Gifted.
On the blessing and curse of being a child prodigy.
A note: this piece was commissioned by one of my followers, who asked to remain anonymous; they wanted to know specifically about my experiences as a child prodigy. I appreciate their support, which allows me to publish longer pieces like this by helping to keep our lights on and our groceries coming, as I’m unable to work currently due to poor health and immigration and logistics issues. If you’d also like to help me keep going — and focus on my writing — you can subscribe to my Substack or my Patreon, or just throw a few bucks my way via PayPal, which appears immediately in my account. Thank you for reading!
One day when I was around two years old, my mother tells me, she was pushing me in my stroller at a swap meet in North Texas, where I grew up. As we wandered, she noticed a woman who was following her, and it made her very nervous. She finally turned to confront the woman, afraid that her ex-husband had somehow sent the woman to steal me or something.
Instead, the woman apologized and explained: she was a child development researcher at the University of North Texas in Denton. She asked my mother: did I really see your child reading out loud?
Well, yes, my mother said. I would point up at signs and say what they said. My mother was very young -- she had me a couple of months after her nineteenth birthday -- and she just assumed that this was a normal thing for a child to do. The woman told her it was very much not normal for a toddler to be reading. She asked if my mother would bring me into their department at UNT so that she could run some tests and see if they could figure out what was going on.
“They kept you all day,” Mom told me, decades later, “and I could hear you crying from the waiting room.” The researcher returned with me eventually, and sat my mother down and told her what they’d discovered: my cognitive development was apparently off the charts; they didn’t have any way to understand what was happening with me.
She asked if they could keep me, for further study. But this was 1980 or so, the post-Watergate era of paranoia and mistrust of Big Science in America, and my mother -- a singer-songwriter who loved the music of Dan Fogelberg and John Denver and worked waitressing gigs to make ends meet -- refused. She didn’t want her child to be a lab rat. She thanked the woman and left.
I cannot remember not knowing how to read. I cannot remember learning to read -- I just knew how to do it. Even in my earliest memories, like seeing the launch of MTV when I was three or seeing The Clash play on Saturday Night Live a year later, I can read the text on the TV screen. I cannot remember having to make any effort to translate words on a page to comprehension in my head, any translation lag. I have been a speed reader since I was at least five years old.
I wasn’t just a “gifted kid”, in other words. I was a freak of nature.
By the time I was in kindergarten, I was reading at a middle school level; by the time I was in fourth grade I was reading books like A Brief History Of Time, and understanding them. In first and second grade, I devoured books like David Macauley’s series of illustrated depictions of the buildings of castles and cathedrals and pyramids and Howard Pyle’s version of Arthurian legends, and -- my favorite -- D’Aulaire’s Book Of Greek Myths. Instead of Scholastic Book Club favorites like Beverly Cleary or Encyclopedia Brown or the Hardy Boys; my preferred fiction was James Michener’s historical novels and C.S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles Of Prydain and Douglas Adams and -- later but still probably too young -- Stephen King.
All of these resources were put in front of me by my grandparents, who were -- unlike my mother -- rich. Not Kardashian rich, by any means, but let’s say “John Hughes movie parents” rich -- upper middle class 1980s rich, rich enough to pay for their grandson to attend private Montessori preschools and prep schools up until eighth grade. My grandfather was an electrical engineer who specialized in designing control systems for oil refineries and pipelines and power plants, who spent most of his life working expatriate gigs in far-flung places like Venezuela or Saudi Arabia or China or Kuwait, my grandmother tagging along with him.
The greatest thing about those private schools was that they allowed me access to resources such as fully equipped computers and libraries, that the public school system in America in the early 1980s probably wouldn’t have. But the trade-off was that -- unlike most of my fellow students and peers -- I was not a scion of Texas oil or cattle or business money. I was the latchkey son of a struggling musician and part-time waitress who lived, not in upscale Highland Park where Dallas’s elite lived, but in a shotgun shack just off the dive bars and used car dealerships of Ross Avenue.
My mom loved me fiercely and took care of me as best she could... but she was just a kid herself, who suffered from bipolar disorder and had an unfortunate knack for falling hard for emotionally unavailable fellow musicians. I grew up in Dallas’s funky cultural scene of the early 1980s, spending many nights sitting in bars like Poor David’s Pub on Greenville Avenue or Club Dada in Deep Ellum, sipping on cherry Cokes and watching my mom play singer-songwriter showcases or open mic nights along with fellow folk and country artists like Lyle Lovett and comedians like Bill Hicks. We moved a lot and lived in cheap houses and apartments in rough neighborhoods; the first time I saw a dead body I was about five, when we lived in the suburb of Addison and some Crips and Bloods got into it on the yard of our apartment complex.
My grandparents were not very grandparent-ly. For one thing, my grandmother was only thirty-nine when I was born; her second husband, my step-grandfather, was even younger. My mother and uncle often seemed more like my siblings, with my great-grandparents as the kindly older generation and my grandparents in many ways more like parents to us all. My grandmother, Gwennie, looked like Angie Dickinson and had been an executive at Neiman Marcus in the 60s, and briefly dated Johnny Cash; she wore big Jackie-O glasses and shopped at glamorous stores and brought back antique Spanish tile to decorate the house she and my grandfather planned to build on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Granddaddy Pat was a Republican who hung out with the Bush family and had been the youngest member of the Houston Chamber Of Commerce and loved Jimmy Buffett and KISS; he wore aviator glasses and Members Only jackets and had a hundred dollar a day cocaine habit in Venezuela in the late 1970s, which is damned impressive in retrospect.
They were bound and determined that their grandson was going to live up to the almost unimaginable potential that had been laid out for him by that researcher lady... so they paid for the schools and the private lessons and two weeks at Space Camp, and my mom let them. And they wanted to expand my horizons in other ways, too: when I was four, they took the entire family -- four generations of us -- down to St. Croix to see the land where they wanted to build their retirement home. When I was six, my grandmother and my mother and I did the Grand Tour of Europe, like a Gilded Age family, from Paris through the French Riviera and Monaco and Sardinia to Florence and Rome, where my mom returned home and my grandmother and I flew to Cairo, so I could see the pyramids and take pictures in front of them dressed like Indiana Jones, and then onwards to Turkey, where we joined my grandfather, who was building a coal power plant out in rural Kahramanmaras province. Three years later, in 1987, I would return to Turkey, to live with them for the final year of the project, while my mother pursued her music career in Nashville. It was one of the most important and life-changing experiences of my childhood.
But after these excursions and trips, floating up in the rarified air of my grandparents’ 1980s oil industry jetsetter lifestyle, I would return to whatever tiny place my mom and I called home, where the gunshots would start just before dusk, and occasionally I would wake up to find one of my mom’s musician or actor friends passed out naked on our couch after a party, a cocaine-lined mirror or bong on the coffee table next to them. Mom would get up and drive me, in her beat-up sky blue Pinto or little white plastic Fiero, to the rich folks part of town, to schools with ivy creeping up their red brick facades, where the kids wore blazers and the parents picked them up in Porsches, or sent a driver to do it.
It was, by anyone’s standards, a strange and disjointed and nomadic childhood, and I was a strange, solitary and mostly unhappy child. I couldn’t really relate to other kids my age and their interests -- sports and monster trucks and Garbage Pail Kids -- and so I spent most of my time alone, reading, in my bedroom or in the woods near our house, or underneath a bush in the front yard. I played with the boys in my great-grandparents’ neighborhood when I visited them -- Jason and Jeremy, the twins, and Willie, who was epileptic and mentally challenged -- but aside from them, I had no friends. I didn’t know that I was lonely to the point of heartbreak because I didn’t know anything different, or what it might be like to have a relationship with kids my age that didn’t revolve around trading action figures or allowing myself to be the butt of their jokes.
Other kids didn’t like me, and I got that, even if it made me feel sad and awkward, but at some point, I started to understand that a lot of the adults I met -- my teachers or my mother’s friends or my grandparents’ friends -- didn’t really like me either. I had trouble understanding that -- I thought that most adults liked kids, especially really smart kids. I was told by my family that I was special, unique, gifted, and I thought that adults would think that was wonderful. It didn’t occur to me that adults would also find me strange, or not be able to really understand what I was talking about with computers or science or history, or that a teacher might be intimidated or even humiliated when I would patiently explain to them that they were using the computer wrong, or attributing a quotation to the wrong author.
It didn’t help that I was a bit of a wimpy kid and a crybaby who would burst into tears at the slightest provocation. When I did that, I could see the contempt in my grandfather’s eyes at his pussy grandson, who cringed away from contact sports and would rather watch fantasy movies than football.
But the grownups always seemed charmed enough when my grandparents would call to me, during a dinner or Christmas party, and have me stand up and tell the assembled guests what I was reading or doing with my computer. It was only later that I began to understand that they probably regarded me the way one would regard a particularly clever monkey that had been taught to do tricks; the warmth I felt when these grownups smiled and nodded was reflected from their admiration at my family’s excellent taste in schools and breeding.
I came to crave that attention and approval, of course, which made it all that much worse whenever I couldn’t or wouldn’t live up to the ideal of the child prodigy they believed they had on their hands.
I was entered into violin and chess lessons at the age of six or so, because what child prodigy doesn’t play violin and chess? But I was terrible at the one and disliked the other; the violin was too difficult and chess profoundly tedious and pointless. I was made to take the MENSA membership exam and passed it, but I also found brain teasers stupid and pointless. I was pretty good at math and learned rudimentary BASIC programming, but I mostly used the home computers my grandfather bought me to play text adventure games like Zork and to make simplistic ASCII art and write stories. I loved popular science books like Ray Kurzweil’s The Age Of Intelligent Machines, but I couldn’t be bothered with the technical bits -- I loved the ideas. I loved building castles and machines with my Legos, and I loved making up stories inspired by my fantasy novels and my mythology and history books, and writing them down or playing them out with my action figures.
What I didn’t like was going to school. Even in the expensive private schools I was sent to, I was often light years ahead of my peers, and I could not understand why I was made to both take tests and do homework, if the point was to make sure I’d learned what they were teaching me. Wasn’t I special? Didn’t everyone know I was gifted? They all kept saying it, but then they’d make me read the same stupid little kid books as everyone else or do the same stupid math problems that were boring and easy. There was no way that I was going to do that. I would just do whatever I wanted to do and they could deal with it.
So that’s what I did... and the more I did it, the angrier it made everyone around me. Nobody likes a show pony that won’t trot, after all. My grandparents, in particular, became more distant, less warm, the worse my report cards got. I would ace all of my tests, but I’d simply not do my homework, and my teachers’ notes made more and more frequent use of words like “disruptive”, “talkative”, “insubordinate”, “rebellious”, “unmotivated”.
After living with my grandparents in Turkey in 1987, I went to Nashville, where my mother had moved in my absence to pursue her burgeoning musical career -- she had played the Grand Ol’ Opry her first night in town and had become part of a cohort of musicians they called the “Class Of ‘87” that included Travis Tritt, Mary Chapin-Carpenter and Garth Brooks.
But in Nashville I was enrolled in an inner-city public school, and somehow they literally “lost” my academic records behind a filing cabinet and, once they’d established what sort of student I was, relegated me to special education.
I don’t know if things have gotten better since the 1980s, but back then, special ed was the Island of Misfit Toys, where kids with mental challenges or illnesses or emotional problems were warehoused to avoid “disrupting” the regular flow of education. I had developed an absolute terror of being institutionalized -- of being crazy -- and this seemed like the first step towards that. On my first day, as I walked into the class, one of the other kids scuttled up to me on his hands and knees, hooting like a monkey, and began humping my leg; when the teacher scolded him he scurried under a table and refused to come out. As an adult, it’s a heartbreaking memory... but I was ten years old, and had nowhere near the emotional equipment to process that. The teacher refused to believe that I could actually read the book I was carrying with me like a lifeboat -- It, by Stephen King -- until she opened a page at random and had me read it aloud.
After doing that, and showing her how to boot the computer in the corner of the room into a BASIC prompt, she mostly left me alone. Unfortunately, the other kids didn’t; if I had been a weird kid in my other schools, I was obviously a weird special ed retard kid here. The usual teasing and shunning I’d gotten used to began to become more physical, more bullying, more frightening.
After a year of this, I moved back to Texas, while my mom stayed on in Nashville -- my grandfather had embarked on a new project in South Korea and my grandmother had moved home to help take care of her ailing father after my great-grandmother suffered a stroke and ended up in a nursing home, and I lived with her. My grandparents’ financial fortunes had waned after the Black Monday crash of 1987, but they were able to get me a scholarship to the Selwyn School, a prep school modeled after British schools like Eton and Harrow but with a bit of a freeform vibe. It was decided that I should skip from fourth to sixth grade, presumably because I kept telling everyone I wasn’t challenged.
My classmates were, again, the children of North Texas’ elite: one’s father owned a ranch that bred Arabian stallions and claimed two Kentucky Derby winners; another one was a member of the wealthy Crow family of property developers. We weren’t allowed to wear t-shirts, but only button-ups; on Wednesdays we were required to wear ties.
Meanwhile, my mother got signed to a major record label -- the first member of her group of friends and peers in Nashville to do so, though certainly not the last. She recorded an album and began a national tour with her band, which ended abruptly in Alaska when she was driving the tour van alone and crashed over a barrier into Prince William Sound. She was dead for ten minutes until they revived her; when she woke up a few days later in an Anchorage hospital, her tour was over and her band had sold her gear to buy themselves plane tickets home and the label had canceled her contract and her album release, citing force majeure.
And that was basically that. She was discharged from the hospital and flew back to Texas and none of her friends or professional contacts in Nashville ever called her again. My grandmother took off for Seoul to join my grandfather; they sent us a tiny amount of money each month in return for taking care of my great-grandfather.
Selwyn was just more of the same. The other kids, especially the rich ones, mocked my ratty poor kid thrift store clothes and weirdo sense of style and humor. Most of the teachers seemed to dislike me as well, and the administrators definitely did. And with good reason, I suppose; I was a strange and disruptive kid, and when I was bullied and teased I reacted loudly and violently. If another kid smacked me or punched me or kicked me, I didn’t just take my lumps; I’d hit them back and scream about it, and so I was always the one who appeared to be causing problems. I was told -- by teachers, administrators, my family, everyone -- that I just needed to keep my head down, and not give the bullies the satisfaction of a response, and try to just focus on improving my dismal grades.
After we went on our school trip down to Port Aransas on the Gulf Coast, the yearbook that year featured a big photo of chubby little me in the surf, wearing a t-shirt because the other kids called me “fatboy” and “Chunk” and giving a big thumbs up and a grin. The headline on the picture read: HAVING A WHALE OF A TIME.
Two things happened in seventh grade at Selwyn, when I was eleven: I came in second in the Texas state spelling bee, and I took my ACT college admissions exam as part of a TAG (or “talented and gifted”) program. At the spelling bee, I got a certificate and a leatherbound copy of America’s Best Short Stories or something like that; a few weeks later, I received a letter inviting me to attend Duke University as an incoming freshman.
My mother wrote back and told them it was a mistake, that I wasn’t a high school senior. Duke wrote back and said that, yes, they knew that -- they’d sponsored the program for middle schoolers to take the test. I’d scored something like 32 out of a possible 36 on the test -- not perfect, but much higher than the average high school senior’s score. (I can barely recall the test itself, except that I assume I mostly blew the math stuff, as it was my weakest area.)
Would I like to leave middle school and enroll at Duke University as an incoming freshman in the fall?
I only remember one actual conversation about Duke’s invitation that involved me. I can no longer remember, more than thirty years later, how I actually felt about it. I do remember being intrigued by Duke’s parapsychology program; I was a Ghostbusters fanatic and my only real model was Dr. Peter Venkman, as played by Bill Murray. But beyond that... I’m not sure.
I was a deeply depressed and unambitious child. I’m sure that, to most of the adults around me -- and certainly my family -- I seemed deeply ungrateful for the opportunities that were given to me. But I didn’t ask to take the ACTs, or enroll in the spelling bee, or skip fifth grade. Adults would ask me if I wanted these things, and I would always say yes, because I knew I was supposed to, and because everything was easy. I hadn’t done a single moment of preparation for either the spelling bee or the ACT, hadn’t drilled, hadn’t done practice tests. I would just show up to wherever I was supposed to be and do my thing, and then when I was done I’d go back to reading my Stephen King novel or a book about Borley Rectory or artificial intelligence or whatever it was. And then the adults would all oooh and aaah over whatever it was I’d done, at least for a little while... and that was always better than simply being Disruptive and Unmotivated and Rebellious and Insubordinate.
Someone must have noticed the depression around this time, because I began seeing a child psychiatrist, who prescribed first amitriptyline and then lithium. (I gather that it’s no longer acceptable practice to prescribe such heavy medication for an eleven year old, but the late 1980s were still the Wild West for pediatric neuropharmacology,) The former made me go into uncontrollable crying fits for no reason, and the latter -- which my mom took to battle her own bipolar disorder -- made me feel like a zombie. There were questions about whether I might be autistic as well.
All of this made me feel like even more of a freak and fed into my terror of being institutionalized, which I imagined as being put into a little white room in a straitjacket and left there, forever, like in cartoons and movies.
I am sure this must have contributed to my family’s decision to decline Duke’s invitation. I think there was a financial aspect to it as well -- the cost of uprooting and moving to North Carolina, where we knew no one, would have been immense -- but during that one conversation I recall participating in, the concern was that I wasn’t mature enough, emotionally or socially, to handle the pressure of college at twelve.
I don’t remember how I felt about the idea of going to Duke, but I suspect that it terrified me. My family was right, of course -- I was no more prepared to go to college at twelve than I was to lead a tank battalion into battle. But I do know, for sure, that it added to my sense of myself as a failure who was not Living Up To My Potential, as my grandparents constantly told me. A normal child prodigy could do it. I was just too weird or too crazy.
A few months later, I was expelled from Selwyn for hitting one of my classmates who was a teacher’s son. I hadn’t started the fight, but of course that didn’t matter; I was the one who got caught, the one who couldn’t just keep his head down. My grandparents told me that was it, that was the end of them spending money and effort to try to give me the education that would allow me to Live Up To My Potential. I had disappointed them and failed them and myself. From now on, I could go to public school like a regular kid.
It was not the last time I was expelled from a school. I was barely allowed to graduate from the public school I attended for eighth grade after refusing to allow a teacher to paddle me for insubordination -- I was given my junior high school diploma but not allowed to attend graduation.
A few days after that, my mother packed up our Dodge Ram and we moved to Montana, where she hoped to reconcile with an ex-boyfriend and find a new songwriting career.
Neither turned out the way she hoped, though she ended up marrying the keyboard player in her band a couple of years later. By then, any question of me Living Up To My Potential was long abandoned. My worst fear was realized when I spent my fourteenth birthday in a juvenile psychiatric facility in Butte that my mom had committed me to for being “out of control”. It was everything I’d been in terror of: arbitrary rules, a total loss of autonomy. I was constantly reprimanded for refusing to follow instructions and spent much of my time there in the “time-out room”, a doorless cube with pink rubber walls and a floor, where I would loudly sing whatever songs came into my head.
I was suspended from school my freshman year for fighting and expelled my sophomore year for telling the vice-principal to go fuck himself. We moved again twice in my high school years -- a six month stint in a hellhole in the central Montana plains called Harlowton and finally to Cody, Wyoming, where my stepdad got a job in a sawmill.
I was completely lost by then -- lost in my depression, lost to my family, lost to myself. The sweet little boy who would stop during a kindergarten soccer game to pick flowers off the field and take them to his mother was long gone; I was an angry teenager with half my head shaved who slouched around those small Montana towns with a pack of my mother’s filched cigarettes and a Walkman, blasting Nine Inch Nails or the Violent Femmes in my headphones and trying to avoid the redneck kids and jocks who delighted in humiliating me or giving me increasingly severe beatings: I had my nose broken a couple of times, had guns pointed at me and a couple of times took serious ass-kickings that probably should have ended with me in the emergency room, if anyone had still been paying much attention.
But attention was in short supply those days. My grandparents had gone to Kuwait after the Gulf War to rebuild the oil pipelines, and my grandmother had contracted a rare form of bone marrow cancer called multiple myeloma that was almost certainly a result of being exposed to whatever hellish chemicals Saddam Hussein had been spraying around the area; reported cases of the fairly obscure disease statistically spike amongst people who were in the region at that time. They had moved to Los Angeles so my grandfather could work for Unocal on some damned oil refinery or another out at Terminal Island, and my grandmother could sit in the front window of their rented house in Rancho Palos Verdes and watch the whales migrating off of Catalina Island with a telescope.
My guidance counselor at Cody High School, Mrs. Boring, was one of the only adults I ever dealt with who seemed to really understand me. She arranged to have me again categorized as a “special needs” student, but instead of spending half my day in a special ed classroom, I spent it in the school library, in front of the high-end Mac audiovisual workstation the school had gotten from a grant, that no one else really knew what to do with. I taught myself to use Hypercard and an early version of Adobe Photoshop, and discovered a back way through the school’s network into this new thing called the “World Wide Web”. The high school also had a radio station -- the only station in the Western Yellowstone area that played modern rock and roll -- and I became “DJ Mongo”, filling in the two hours after school with a combination of Counting Crows and Boyz II Men and Pearl Jam, along with my own discoveries in the racks of old 45s they had in the station, like The Clash and Bauhaus.
I somehow ended up on the school’s academic decathlon team, and was told I was expected to attend team meetings and practice drills. I, of course, never showed up to a single meeting; when I got on the bus to go to the state finals, I can still remember the palpable look of disgust on the face of the science teacher who coached the team.
I won the gold medal in English and the silver medal in science. The disgust on the teacher’s face turned to anger, but I was far past caring,
Not long after that, my parents joined my grandparents in LA, so that my stepdad could take a job on my grandfather’s project... and they decided that it would be better for me if I finished up my schooling in Cody. So they rented a tiny apartment from our landlady that was tacked on to the side of a barn overlooking the Yellowstone River... and the last day I set foot in my high school was the day they left. They told me to get a job if I wanted to buy food and cigarettes.
I spent several months living off the kindness of my friends, who worked McJobs and would bring me leftover pizza or Arby’s roast beef sandwiches after work; I couldn’t get a job, didn’t want a job, and finally my family had no choice but to get me a plane ticket to LA to join them.
A few days after my eighteenth birthday, in my final act of academic achievement, I got one of the highest scores ever recorded in the state of California on the GED high school equivalency test. They sent me a note to that effect, along with my certificate.
I somehow convinced my grandparents to pay for me to attend the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, a private art school that at the time was a pipeline for computer animators to enter the special effects industry; my time in the high school library had convinced me that I wanted to be a 3D computer graphics animator. But I dropped out halfway through my first semester, unwilling to go through the traditional art classes required to move on to the computer graphics curriculum. Instead, I began writing for the slick, uber-hip magazine Mondo 2000 at eighteen, and slowly began to build a small career as a writer, making a pittance from my articles about bands or virtual reality or cyberculture.
I lost my GED soon after I received it. Maybe it’s in one of the boxes of my grandparents’ things that are still piled up in my parents’ house in Las Vegas, where they moved in the late 90s so my stepdad could take a job as a carpenter with a convention logistics and management company; I followed them not long after, still incapable of supporting myself. The multiple myeloma killed my grandmother in 1997, and my grandfather died some years later of a heart attack, while visiting us in Vegas. I found his body and tried to revive him, but it was too late.
I think both of them died disappointed in their brilliant, troubled, frustrating grandson.
It’s taken me a few days to tell you this story, partially because I kept rewriting it and partially because remembering my childhood and adolescence is the emotional equivalent of being keelhauled. I suppose there must have been times back then when I was happy... but when I query the database of my memory, I can only recall individual moments of happiness, or even contentment. Most of them involve books or movies or toys; in almost all of them, I am alone.
Most gifted children, I think, tend to be unhappy. Social media is full of “former gifted kid” memes that we all post, and the tropes are unsettlingly familiar: a complete inability to finish what we start, abandoning hobbies or work as soon as it actually requires us to make an effort, an inability to easily form friendships... and most of all, an inability to Live Up To Our Potential. A lot of us suffer as adults from emotional disorders or attention deficit disorders. Many of us discover we lie somewhere on the autism spectrum; many of us end up as drunks or junkies. God knows I’ve smoked enough cigarettes and drank enough whiskey and done enough drugs of all sorts to kill a horse.
Why, though? Why are we so cursed? I think it’s a combination of two things: expectations and perceptions, both our own and those of the people around us.
I am a big man, physically speaking. I always have been. By the time I was in that spelling bee in seventh grade, when I was eleven, I was already five foot ten; I quickly shot up to my full height of six foot three. Nor am I a skinny dude; I am broadly built, like an NFL linebacker. I’m not a giant, by any means, but I’m still often the biggest person in any room I happen to be in.
I’m also a genius, by definition. Does that sound arrogant? It’s not meant to be. It’s simply a fact. By any sort of intelligence measurement or test you like -- and I’ve taken them all -- I am at the very far high end of the spectrum, the same way that I am in the 98th percentile of all men in terms of height. I am an unusually tall man, and I am an unusually smart man; these are simply descriptions based upon metrics. I have no more control over my intellect than I do my height. But both things absolutely inform the way I see and interpret the world, and move through it, literally and metaphorically.
It’s well-known that society favors tall men; we are more likely to be elected to public office or get promotions, and many male-attracted people of every gender express a preference for tall men.
But tall men are often ungainly and ungraceful as boys -- I certainly was -- because our bodies grow faster than our nervous systems can keep up with. As adults, we tend not to live as long as shorter people, and many of us suffer from constant spinal pain and injuries, because while society may say it loves us, it does not accommodate us. Airplane seats and restaurant booths are too narrow and cramped, chairs and tables and countertops too short; our feet hang from the ends of beds. We have trouble finding clothes or shoes in our size; we are resigned to hunching down to wash our hair in the shower and pulling our knees up to sit in the bath and not being able to fit in the back seats of cars. Being big is only an advantage on dating apps and in corporate politics and bar fights; everywhere else, it is a liability.
The same is true of intelligence.
Like tall kids, most smart kids are also ungainly and ungraceful as children; not physically, but socially and emotionally. That comes from the intellect, the ability to see and hear and process and reason, growing faster than the emotions can handle.
Do you remember the first time you realized that a lot of society’s unspoken and unquestioned rules are, in fact, bullshit? That people spend half their time just doing busywork so their bosses will think they’re earning a paycheck, and that most of what most people do with their day is actually pretty unimportant and unnecessary, and that both they and society as a whole would probably be better off if they were doing things that mattered, that they loved and cared about? A lot of us figure this out when we’re in our teens or our twenties, if we ever figure it out at all.
Now imagine you saw all of this and understood it when you were eight years old.
You realized that you weren’t forced to go to school to learn things, but to learn how to do as you were told without question, to find your place in the social food chain, to do endless meaningless homework even though you’d already proven you knew the answers to the questions you were being asked. And you would probably go on, your entire life, doing the same exact shit -- except that nobody was going to make you go to your stupid job, but if you didn’t, you’d end up homeless and starving.
And then one day, probably long before your peers, you understood that you were going to die, that it was inevitable and unavoidable, and that when you died all of this stuff, this crap that you’d been doing would be for nothing?
And when you asked adults about it, nobody could give you an answer that satisfied you, and in fact seemed unnerved or irritated when you asked the question; that’s just the way it is, they would say, even though it was absolutely obvious to eight-year-old-you that it was bad and dumb and pointless and there were obvious better ways to handle things.
And you were expected to simply just go along with this bullshit; you were expected to pretend you didn’t see it, that getting good grades was important so you could go get into a good college and get a good job so you could make a lot of money because... why, exactly? To make the economy better? To have things that anyone could have, if some people didn’t keep them away from other people? You were supposed to pretend you gave a shit about grades and sports and fashion and whether you were popular, and you couldn’t opt out of it or just skip it and try to go do something that actually seemed interesting or useful or fun instead? You were expected to wake up every morning at dawn whether you got enough sleep or not -- because you were hoarding away your precious nights reading about things you actually cared about -- and made to go to a place where you were horribly, deeply bored, when you weren’t being teased or ridiculed or shunned or getting your ass beat. And nobody cared about how any of this made you feel, or asked you if you wanted to do it, or cared if you were miserable or if someone gave you a bloody lip... tomorrow and the next day and for more years than you’ve already been alive?
Oh, and on top of this, you’re expected to throw yourself into this horrible, mind-numbing horseshit, to smile and nod and give all the right answers and do all the meaningless work, and have some kind of program for yourself for academic achievement, at a time when most parents are happy if their kid can manage to remember to take their sack lunch. You are expected to Live Up To Your Potential.
This is all hard enough for grown adults to comprehend and internalize and accept, but for children? Some things you can’t learn from a book; some things you simply learn from experience, and experience is bought with time that cannot be condensed or compressed. I may have been a frighteningly bright child, but there is no such thing as a wise child. Wisdom comes with time. And intelligence without wisdom is a blade without a handle; no matter how sharp it is or how talented you are at wielding it, you cannot help but cut yourself in the process.
The shocking thing is not that geniuses are often unhappy children and unhappy adults; the shocking thing is how many of us survive being the former long enough to become the latter. The world is no more made for the very intelligent than it is for the very tall; we spend our entire lives simply learning how to control the powerful-but-cumbersome engine we’ve been given, and how to compress ourselves into spaces that were not designed for us, by people who claim to admire us but seem only to want us to cut ourselves down to their size.
Whenever we’d move, or when I’d get kicked out of one school and have to start afresh in another, I’d see the eyes of the football coaches light up the first time I walked through the door. I was gigantic; by the time I was a freshman in high school I was nearly as big as a professional ball player. Even if I’d been a clinical-grade moron, they could have stuck me on defense and told me to just stop anybody getting the ball, and they would have rode my big ass to the championships.
But I would see that light die in their eyes as soon as they realized that I wasn’t trying out for junior varsity, when they realized that all I wanted to do was read books and play with computers and hang out with the burnouts across the street from the practice field at lunchtime, smoking cigarettes and listening to weird music. I could see their hope turn to disgust... the same way I could see it in the eyes of that academic decathlon coach, and the eyes of the administrators when I’d be called in after telling another teacher to suck my dick or getting in a fight.
I knew that look by then, because I’d seen it often enough in the faces of my family. I got used to disappointing people.
But with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight -- during which time I think I’ve managed to acquire a little more wisdom than I had as a boy -- I have to wonder: what did everyone really expect of me? I think my grandparents genuinely regarded all those private schools and violin lessons and Space Camp and trips to Europe and everything else as an actual financial investment that they expected to reap great dividends in the future, either in terms of actual material wealth or prestige for the family... and my failure to Live Up To My Potential was something akin to the CEO of a startup blowing his investors’ money on caviar and hookers and blow. More than that, I think they expected me to recognize that and to dutifully live up to those expectations.
I think that’s a bit much to ask from someone who, despite being able to tell you all about how black holes are stars that collapsed in on themselves so hard that they punched a hole in reality, still couldn’t sleep properly without a nightlight and his teddy bear to protect him from whatever lurked in the shadows.
So what do you do with such a child, with such potential? What’s the right way to handle them?
I would love to tell you that I’ve thought about it for my entire life, which I have, and that I’ve come up with a list of ten bullet point action items for How To Raise A Genius. But I haven’t done that. The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve never had kids, probably won’t ever have kids, and partially it’s because I was terrified of having a child like me and screwing them up no matter how hard I tried not to. How do you walk that tightrope between encouraging and feeding your child’s intellectual curiosity without pushing them into things they don’t want to do, aren’t ready for, don’t have the emotional capacity to handle? Do you just throw money and time at giving them the best education and the most opportunities you can, without worrying about whether or not it’ll pay off in the end, or making them feel pressured to be worthy of the gifts you’re bestowing? That feels closer to the truth, I guess, but it’s a hard ask. Maybe an impossible one.
I don’t know what I would say to ten year old me if I had the chance to talk to him. How do you make a trapped animal understand that the pain would end if only they would stop struggling? How do you make a child understand that some consequences aren’t as direct as being sent to bed without supper or being grounded... that choices you make before you go through puberty can affect your life years and decades down the road? That you can carve out your own happiness, a space that’s just for you, and that even if that’s all you’ll ever get, it can be enough -- that it has to be enough?
I picture that chubby little kid with his stupid little mullet, sitting alone on the steps outside his school or under a bush with a book in his hand or running away from the bigger kids who tease him and bully him, and my heart absolutely breaks for him, because I know there’s nothing he can do himself right now to make anything better for him, and that the damage to his poor little soul and heart will make it so much harder to make anything better for a long time to come. I can see how much he has to fold inward on himself like an awkward origami animal just to fit into the world. I can see how much he wants to please and how sad it makes him to disappoint everyone, and my heart just fucking breaks. There’s nothing I can do to save him from what he’s got in front of him. I’m not sure anyone could.
These days, I live with my beautiful and wonderful British wife Michelle, in a tiny house just outside the official northwestern edge of Greater London. I’ve had three heart attacks -- that I know of -- three stents and one triple bypass that has left me in constant pain. Because I’ve always worked as a freelancer or contractor, I never had access to regular healthcare until I moved to England, and so I suffer from debilitating pain and injury due to neglect and constant stress and the consequences of chain smoking and drinking and doing drugs since I was a teen, not to mention all the injuries I’ve sustained by doing stupid and dangerous things, in my lifelong quest to avoid boredom. Due to bizarre and unexplained delays in my immigration process, I cannot work legally in the UK at the moment; I’m constantly applying for remote work with American firms, but my heart problems leave me constantly exhausted, and my physical trauma means I’m not even fit to do under-the-table construction or agricultural work, as many immigrants do.
If you asked me, on most days, what I’ve accomplished as an adult who was once a prodigy, I would tell you I’ve accomplished very little, that I am, at forty-five years old, pretty much a failure. My wife and my friends tell me that’s not true, that I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I got into the Internet industry pretty early on and I’ve been CTO and lead developer of several startups; one of the early projects I did was arguably the first online music store in history where bands could sign up and sell their own tracks without a contract or a record label. I was also able to make a (meager) living as a writer from the time I was eighteen, and became a columnist with the Las Vegas City Life alternative weekly in 1999, when I was twenty-one. A few years later, I co-authored a series of investigative features about the people living in the sewers and storm drains under the Las Vegas Strip that received international attention and got my co-author and I nominated for a Pulitzer. I’ve recorded and released a few albums of my own music and written a couple of books that were published online. For a few months in the late 2010s, I ran an effort to get toiletries and blankets and other supplies for Las Vegas’s homeless population via Amazon wishlists that probably kept a few people alive during cold weather.
But mostly, it feels like I’ve never Lived Up To My Potential. I’ve had brief periods of prosperity, where I made decent money doing work I liked, but bad luck or bad decisions on my part have always seemed to snatch defeat from the jaws of long-term success, time and time again. I was an early proponent of crowdfunding, and wrote a few very well received pieces whose research was funded that way... but I’ve also run a couple of absolutely disastrous campaigns where I failed completely to achieve my goals, for reasons both in and out of my control. I’ve tried to make the world a better place, but I’ve also been faithless and thoughtless and hurt people because it took me an inordinate amount of time to learn how to be a decent, self-reliant human being -- I was mentally gifted but emotionally challenged, you might say. I’ve gotten better at it, I think, but I’m ashamed of all the years I was such a selfish little shit.
I’m not bitter about my childhood, most of the time. It was what it was, right? I can’t change it. I could still be angry at my grandparents, and my family, and sometimes I am, but what is the point of that? They had no more instruction manual for how to raise me than I did on how to raise myself. They weren’t bad people, though I do think they were very self-absorbed people... but most people are, if you look at them honestly, and whether anybody ends up doing the right thing seems to mostly be a crap shoot. And really, it’s not like I was starving or being molested or living in a war zone.. although, as my friend Frank Beaton once pointed out to me, you can drown in six inches of water as easily as six feet, and that’s true even if the water is really Chanel No. 5.
But it’s hard, sometimes, not to wonder about what might have happened if the pachinko ball that is my life had bounced down one set of pins instead of another. What if I’d gone to Duke after all? Where would I be now? Would I have burnt out nearly instantly, as my family suspected then and I suspect now, or would I have found some way to succeed? If I had, I’d probably be a lot wealthier than I am now, but somehow I don’t know if I would have been happier; just unhappy in different ways. I probably would have gotten laid a lot less.
I cannot change the past; all I can do is look to it as a guide on how to navigate the future. I hope that at some point I’m given a way to make life a little less shitty for kids who are the way I was, all those years ago, even if it’s just to tell them that it does get better; maybe not quick and maybe not in the ways you want, but it gets better. And no matter what else happens to you, you’ve got what’s inside your head, that portal to different worlds and possibilities; that much, at least, no one can ever take away from you.
We are gifted and we are cursed at the same time; we are full of potential, and whether we Live Up To That Potential or not, every day is another chance to find our own path and our own way of doing that, whatever it looks like to us. Most of us spend a long time finding that path; some of us never do, but the search for the path, for the meaning of who we are and what we can do? That’s what all of life is. We are born falling, and we cannot control the direction we’re falling in, but we can control how we fall and how we feel about it and maybe where we land.
That’s enough. It has to be enough.
Thanks to Rishi Tandon for proofing and suggesting edits!