Episode 195: Under My Umbrella

My brain is my brain and it does brain things.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:05

I really do think this could explain a lot. This is Bad Attitudes. Hello, friends and strangers. Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes, an uninspiring podcast about disability. I'm your host, Laura. This week's supporter shout out goes to Meredith R. Thank you for your continuing support. If you'd like to hear your name on a future episode, consider becoming a member on Coffee. Visit ko-fi.com slash badattitudes pod for more information. You can also support the pod by visiting our merch store at badattitudeshop.etsy.com, where you'll find podcast merch and satisfyingly sarcastic designs, especially for the disabled and chronically ill communities. For questions, comments, or ideas, visit the website at badattitudespod.com. Email badattitudespod at gmail.com or reach out on social media. Follow at BadAttitudes Pod on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and Blue Sky. As always, I want to remind you that disability is not a monolith. My experience as a disabled person is going to be different from the experiences of other disabled people. I am one voice for the disabled community, but I am not the only voice. A while back, I saw this illustration that put the term gifted under the umbrella of neurodiversity, and it sparked something in my brain. I'm not trying to appropriate any labels I don't deserve, and I don't know if it rises to the level of true neurodiversity, but being labeled gifted as a child can really do things to a person. Especially if you internalize that label as much as I apparently did. It's very common for adults diagnosed with autism or ADHD to have been considered gifted children. I know multiple people for whom this is the case. It's also common for them to say that their diagnosis makes things from their childhood make sense, issues they struggled with, or the way their brain worked, or the way they felt. Then it occurred to me, I wasn't just a gifted kid, I was a disabled kid. And disabled kid was probably my primary identity. So now I have to wonder, did my experiences being disabled, the medical appointments, the operations, the hospital stays, the injuries, so cloud my educational experiences that I wouldn't notice other issues? It seems plausible. I say I was considered gifted, and a lot of the time I say that school was easy for me. I don't want you to think that means I was getting straight A's all the time or that I didn't struggle at all, because that's far from the truth. I can count the number of times I got straight A's on one hand. I was primarily an A B student. And that's just if we're talking about final grades, like at the end of a quarter or a semester. I got plenty of lower grades on tests and projects and papers throughout the years. And when I say school was easy for me, I mean I knew how it worked. I knew what was expected of me, and I knew how to get there. I didn't sail through, especially after getting into algebra. Again, I don't want to mislead anyone. There were certain subjects I did sail through. English and language arts were truly easy for me. My troubles usually came in the classes with the less room for interpretation. I've always been besties with abstract thought. School only became well and truly easy for me when I got to college. While my academic struggles weren't a secret, I do think they were overshadowed by the physical challenges I dealt with. If I hadn't been dealing with the challenges of being disabled and or injured at any given time, any academic issues I encountered would probably have been more front of mind. No pun intended. All of this is just speculation about what was going on in my brain as a kid. There's a very good chance that nothing would have changed if I had a diagnosis. It's incredibly likely that my brain was just my brain, and there was nothing special or unusual about it. Whatever you think special or unusual might mean. Based on the responses I got to a thread I posted, it's pretty much a given that being gifted is not under the neurodiversity umbrella. That's fine. Like I said, I'm not interested in co-opting a label that doesn't belong to me. I do want to spend just a little bit of time talking about what it means to be labeled gifted, because there are some distinct differences. One of those differences is what is expected of you, particularly by the adults in your life. This may or may not include your parents, but it almost always includes your teachers. In high school, I was part of a program for gifted students. I had grown up and gone through middle school with almost every student in my classes, so we functioned as a de facto unit, and we were treated as a unit by the administration. I remember distinctly an incident in which we were all denigrated for essentially behaving like teenagers. At the time we were all in the 14 to 16 year old age range. I don't remember the exact language, but the word apathy was thrown around a lot. What were we apathetic about? I couldn't tell you. I just remember a letter being sent home to all our parents because we weren't living up to the expectations the administration put on us because we tested better than our peers. I remember my parents' basic reaction being, this is bullshit. They wanted us to be adults, but no one was bothering to teach us how to be. The worst thing about being gifted is starting to believe your own hype. You're gifted, so nothing should be hard for you. If you do struggle, the problem is you. At most, it means I read above my grade level until my age caught up with my reading habits. You can only read above grade level for so long. Gifted kids are not guaranteed more success as adults. We often struggle more for it because we were conditioned to fear failing. It's like that meme that occasionally makes surrounds. If you were a gifted child, you're either a doctor now or you have anxiety. There is no in-between. It's not far off. If we didn't excel, a lot of us stagnated. If you get a diagnosis of autism or ADHD as an adult, that can be really helpful. You learn coping strategies to work with your brain. There are no coping strategies for being a former gifted child. We just have to wing it. I've spent the past several years coming to terms with a lot of this. I made being smart a huge part of my identity, as I discussed in a previous episode. But in the day today, being smart doesn't do much for me. What has proved more valuable is my willingness to learn and my curiosity. Those are the marks of real intelligence. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you in the next one.