The Desire to Be Gifted

Making sense of my desire to be viewed as exceptional as an autistic person.

Photo by ALAN DE LA CRUZ on Unsplash

Much has been said about what it means to be gifted. In the general sense, it usually means having a high IQ or to excel in certain areas at levels not typically seen with other individuals. Educators and experts often discuss what’s the best way to educate children who appear to be gifted, usually resulting in such children either being placed in special schools for those who are academically gifted or simply attending certain “gifted classes” in public schools, which are usually just honors classes.

There’s also some discussion on who’s not gifted. I remember reading an article back when I was in middle school which claimed that parents shouldn’t convince themselves their kids are gifted just because they seem to have strong talents, even saying that just because a kid is very good at sports doesn’t mean they’re gifted.

However, while you’ll sometimes see articles trying to talk parents out of thinking their children are gifted, you’re not as likely to find ones in which someone says, “Hey, stop wishing you were one of those gifted kids! No matter how much you try reading above your grade level or trying to improve your math skills, you’re always going to be simply average, maybe even below average. Just accept this and move on with your life.” I don’t recall ever reading something like that, but I felt like I was somehow getting such a message subconsciously from noticing what others said about autistic people such as myself as well as my awareness of my own limitations. You may not hear a lot of adults say out loud that they think certain children will be failures, but you can sometimes get a sense of it.

To be honest, I have always been all over the place when it comes to my abilities. I grew up in a household where English was rarely spoken; my parents came from Guatemala and usually only spoke Spanish. For some children, this would mean starting kindergarten with little to no knowledge of English, resulting in them having to take English as a Second Language classes. However, because I watched a lot of TV shows in English as a little kid, usually though PBS and Nickelodeon, I managed to learn English with very little help from others. And because some of these programs would also teach the alphabet and some reading skills, I was also able to learn to read this way. I would make my parents buy me pictures books based on my favorite TV shows, and I also liked reading certain labels and billboards. When I got older, I started regularly checking out books from the library, getting everything from picture books to books on history and science and chapter books. Based on this information, some people might conclude this meant I was gifted.

However, I was limited when it came to doing other things. My diet was often limited; I usually only liked eating things like cereal, burgers and fries from fast food restaurants, macaroni and cheese, all sorts of snacks, and some fruit. I also rarely attempted to put on my own clothes; it was usually my parents who would dress me for years. Tying my shoes was practically impossible for me; not even a certain episode I saw of SpongeBob which had a song about how to tie your shoelaces could make the task any easier for me. It wasn’t until I was eight that I finally managed to do it somewhat well, but even nowadays I sometimes struggle to get it just right. And although I could count, I struggled with reading clocks and counting money for years, and I had a hard time doing fractions and long division in math classes, resulting in me having trouble with certain math classes during my school days.

It wasn’t until I was ten years old that I got an autism diagnosis. It had occurred a year after I’d been living in a women’s shelter with my mom and younger sister after we got away from our alcoholic father, during which it had been observed that my sister and I didn’t appear to behave as typical children did. After we got some medical and psychological exams, we were both diagnosed with autism. I didn’t think much of this diagnosis at the time; it just seemed like some strange word that could have meant anything, but which probably wasn’t too serious. But after this happened, I started seeing certain specialists in school to receive testing and get help with things such as organizing my assignments.

This had been towards the end of fourth grade, and my grades were mostly average at the time. Upon going to a different school in the fall, I was placed in a reading group for those who read below average despite how I usually read well enough, but I received little to no help with math, in which I struggled with a lot that year. A year later, I started middle school, and during my first trimester, I managed to get As in nearly all my classes except for math. Two years later, I managed to get straight As twice during the eighth grade. This left me convinced that maybe I was somehow exceptional despite my occasional struggles, especially towards my early middle school years. My teachers certainly thought I was a good student, and when I asked my mom about it, she’d say that I was smarter than average.

At first, this left me seriously wondering if there was a chance I was a genius or gifted, leaving me motivated to excel as much as I could in school. After all, how could a simply average person have learned English mostly their own, or have such a strong interest in books while not caring as much about stuff like fashion or most popular trends? I thought it had to mean that there was something unique about me, and so I strove to fulfill these expectations I’d put upon myself by attempting to read classics by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen- which I was encouraged to do after I managed to finish A Little Princess and Anne of Green Gables the summer before sixth grade- and learning about the habits of smart people, including kids who were consider to be geniuses and what was required to get into what were considered good colleges such as Harvard and Yale. I would find myself struggling to finish such books while realizing how far I was from meeting the expectations of smart kids, but I still wanted to try seeing how close I could get to being gifted.

But when I had an IQ test taken in school when I was in the seventh grade, I got a score of 91. Depending on how that score is viewed, a person which such an IQ can be viewed as either on the lower end of the average spectrum (based on a range of about 90-110 for an average IQ) or as someone of “borderline” intelligence, or a person whose IQ is under 100 but not at the range for intellectual disability, which would be a score below 70. Such individuals would have a hard time finishing high school and qualify mostly for lower paying jobs. However, just seeing myself labeled as average, as I noticed through the paperwork reporting my score, was a little disappointing to me. A social worker told me this meant I had the capacity to go to college, but I wanted much more at the time. I wanted what I felt to be some special ability of mine to be fully recognized, to know that my passion for reading, history, and other related subjects stemmed from somewhere significant.

Not long after I had my IQ test, I learned about what autism meant, and I was left feeling even more discouraged. Back in the early 2000s, you did hear a bit about higher functioning autistic individuals, but most of the attention back then was on how many autistic people either couldn’t speak properly or at all, how they could have intellectual disabilities, and how it was hard for them to maintain full independence. Also, there was a lot of talk back then about how it was believed to be caused by vaccines and how good it would be to find a cure. And any discussion of the gifts of such people usually involved how good they could be with math, technology, and certain sciences, areas in which I tended to struggle in. I had liked certain areas of science as a little kid, including learning about space and biology, but given how much more difficult the classes got in school as I got older, it wasn’t always an area I excelled in. Nowadays, there’s more discussion on how autism can come across differently in women and girls than it does in men and boys, which has resulted in many women getting a late diagnosis. This would probably have made it easier to understand my condition back then, but as it was, it just made it harder to deal with it.

Despite all I was able to do, discovering all this was far from a reassuring discovery as a young teenager. Rather than being gifted and having the ability to do anything I wanted, it looked like I was the opposite, someone who had limited innate potential and was doomed to be dependent on others for the rest of my life. Someone referred to as “special” not because of my talent, but because of my limitations, which felt shameful to be me. At best, I could only ever try to imitate the gifted, without ever achieving anything significant. I didn’t usually hear this from teachers, but it was often my mom and stepdad that expressed doubts about my future back then and even now, and I would go on to internalize those doubts despite my refusal to fully accept them.

Did this go on to impact my success in high school? Not completely, but there were still struggles along the way. I got mostly good grades in school, managed to learn some French, read a few classics both in my classes and outside of them, and I even got to take some honors classes by senior year. However, I still struggled in math, getting mostly Cs in Algebra 1 and Geometry and then Ds in Algebra 2 during my junior year, got a D during my second semester of Chemistry, and probably didn’t pass the AP tests I took for French and Psychology despite doing well in the classes-I never got my AP scores back, but I did struggle with the tests after a lot of stuff in my personal life impacted my ability to study for them. There were some occasions when I cheated on subjects I struggled in, which I never got caught doing but which isn’t something I’m proud of, or when I didn’t try as much as I could have. And although I still read books, I’d go through frequent reading slumps where I’d struggle to finish half of what I read. So overall, I may have just come across as an average student, but that feeling of being different never went away.

Now, if some people were to see how I was doing, they’d probably think of me as someone who’s a failure because I work in a low position in retail, still live with my family, and didn’t manage to get a bachelor’s degree. Just one look at this information and it would be enough for them to make several negative assumptions about me. Would it matter to them that I went to community college and completed an associates’ while remaining involved on campus, or how hard I had to work to get my current full-time job after staying in my previous low paying job for too long, or the fact that for the past two years, I’ve managed to finish between 45 to 50 books a year? Maybe not, but at least I know that all of this is still true, and that I can still achieve a lot despite not being the gifted individual I once thought I could be.

I’m not going to claim here that IQ scores don’t matter at all, or that we should completely do away with certain labels which could help individuals have their needs properly addressed and fulfilled. What I’m going to say is that we shouldn’t underestimate anyone’s abilities. Nearly everyone has something which they are good at, and we should all do the best we can to help all individuals reach their full potential at their own pace.

Perhaps I’ll never write the Great American novel or win a Pulitzer Prize, but perhaps I could find a small but dedicated audience through my essays or stories. Perhaps I can’t share stories about how I aced every class I ever took and was a prodigy at a young age, but I could tell about all the work I did to get good grades in certain classes and how I never gave up on reading despite going through multiple reading slumps and several years in which it was difficult for me to finish reading certain books. I may not be gifted, but I have a lot of perseverance, and the ability to keep trying can be just as valuable as unlimited knowledge. Because if we were all to give up just because we can’t be among the greatest, what would be the point of trying anything at all?