Too Perceptive to be Crazy, yet too Crazy to be Normal
So what could I do when the above was my life profile?
Thank goodness I was always “popular,” and being pretty as a young person helped—but everyone throughout thought I was just a tad “off.” Therefore the common consensus about me ran—oh that’s just “Raya.”
That was until my younger kid’s mentor suddenly told her she was “gifted”. Now at 37, my younger kid buckled down to research what being “gifted” meant.
She discovered that “giftedness” meant being on a spectrum of neuro-divergence. Gifted humans belong to a neuro-minority of humans with specific, studied, traits. Gifted humans are rare, and are also an at-risk population that has very special needs. More than anything, being on the "giftedness" spectrum is not a guarantee of success. In fact—it is quite the contrary. When gifted people aren’t nurtured to harness their creativity and their “specialness,” they can become overwhelming underachievers.
This was how she realized I too was gifted—but gifted gone wrong. Hell—we were all gifted—her dead father and her sister too, because this profile often ran through family trees.
She explained to me, how, given my particular set of circumstances and biography, nothing in my life had ever favored me, which was why I had consistently made brilliant plans that never panned out in the reality of their execution. If anything, my plans too often went so spectacularly awry, onlookers frequently questioned my sanity—but then, at the eleventh hour, somehow (sometimes) I “righted” the outcome, thus averting the outright label of “she is totally mad.”
Not to let me off the hook, she collared me to read articles on the giftedness spectrum which I will attach below.
That’s how, for the absolute first time in my life I felt like “I had come home.”
Suddenly the crazy plots of all my novels made sense—when viewed through the prism of a severely neglected gifted child who had undergone acute, prolonged and repeated traumas since early childhood, all untreated.
Yet now I found I was at that textbook phase of shame, where how the hell do I convey my reality to the neuro-majority without coming across as conceited?
The answer was—I didn’t know how, and I didn’t have the money to consult a giftedness psychiatrist/psychologist, therefore I would simply leave it alone.
Instead, I would pray that as outlandishly crazy as the life of my protagonist, Noor, was—my prowess as a writer would see her through, because even in the midst of her madness, her final outcomes were untouchably smart by any standards, even the most patently “normal” ones.
But was it an easy position in which to be? Did I like it?
Frankly, no I didn’t.
All I ever wanted was to be “normal,” but what one came as wasn’t a choice, was it?
Thus I was perceptive and incredibly stupid at the same time, clever, yet naive, smart yet foolish…and the worst curse was, I couldn’t escape any of it.
However, just like I had taught myself to write, maybe I would be able to teach myself to manage my giftedness better? It was certainly a drawing board on which to pin my hopes of a saner future.
Here are the articles I promised:
https://intergifted.com/articles/
