Gifted learning sounds like a great and wonderful gift to have, but living with it, I can tell you it does have some caveats. Imagine you are in a room full of people, everyone is talking, having a good time. Many conversations are happening all at once. Generally, most people would just tune out the conversations that are of no importance and just focus on the conversation at hand. In my case, I can make out every conversation to some degree in some way. You see, my brain wants to pick up everything. Like switching a light switch on and off, it will rapidly listen in on multiple situations real quick trying to piece together everything going on. That is my superpower. That is my curse. You might say, “with great power comes great responsibility” (Spiderman). Well, it is rather a lot of responsibility.
After elementary I returned to a friendless world. No friends up till about junior year of high school, I feel like. This caused educators to believe that I had autism. So, I was shunted into special ed. I was taught things to do, like look people in the eye and wave at chest level and what not. This wasn’t good for my mental health. Being put with kids that obviously had serious disabilities rather made me feel even more like an idiot than what my parents had already told me every day.
You see, it was traversing my disability, being misdiagnosed, mistreated by my parents- who for the life of them couldn’t understand what was going on, mainly because they didn’t believe in psychology where they came from- and all the caveats of having no friendship, and then suicidal tendencies to pull it all together I was handling way more than most teenagers should.
Traversing my journey to learn about how my gifted learning disability has affected me in all the aspects that led to my depression is where I draw a lot of my creativity. Trying to figure myself out. Trying to resolve all the questions of why I was put in the situation I was in. It made me a master problem solver. Solving problems is how I become creative. By solving problems, I had to figure a way around the most difficult emotional and logical situations. This is the beginning of that journey.
