Unweaving the Narrative

Nobody believed in me. That was their first mistake. The second mistake was trying to convince me that I shouldn’t believe in myself. Looking back, I wish I would’ve broken their systematic belittling of me earlier in life, but it’s hard to ignore the words of adults when you are young:

“Look at her feet. She can’t even walk straight. We’ll have to make accommodations for her in PE. That’s too bad, too. I had some really fun new things I wanted to try this year.”

“Oh, poor girl. Everyone else is done, and she isn’t even close to the finish line. How heartbreaking! I can’t watch!”

“She can swim, but she can’t dive. If she can’t dive, she can’t compete. Period. No exceptions.”

“We’ll have to change that one dance number for the musical just so she can participate. Ugh. What a nuisance! Thank God she can at least carry a tune!”

“It doesn’t matter how good her voice is; she’ll never be in the show choir. She can’t dance. Besides, her family is poor, so they wouldn’t be able to afford the costumes anyway.”

“She’s a slow reader. She’ll never get an English degree.”

“She’s too shy to be a teacher. She’ll never make it through student teaching.”

Because memory is a bitch and is forever messing with the facts of the situations I have experienced, I cannot reliably say that the words in the quotes above are 100% accurate. And, honestly, I don’t care. Truth and reality are so heavily influenced by a multitude of factors beyond our control that if we stopped every story because there might be a smidgen of fabrication, then no stories would exist. Ever. And that would be a very sad world indeed.

With that said, it was not the words themselves that made the greatest impact. It was the sentiment behind the words that clung to me like a wet blanket, dragging my shoulders into a slumped resignation that I still have to shake off daily. I’m not saying that every adult in my life has been a naysayer. There were plenty who encouraged me and told me I could do something more times than not. But many of them were only giving me lip service.

I was taught to look at people when they are speaking to you, so I learned early on how people can lie with their body language and words but not with their eyes. If you look someone in the eyes when they are speaking, you can see so much more than what their words are communicating. That was how I learned the heart-wrenching lesson that fake hope hurts worse than honest pessimism.

I can openly fight what I can see and hear, but lies, by their very existence, hide behind things. They hide behind smiles and helping hands that are a little too rough. They hide behind words that are meant to be hopeful but carry a bitter taste and sting your ear—leaving you doubtful of both the words and the intention following in their wake. This doubt manifests a deep mistrust of people because you see their selfishness, bitterness, and resentment. Sometimes it is so strong that it spreads from their physical bodies like sticky, slimy fingers to contaminate those nearby. Those of us who can sense or see the lies cannot ignore them. It’s a type of hyper-awareness that develops slowly and deeply in the parts of your soul that you don’t even know you have until one day you wonder why you always feel so heavy when others seem so light.

Before my awakening, my soul was grounded in the reality the adults around me crafted to keep me in the world they understood. It kept me safe, yes, but it also kept me submissive, compliant, and on the wrong path for decades. As I learned to pose questions instead of puppeteering for my peers, I began to realize that things are not all good or all evil. That calamity is absolutely awful, but it can also make you stronger. That victory is something to celebrate, but it can also keep you complacent. That the events in this life can be catalysts or catastrophes, and you have the power to choose which purpose they serve.

I was, like most children of a certain age, woefully ignorant of the complexity of truth and reality. I am not alone in my experience, though. I think we all start the same—trusting in our parents, teachers, pastors, and community leaders. We naively believe that they are inherently good people who are responsible, dependable, and, most importantly, honest. We trust them. Mainly because we cannot take care of ourselves yet and therefore are dependent on them. Because of that common truth, I have made it a point to never lie to a child. They can easily handle most truths when presented in a calm manner. Also, if they don’t like the truth, it gives them a wonderful chance to build social and critical thinking skills, and the universe knows we could use more of that in today’s society.

In fact, dealing with hard truths is how I started my metamorphosis into the person I am today. And I’m still changing, growing, becoming more authentic, more me. I am on a personal mission to shed all the false beliefs bestowed upon me as a child about what I can and cannot do. Don’t get me wrong. They had good, logical reasons for saying these things. I was a flat-footed, overweight asthmatic with poor eyesight. Hell, at one time, I walked with orthopedic braces on my legs because I was duck-footed. As embarrassing as that experience was, I am grateful that I don’t waddle down the sidewalk. However, there is a certain point at which other people’s beliefs create a tension between what a child sees and what she hears other people say they see. The imbalance causes the child to split their understanding of the world into two camps: what they’ve been told and what they have experienced. There is not an age range that one can pinpoint as the time frame in which this happens. It is entirely up to the child. I have met 6-year-olds who have gone through the split, and I have also met 17-year-olds who have yet to experience it. In fact, I’m not even sure I can say when the split happened for me, but I do know that I entered 2nd grade with a different perspective than I had the year before.

At my elementary school, the district decided to test every first grader for readiness, intelligence, and behavior in order to create a method for placement and evaluation of the effectiveness of elementary and secondary schools. From what I’ve read, there was a big push in the 1980s to develop a deeper understanding of the emotional, social, and intellectual capabilities of students and make adjustments to curriculum and programs within the schools. The idea looked great on paper, but in practice, it fell short of accomplishing the original goals. I can confirm that we haven’t gotten any better at using this method to increase student growth and success. In my 22 years of teaching, I have seen how this cycle of testing and re-testing ends up creating more setbacks for students than anything else. I believe that this is the crux of the problem with our education system.But I digress. I am not writing a TedTalk on the problems in education. I am relying a story of how I learned to manifest as an individual.

I was one of those first-graders being tested. I had the highest score out of every first-grader in every elementary school in El Dorado, Kansas, that year. By the end of 1st grade, every teacher in my elementary school knew I was gifted. I don’t know when my parents found out, but I don’t recall any change in their behavior towards me or my academic performance until I started middle school. My teachers, on the other hand, were in a tizzy. They had to do something with this data, right? The next year, they thought they had a solution. They cut out a small portion of each day and called it “gifted time”. Really, original, right? They had no idea what to do with the 3-4 other kids who had qualified as gifted, so we ended up going to the library a lot and reading or playing games. It was a completely disorganized time. I remember missing my classroom and wishing I could go back. I mean, I read and played games at home. I learn at school. As it so often does when the government pressures schools to embark on programs they are wholly unprepared for, “gifted time” turned out to be a disaster.

By 3rd grade, they had switched from the pull-out method to the special class method. They combined the top 10 students in 2nd grade with the top 10 students in 3rd grade into one classroom with one teacher. My poor teacher worked her tail off that year to teach two different curricula at the same time with 20 children who—despite the popular belief that smarter meant easier to manage—were just as active and noisy as the rest of the students our age. By 4th grade, we were back to being in regular classes with no gifted time. I don’t know if they gave up on providing “services” for us or not, but I was just happy to not have my learning time taken away from me.

The summer before my 5th-grade year, my parents divorced. This caused my mother, sister, and me to move in with our grandparents in a different town. My mother thought it would be best to not share my gifted status with the new teacher, and I’m glad she didn’t. Mrs. Pierce was a remarkable woman, and it was a joy to surprise her with how much I could learn, retain, and apply during each day. I got to earn the time to work on special projects—like building bulletin boards in the hallway or writing sentences for vocabulary words that Mrs. Pierce could use as examples during direct instruction. Some may look at those things and think that I was being used as a TA instead of being treated like a student, but I really enjoyed those things, and I looked forward every day to getting my work done so I could use my creativity to help this really spunky, really cool, really smart teacher who was never, ever unkind to any of her students. She always focused on our potential instead of our mistakes. She made me believe I could be anyone and do anything. She showed me a side of reality that was hidden. The side that wasn’t made up of harsh criticism, sympathy, or judgment. She gave me hope. Hope that my life would not always be in an upheaval of emotional chaos; hope that my future was not predestined because of my limitations; hope that the only thing I needed to reach my goals was me; hope in possibilities—and all I had to do was grab the one I wanted and hold on.

So, it was when I was 12 years old that I understood that what is is not always what will be. That what may be true now may not be true later. That beliefs can change. That people and their words create a narrative of the reality we live in. We can either choose to accept this reality or look more closely at the weave, at the threads of doubt, deceit, and fear woven throughout and replace them with threads of hope, wonder, and joy. But until someone shows you there is a different path, you don’t know you can choose it. So, listen carefully, all you gifted gems out there—and trust me, I don’t care what any test says about your abilities. You are gifted in so many ways in which others are not because there is only one you. So, hear my words, my beautiful weavers of your own fate. You can choose joy. You can choose hope. You can choose to build your own reality through your own thoughts and words and choices. And I hope you do, because we deserve a more authentically positive world than the pragmatically negative one we were taught to believe in as kids.