I didn’t realize I was smart until I was 37 years old. As a kid, I don’t remember testing for the Gifted and Talented program. I don’t remember them telling me I didn’t get in - did that happen? I do remember always being in the “talent pool” class. This was the class the GT students were in. Occasionally, they would be plucked from our class to work on a separate GT curriculum or have a field trip. According to Google, the “talent pool” is defined as follows:
“The talent pool serves as a flexible pathway for identifying and nurturing potential. It allows students to demonstrate growth and explore advanced material without being permanently labeled as "gifted" or locked into a specific program.”
To my young mind, with its perfectionistic tendencies already in place, I had decided that being in the “talent pool” class meant that I was not smart enough to officially enter the Gifted and Talented program. From an early age (around 9 or 10), I had already decided that I wasn’t smart. I wasn’t aware of the different types of intelligence, for example, one of the highest forms: creativity. At the age of two, I was already crafting songs and begging my mom to record them on her giant VHS camcorder. Sometimes these sessions would go on so long you could hear my mother’s voice in the background say, “Casey, I think the battery is dying.”, just to give herself a break. Ha!
I heard an interview with Alanis Morissette where she confessed she didn’t realize she was intelligent until a therapist told her at 35. Hearing this, my entire body lit up, and I even got a little teary-eyed. I felt so seen! I didn’t realize I was smart until a recent reading I had with a medicine teacher of mine. It felt affirming to hear her speak so highly about my intelligence, but it was also heartbreaking that it took a near stranger to make me realize my own gifts. Why had I struggled to acknowledge my intelligence for so long?
I remember my mother saying her parents had her and her sister’s IQ tests done when they were kids, and her sister’s score was higher. That always made my mom believe she wasn’t that smart - maybe hearing this story is what made me think this way? I got straight A’s and B’s throughout school (minus college when I got into drugs and alcohol), but somehow I knew that didn’t necessarily measure intelligence. Like my mom, I always knew I was smart enough, but I didn’t realize I was highly intelligent until recently. My mom told me I was smart, but I always kind of thought she had to say that. Of course, intelligence isn’t the same as wisdom. While I do think I hold more wisdom than the average person my age, I’m still working on curbing my often unbridled ego so that my wisdom can shine through. In other words, I can still be a bit of a dumb fuck. Can’t we all?!
I sometimes wonder what my life would have looked like had I realized my intelligence earlier on. Would I have had more confidence? Would I have felt more protective of my intelligence and drank less? Would I have wasted less time entertaining men and women who couldn’t truly appreciate me? While I am grateful for the experiences that have led me to this moment of clarity, it’s comforting to imagine a parallel universe where I grew up understanding the depth of my intelligence. I like to imagine what it would have been like to have understood all of my different types of intelligence - intellectual, existential, emotional, physical, and psychic. I pray my daughters will experience this, not from an outside authority, but from a deep inner knowing. And so it is.
Maybe the truth is: I was gifted and talented all along, just not in a way they could measure on a worksheet.
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