Twice Exceptional Giftedness

I started working when I was 15 years old. I have gotten every single job I have interviewed for. I’ve gotten store manager jobs at more corporate retail stores than I can count. I either didn’t show up for my first day and if I did I had a panic attack, left, and never went back. Each time I did, I felt like a failure. Good for nothing. Stupid. A loser. Piece of shit. But, since losing the store I decided that I wanted to learn about myself in a way that I never have. To dive deep into why I’ve done the things I’ve done and repeated the same patterns over and over again. I wanted to learn about my brain and how it works. I decided to do some testing; I (kinda) wanted to know what my IQ was, and after taking four different IQ tests, it averaged out to 143. I was like, cool, I’m dumb. I didn’t know that was a “good” number. (So much for being smart.)

I explained to the psychiatrist who administered the tests about how I’ve alway job hopped, moved from state to state, moved to four different apartments in the same town, hated every job I’ve ever had, never felt challenged, and never felt like I “belonged” wherever I was. I talked about my traumas, my anxiety, the fact that I am able open any platform or app – all things Adobe; Illustrator, Photoshop, etc., Shopify, Showit, Squarespace, and start using it like I’ve been using it for years even if it’s the first time I’ve ever laid eyes on it. I find discrepancies in things like tax returns for fun, I hear things in music that most people don’t – for example, the way a singer will take a breath in before they sing a line – and a whole mess of other crap. Turns out, these behaviors stem from being a twice exceptional gifted person. To be twice exceptional you have to have a certain IQ and a disability – I have anxiety and trauma, although I did not know they were disabilities or ever think of them as disabilities. Learning that about myself made every single thing about my life fall into place. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. Why I get bored so easily, why I feel like there’s something wrong with me because no one seems to understand me, why I have always felt like I’m dumbing myself down, why I don’t have patience for people who can’t figure out things like technology or how to change a tire on the thruway at 2 AM on their own having never done it before, why I’m planning 25 projects before the one I’m currently working on has been completed, why I’m able to pick up on things that other people aren’t. Pattern recognition is one of the traits, and as I tell my story you’ll see where I’ve used it throughout my life without knowing that I was. The pivot point for me was after I had finished writing my 4th legal demand and I was researching a medical corporation and the doctors whose “care” I was under for close to a decade. I came across the reviews online and something didn’t look right. I couldn’t really explain why other than the fact that the grammar was similar. So I started writing down the dates of each review, the corresponding days, and which of those days had multiple reviews. 

October 2024
M, M, T, W, T, F  
W, W, W, T, F, S, S, S, S
Multiple review days: 
12×2, 17×3, 20×2, 21×2

Something made me create a table with all of the information that looked off to me. I knew the reviews were bullshit; there was an algorithm of some sort, I just couldn’t figure out what it was. So, a year later I went back and looked at the reviews again. They had all changed. They had been taken down, the dates were changed, or the reviews changed.

The part that really sucks about this is realizing how much time you’ve wasted on stupid shit, how often you betrayed yourself by dumbing yourself down for everyone around you, never feeling like you’re where you’re supposed to be, and wondering what your life would have been like if you had parents who nurtured the fact that one of their children was an exceptionally gifted empath. Creatively, musically, etc. 

The part that’s awesome…is that now I can nurture myself and become all the things I never knew I could be.