Why Being "Gifted" Totally Blows (Part One)

I'm not what you might call a "good" student. When I was five, they—“they” being the powers that be of Oregonian academia—pulled me out of kindergarten and announced to my parents that I was "intellectually gifted." After that, I was never allowed to be normal again. I was put in special, after school programs for the "TAG" (Talented and Gifted) kids at my school. At the age of seven, I was forced to boil colored water in beakers and recite geography while my friends played outside.

Middle school started, and I had every hope of being one of the "cool," normal girls. Instead, I was placed in a special homeroom where we had to read Great Expectations (unabridged) and write a hundred pages of "reflective journaling" on what we thought, during a period where other kids got to socialize and play tic-tac-toe. It’s a wonder I don’t hate writing. Though I still hate Great Expectations.

My freshman year of high school, I declared that I'd had enough of being solely classified by my peers as a “smart” kid. You see, I happened to know that deep inside, there was much more than academics to me. I was also a funny kid. A talented, artistic kid. A kid who was royally sick of being pandered to and forced to enter spelling bees and adult writing contests. So I rebelled. I ran for student body office and joined three different clubs. A type of nerdyness still, yes. But I no longer had to be the "smart girl".

In fact, I had made myself so busy with all of the extracurricular stuff that my grades began to suffer. I also started to be treated like a human being. I learned to talk like a teenager instead of using four-syllable words as a rule. And I had fun. I grew socially, and actually started to become my own person. But I’d stopped writing.

By the time I was wrapping up high school, I had become so wrapped up in not being a “smart” kid that I’d forgotten how to study. I'd learned early on that if I didn't do any of my homework, I could still make B's and finally get left alone—for the most part—by those teachers who were looking for "Blue Chip" students to raise and pick on. I could have friends, and a life. But I also found that I could no longer remember how to do complex equations or place all of the countries in Africa onto a map.

When I applied for a prestigious university, I knew my chances of being accepted anywhere impressive were slim. I wanted to go to BYU, for reasons even I didn't fully understand. Now, I realize that I was driven to live somewhere far away from home, so that I could start a fresh academic slate, and fill it with mediocrity. All I had ever wanted was to be one of the “normal” students, as I hadn’t had that even in high school, because I had still been remembered as “that third grade prodigy who won all those writing contests.” However, when I was actually accepted to a good university, I didn't count on the fact that my life-long problem of feeling "too special" and "too smart" would instantly become moot, even without self-sabotage.