A late identified neurodivergent perspective.

Have you seen this Far Side comic by Gary Larson? It’s near-ubiquitous in my memory. Just the other day I thought of it again.

But this time I remembered it through the awareness of my neurodivergence. Like many of us, I was placed into the US public school gifted program early but was later considered an underachiever who didn’t want to work.

From the start being in the gifted program was uncomfortable. The other kids thought we were weird, and the whole thing felt like a hoax. There was no special teaching or learning. Even at eleven years old I knew something was up. Now I wonder if the gifted program was like on the other side of special needs. Ignorant people often referred to some kids as ‘slow’, so maybe I was in the ‘fast’ group.

Either way, being gifted (whatever the hell that even means) was equivalent to being ‘slow’.

Just another flavor of weird no one knew what to do with. Maybe we were just the kids with white or other types of privilege.

[So my memories of the gifted program were pretty sucky. But the future would be worse. The gifted label permanently affected my attitude toward myself. The gifted label exacerbates a lot of neurodivergence. Add in a little childhood emotional neglect and it’s a trifecta.]

Before taking all the autism tests my memories of the gifted program feel shameful. But once I realized I am likely neurodivergent, I see it through a different lens. Figuring out a more complete story about why I was such an outcast is a relief, but there are more negative emotions, too. I grieve a childhood I’ll never have. I empathize with other folks who have suffered like this. I ponder how humans came to vilify our differences and value conformity. I associated these darker feelings with the gifted program.

The epiphany came when I remembered the Far Side cartoon.

I realized I had been viewing this through an autistic lens and that others saw it a different way. I verified this with my wife, and it seems most people think the irony in the cartoon comes from a simple error. The boy pushes when the door says pull, insinuating he’s not gifted because he can’t read the sign or react appropriately.

The dissonance came because I had always seen this cartoon with a lot more sadness and little actual humor. I see the kid bowing his head with dread because he doesn’t want to go in. He is like me, he sees through the illusion of giftedness and doesn’t understand what that says about him. His presence in that room is suffocated by the weight of the word. Gifted.

The boy is all but begging to not have to return to his gifted class.

Please don’t make me go back. It’s terrible!

So, yeah, trauma, much? I get it. There’s a lot rolled up into that one-panel comic strip. I think there are a lot of us who might see this differently now. Or maybe those like me who always have. Certainly, there are a lot of formerly or currently gifted kids who can relate.

My solution to this problem is to embrace diversity. To fly your freak flag. To learn to process any shame you have around being labeled like this. There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s the system that came up with the gifted program.

And it doesn’t stop with neurodiversity. We’ve normalized and averaged out many human traits. Our species depends on diversity and it’s time we reversed the trend.