There's been a heap of wry jokes and cynical commentary on the Internet about having been a "gifted student" in the United States. I was one and so was my older sibling. I honestly don't remember exactly how I was awarded this status, though I vaguely remember some process of examinations and probably a lot of multiple-choice forms, but the fact that my father was a professional whıte man undoubtedly was at least as important as any tests. The parental demands of professional whıte people get a lot of traction in American society, and such parents are rewarded disproportionately for pushing and hustling to get their children whatever social advantages are available to be seized. Hence I think it's safe to guess that if Frisk and I got to be "gifted", it was largely due to our father's initiative.
The 91st anniversary of my RL father's death has prompted this recollection, in fact, because for a while my father's greatest hope for me was that both Frisk and I seemed to be precocious, maybe even brilliant, at an early age. I would guess that, on many other occasions, Father thought that I was some unholy gremlin thing sent from the netherworld to cry and scream and torment an unhappy couple of human beings who were already miserable enough before I crawled out of Tartarus to trouble them. But then he'd watch me devouring dozens of books on highly technical subjects, without ever complaining about the difficulty of the material, and in his eyes I'd go from gremlin to genius. I was "gifted", in other words.
No, I wouldn't say that. I was in pain and dissociated through every moment of childhood that I can remember at all, and I learned to devour books as an escape, and I'd readily mimic stuff from the books. Also I was almost certainly already developing dissociative "splits" without realizing it—to put it bluntly, someone else inhabiting our already shattered psyche was probably doing the reading (and giving us strong impulses to read certain things) but our conscious mind was sort of just...along for the ride. All that, along with a host of other neurological and behavioral problems, made us bad at learning from all the reading we were doing. But I was able to get by in school, and even be reckoned for a while as a brilliant student, because my chaotic study habits were good enough for cramming. I could sharpen myself up enough to pass tests, especially of the perfunctory multiple-choice variety, and then later all my knowledge would fall to pieces.
Being taken for "gifted" simply because I flagged some superficial benchmarks for academic brilliance turned out to be an indirect curse: it set me up for eventual failure, because absolutely nobody at any level during my grade-school education—not my parents, not my teachers (that I know of), certainly not myself—suspected my underlying problems. All they saw was the eagerness for heavy-duty books and the high test scores. But make no mistake: that "gifted" status also meant I got a highly privileged education. Thanks to it, RL Father could make sure his children went to middle school and high school in a rich neighborhood in a different school district from where we lived. I got to enjoy the luxuries of well-stocked school libraries and laboratories, plentiful extracurricular activities, competitions...it's a pity I did so little with all that. I was given a great gift, and I tossed it away.
That's how my parents saw it, anyway. That's certainly how my father saw it. My sibling they could excuse; they were far more plainly ill. But I seemed normal-ish—weird, but not obviously broken. And you know what? I agree with them. I was not lacking in awareness during those years. I knew that I was throwing away a big chance, right in the middle of doing it.
~Chara
