I’m just a normal 13-year-old girl living two years ahead of where I should be, and it’s not as amazing as most would think.
While to others I might seem like such a “lucky and privileged” child who gets to graduate high school at age 15, or skip two years of NAPLAN testing, for me, being labelled as gifted feels more like a double-edged sword.
It all started when I was nine and half and a big stack of papers was presented to me. The psychologist explained to my mother that I was “gifted.”
I didn’t know what that word meant at the time, and found out later that the textbook definition of being gifted is “having exceptional natural ability.”
It slowly became more apparent what made me different to others at school. Like how I was constantly bored in class when teachers gave lessons on something I taught myself long ago, or how I didn’t have to study hard in primary school but was still able to achieve good results. But the more I understood how I wasn’t “normal,” it seemed like the more expectations and labels were put on me. The stereotype of being gifted feels like an obligation to achieve something great and the pressure started to build up.
Other kids at school started using the label without really understanding what it meant and it was a daily occurrence to hear things like "it must be nice not having to try” or "you wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be normal.”
Overtime I realised people were only nice towards me to take advantage of me with assignments or school work.
At first making sure that I performed up to expectations wasn’t a huge stress for me but as I moved further up in school and work became more demanding the consequences of not having needed to put in effort or study for the past six years finally got me. Whenever there was a slip in my grades, people around me took it as an opportunity to point out my failures, "guess you aren’t as smart as you think you are”, or “I thought you were supposed to be good at everything.”
Whilst being gifted gives me the ability to learn and understand things at a greater speed than other peers, I never once claimed to hold all the knowledge in the world - and that’s what most people do not understand.
When I started facing more drops in my grades, I struggled to move back up because I never really tried studying for anything. People often took this as me being “full of myself," thinking that I didn’t need to study because I’m just “so smart”. I often tried explaining myself and my unique differences to others, but most people around me could not interpret the difference between being knowledgeable and being intelligent and saw my attempts at explanations, as attempts to brag or gloat.
Being gifted means that I’m able to learn things more quickly but I have learnt that I still need to work hard if I want to achieve my goals. Overall, although I have mixed feelings about the label gifted, I have accepted it is part of who I am.
All I want to do now is make the most out of it, rather than let it weigh me down.
