Gifted

I scored a 151 on an intelligence test at 8 years old which sounds impressive until you realize I also took the SAT three times like Rudy at try-outs and still walked away with a very human Frankenscore, so clearly the laminated ’95 humblebrag did not unlock Mensa-adjacent world domination but it did quietly teach me that my brain was a commodity, that my curiosity was an asset class, that when adults widened their eyes and said you’re so special what they sometimes meant was you could produce something valuable for us one day like the iPhone or Dippin' Dots, and if you were a gifted kid in the 90s you remember the way people said potential like it was both a blessing and The Ring, My Precious, and I was the child in Sunday School trying to reverse-engineer heaven because Cain and Abel felt like an unnecessary subplot if eternity was already on the table, and I devoured Animorphs and The Giver and A Wrinkle in Time like contraband manuals for alternate timelines, proof there were trapdoors in reality if you pushed hard enough, and somewhere along the way the messaging shifted from wow your mind is a wild meadow of wonder to wow you should really harness that because it would be such a shame to waste that high-scoring mindfield of yours, and I fully intended to become a professor of philosophy or linguistics like the deeply chill 18-year-old I was until halfway through freshman year I panic-switched my major to music because sometimes the creative gut instinct is louder than the change-the-world script and I trusted that the same brain that could diagram metaphysics in church would figure out how to spend my time here which seemed to be creating and reveling and galavanting in the full-spectrum absurdity of being alive, and I’m not sure whether anyone held a villainous meeting to weaponize our giftedness or if they just built a system that rewards output so consistently that we started feeding it our imagination voluntarily, turning every spark into a résumé line, every existential spiral into a scholarship application, every what-if into something ranked or monetized, and now that same brain that once rewrote the ending of Bridge to Terabithia in the margins is drafting brand decks and optimizing messaging and occasionally falling three hours deep into Gateway Program conspiracy TikTok because intui-pattern-recognition does not clock out, and listen I love being paid for words but sometimes I feel the ghost of that 8-year-old whose skull felt too small for her questions and I wonder when we decided wonder needed to justify itself with revenue, when creative essence became something to credential or leverage or magic-wand into quarterly growth, and maybe the rebellion is simply letting some ideas stay unharvested and unoptimized and gloriously unnecessary because my imagination was not born to increase shareholder value and neither. was. yours.