Being too visible

In real life, I’ve only said I was gifted twice.

The first time was when I was about 11, and was explaining to my best friend why I was going to a different school.

The second was over three years ago. In 12^th grade, we were eating in a restaurant with nearly all of my teachers and classmates, just before the christmas vacations. My history teacher had been more or less finding a way to say “Thomas, I think you may be gifted” without saying it, because she wanted me to be the one saying that out loud. The word I decided on using, doué, is a literal match for the English gifted, which is only really used here by psychologist Arielle Adda, and seemed mild enough to me for the purpose. This was in the presence of most of the other students, and teachers (although, she was talking to me specifically).

Except, as I’ve told before, I was in what was more or less a gifted school. I wasn’t special in any way, and I was surprised at why she was singling me out, first and foremost. Besides, because the school made skipping grades so easy for anyone not born in 2001, the age average was low. I was the normal age expected from 12^th grade students, but many of my friends weren’t. Some of us were two or three years ahead for Christ’s sake! And yet she confirmed when I asked her that she had no idea. She thought I was the first gifted kid she encountered, in 6 months in a more-or-less explicit gifted school.

This is the only time I’ve been invited to say the quiet part out loud myself, but this is not the only time people started telling me I was gifted after talking with me. This happened regularly from my childhood until last year (I don’t recall it happening during the past year, although I’ve talked to fewer people). Sometimes, after a few minutes of talking. To be honest, it mostly freaks me out.

It’s clearly not a general gifted thing, and I guess that’s a case of me being closer to the stereotype, but I don’t really see how I am/was, compared to the people I used to be in school with. And once again, I wasn’t even young during this event in particular.

Maybe after 20 years it stops happening.

Thomas