’t hard. but there were moments when it was. i still suck at percentages. calculus whooped my ass. so did physics and chemistry. i had tutors. i was ashamed that i had tutors. because i was “gifted”. could i have learned and been better at math and science without the moniker? i wholeheartedly believe i could’ve. but there’s an expectation when you carry the label of gifted or smart. gifted kids don’t get to be weak in any capacity. we don’t have the luxury of not knowing, or having lapses. we have to be good at everything. people don’t understand that because one has an affinity for a particular subject, that doesn’t necessarily translate to all things. i was a voracious reader and a budding writer, so of course school was easy to me to a point because most of it was consuming information and regurgitating it on command. my grandmother was a math person. numbers and their various configurations were to her what words were to me. so she expected me to understand it the way she did but faster because it was her thing and i was gifted. and when i didn’t, she had a few mr. krabs moments and i got them hands. i hated math (and myself) because of it. because i was supposed to be smarter, but i didn’t understand the way numbers broke down into pieces. and because other things came so easily, i felt i couldn’t ask for help because i was supposed to be smarter.

i’m not completely sure how my peers felt about my differentness because i don’t ask, but i have been told a few times by a few former classmates that my achievements caused problems for them in their homes. i would apologize but i can’t because i had my own problems in my home. it’s easy to be envious of other people if you think what you had wasn’t enough or what they had was better. but trust me, if you got a whooping because of my grades, i got 3. if you made a B on a test and felt relief or pride, that same B in my house was a point of stress and shame because why wasn’t it an A. i was never in competition with any of the people who were envious of my achievements. in my house, the competition was with the white students whose grades were higher, and my dead mother, who was “perfect” (another conversation for another day), and it seemed i was always losing, which killed my self esteem and made me hate myself all the more. i have semi bald spots just above each of my temples from rubbing my scalp during tests, homework/ study/ tutoring sessions and taking the SATs. i had ulcers in middle school. i didn’t choose any of this, and wish things had been different. but they happened the way they did for a reason, so here we are.

somewhere in my mind, i think this all sounds like a pity grab. like i’m complaining or ungrateful for the perceived advantage and the tangible privilege i had. and that’s not the case, per se. i know for a fact that i had a leg up on my peers, but i also know that leg up was by virtue of the circumstances of my birth, both favorable and otherwise. based on your perspective, biases, et cetera, you view a situation a certain way. what appeared “easy” to some was the culmination of sleep deprivation, hours of study, drills, and reading, countless tears and whoopings, and a dysfunctional, overprotective, helicopter parent whose focus on power and control to produce the kind of results that would bring her acclaim and praise left me without friends, experiences, and many of the inter/intra personal skills that would’ve made it easier for me to handle minor setbacks and obstacles in life. yes, i made good grades, but if those grades weren’t perfect, i suffered. yes, i had “nice clothes”, but they came with a cost that far exceeded the price tag. yes, we had experiences that other children did not, but i was always lonely. being one of few chips in the gifted cookie introduced me to racist microaggressions that changed how i interacted with myself and others. because my answers, though usually right, were always questioned and scrutinized, i learned not to trust myself. because i was Black, the assumption was that i didn’t belong in gifted to begin with. because i was often the only Black child in a room, i had to face these things alone, and going back to my peer group would only exacerbate this feeling, because the prevailing ideology was that my “giftedness” put me on some platform of excellence that separated me from the rest, when it shouldn’t have. peers assumed, and rightfully so, that i thought i was better than them because i was smarter, or because i had things and opportunities they didn’t. i didn’t think these things because they were inherently true, i thought them because that’s what i was being taught to think. so there was a disconnect between myself and people my age. most of my friends were older because i felt more comfortable with them. i had been rejected by my own age group, and even though my grandmother had fought so hard for me to stay with them and not skip grades, she didn’t let me socialize with them either, which left me on the playground during recess, sitting alone reading, or being beat up on the days when she wasn’t patrolling the playground (that’s another story for another day).

what i wish someone had told me, at some point in my life, was that i was enough. that it was okay to not know things. that failure, no matter how small, was okay. and most importantly, that my worth as a person is not now, nor has ever been tied to what i can produce. i spent most of my life trying to produce excellence to prove that i was indeed worthy of love. i chased the acclaim and the reverence that being gifted garnered me, even though it was a fool’s errand. i have dedicated myself to doing the “right” thing, being the “right” person, holding myself to an untenable standard because that’s what i was supposed to do to produce the kind of excellence required of me. i don’t ask for help. i quit things that i don’t do well on the first try. i procrastinate. i get anxiety when i feel like something isn’t going to look amazing. i push harder to be better at something, not for my own edification or approval, but because i want other people to look at it and know that it is excellent. i grew up and grew older hearing other people tell me what they thought i should’ve been based on what they thought my life was, and internalized my not being those things as failure, when in fact, it was just a projection. i am the only person who has had to live my life, why would the opinions of others matter so much? because that’s what this shit does to you. it makes everyone else’s opinion of you matter more than anything. “i thought you would’ve been a lawyer or a doctor”. yeah, me too. but i was a bartender, and a victim advocate, and most importantly, an artist. and those things don’t carry the kind of prestige a person like me is supposed to be capable of. but those are the things of which i’m most proud. because those things made me happy. they freed me from the noose of expectation.

where does this leave me? well, yesterday, it left me in bed all day, unable to function and on the verge of a breakdown. today, as i sit here overcaffeinated and still sleepy, they leave me with a sense of peace and acceptance. i know today that who i am is who i am; i cannot change what happened to me, but i can choose to not let it define me. i can revel in knowing that i am worthy of love and respect simply because i exist, and i can give that love and respect to myself without pause. i can do what i can, to the extent that i can to my own satisfaction, and be okay with the outcome. i can be gentle with myself as i learn to ask for help when i needed it, and receive love when it is offered. i have made peace with myself and those who sent me down this path, regardless of their intentions. does this mean the curse is broken?