I'm listening to a radio program about growing up mediocre with a massively gifted sibling, and all I can think about is how, when I was in elementary school, my sister was put in the TAG program. Everyone was frothing with pride and celebrating. Her IQ was through the roof and she was racking up the math and science success, gonna be an astronaut, that sort of thing.
After that, my mom decided I belonged in TAG too and went to the school about it, and I remember being really embarrassed because she was relentless, talking me up nonstop to the counselors and showing them my art and so on. I remember taking an IQ test (which I didn't know was an IQ test) that consisted of messing around with plastic triangles and stuff. They let me in, and I was 100% convinced they only wanted to get my mom off their back.
I still feel a little suspicious about it, like I never earned it on my own merits. Once I was accepted and went to my very first TAG class, my worst fears were confirmed: the curriculum bored me to fucking tears. The first lesson I went to was about the visible light spectrum, and I at the time, I did not give a shit. It was, unfortunately, a taste of things to come.
I had no interest whatsoever in optics or chemistry or any of the nerdy stuff the other geniuses gobbled up. I tried to make myself care because I wanted to be a genius, but it was just dull as shit. My lack of interest was proof that I was not only not gifted enough for the advanced programs, I was actually a little bit slow!
In the sixth grade I did so badly in school that they moved me out of TAG and suggested special ed instead. I was already riding the short bus because of bullying, so you can imagine what a number the apparent confirmation of my worst inadequacy fears did on my self-worth. I was actually falling behind because I was skipping school twice a week. Trouble at home and crippling suicidal depression. But the TAG to Special Ed demotion still floored me. We moved right after that, when my parents finally split, so I was not demoted to the ultimate shame of Special Ed. The pity is that, had we not left the state, the school might have figured out what was wrong with me that year, and things might have gone very differently.
Of course, if we're playing coulda-shoulda-woulda, let's assume I got help and stayed in school. Now I'm on course to be there the day Kip Kinkel went on his shooting rampage. No fucking thanks.
My class had a going away party for me on the last day, but I was too depressed to go and say goodbye to my three friends. Failing to force myself to face the world was one more way I knew I had failed to be a genius. My father really liked to spam the "God, I thought you were smart" when I screwed anything up.
Looking back, I wish I could have had someone tell me about what it meant--and did not mean--to be accepted into TAG, and maybe reassure me that intelligence doesn't have anything to do with your interests. No one, however high their IQ, is born knowing what a circuit board is for (I sincerely did not understand this!). If someone had offered nine-year-old me foreign languages or psychology or anything that was not a sudden submersion into the middle of a cold, abstract hard science lesson, that would have been something. Maybe I wouldn't still, 25 years later, be unable to completely shut out that little voice that tells me if I was really a genius, I wouldn't be in any of the trouble I am in now.
Fortunately, I'm smart enough to know bullshit when I hear it.
