What is it about my childhood, my education, my experience that makes me wince? When I really think about it, it’s not what I expected myself to say. It’s that I didn’t realize how incredibly helpful and healthy anger can be. However, the education system doesn’t factor that in. You either can or you cannot, they forget the process by which people learn, and grow, and blossom is sometimes not enjoyable or easy. They tell people you are gifted, thus you do this, or you simply aren’t, thus you are that. I’ve been in what they call the “high end of the scale or gifted.” And I still haven’t decided if that’s a blessing or a curse.

Gifted: “A special ability or capacity; natural endowment; talent; something bestowed without any particular effort by the recipient or without its being earned”

I don’t like being called that one bit. I’m not sure whose idea it was to tell children that they have something more than others do, and that not only are better but that they don’t have to work to be “better.” Not only did I not have to work for it, but others just have a natural disposition of being less “gifted.” When you really break down what that word implies, I can’t help but wonder, who the fuck is giving out the gifts? Is it the man in the sky? Is it my parents? Is it the amount of money I’ve had spent on me? It is the amount of time I was forced to do busy work? Is it how many books I’ve read? Is it how many places or languages I’ve been exposed to?

I attend a school that not only believes being “gifted” is a real thing, but they are privately funded by two people who made it their lives work to help “the extraordinarily gifted children.” Is this weird to anyone else? Because what they actually did is created a school full of well disciplined children whose parents are of higher class. They have taken the good students out of public schools, and told them they are “gifted” and segregated them. Don’t get my wrong, its incredible being at a school that is at least attempting to be better. The idea is refreshing. However, I think being labeled gifted has stunted my ability to cognitively learn and experience the world around me.

Learning curves. I think when they talk about being gifted, they are talking about children whose don’t have learning curves, they just get the specific things they are testing them on not real learning involved.

For me, as you might expect, my learning curve has never existed in an academia setting. It was always easy.

I never understood how to actually learn, until I started learning from the world and not from a book. Whenever you start a new thing, that you’re learning because it draws you, inspires you, there’s a learning curve. You have to put in the time and the practice to get better. Logical, right? Well I never knew that. I felt some incredible anger when I started playing guitar and I wasn’t just good at it. I felt like less of a person somehow, like I wasn’t good enough. Ah! This anger, deep anger, was the best gift I could have ever goten. This is because I got frustrated enough to actually learn. I sat down, and practiced for hours. My “better” ness than others that played music had nothing to do with how gifted we were, but was directly correlated to the amount of time spent practicing.

I don’t want to be “gifted” at anything. I don’t want the compliments I get to imply that other people are in some way any less than I am. Does it seem backwards to anyone else that the kids that have to work less at school are rewarded more? And the kids that actually have to go through a learning process, which is full of anger and frustration and wonderment, are constantly being insulted by others rewards. For example I was always told I’m smarted than my older sister, who is an athlete. This seems logical, she was ski racing and I was getting A’s. Well, the thing about that is that she actually has study habits. If I don’t get something right away, I have absolutely no idea how to approach it, because “I’m gifted” and never had to put any particular effort into it. This means that while I did better on paper, school actually made her a better person, someone who had to create a better relationship to herself to learn. Where as I just half ass school and do fine, even at a school specifically designed for gifted children. Therefore, I’m getting less out.

So, this leads me to two conclusions for my own life. One, the reason I don’t whole-heartedly commit myself to my school work is because I’m deathly afraid of failing. Because if I fail, then who I am if I’m not gifted? If I have to try, does that mean I’m less gifted, less awesome? This seems to be why I’m writing this blog, instead of writing a paper on Shakepear (who doesn’t make a damb bit of sense and I’m scared to admit it). Two, I no longer want to be judged on how well I can play the game of academia. I want to work, work hard, for skills and talents and hobbies and knowledge. I want to change the way children are educated, and the way I educate myself. Eradicating the notions we have that learning stops when school stops and that it’s easy to be better. I want to give people good tools to do cool shit and feel empowered. Stopping the game of making others succeed, only in comparison to the “less gifted.” I want to empower people to struggle to find what they love, to battle to master it, to get angry enough to be better only in comparison to themselves, to do what makes them happy, actually happy.

If we are going to use the word gifted at all, I think the only way that is ethically acceptable is to talk about how gifted we all are to have life. We have a breath moving through us that keeps us alive, we are aware of ourselves and of eachother, we get to share community and love and trust and stoke, we get to be better today than we were yesterday, we get to have bodies that are made of atoms that aren’t suppose to stay together, we get to find being that have souls made of the same stuff as ours, we get to move, we get to live, wouldn’t you say thats gift enough? That our gifts should connect us, not isolate us.

Constantly balancing my reality of expectation and “giftedness” with the desire I have to share my experiences and listen, deeply listen to others meaning, to be in the mountains, to move my body through space, to see the magical depths of this life, to connect to the similarities I have to everyone and everything around me, to be completely complete with that.