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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • If it was 20, maybe even 10 years later, I might have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child. But I wasn’t disruptive and I scored extremely well on tests. In the 80s, that overruled pretty much everything else. And when I had trouble later, it was because I was “lazy.” This is why I dislike the narrative that “gifted means everything came easily until it didn’t and then they failed because they didn’t face hardship.” I didn’t have trouble because I wasn’t challenged. I had trouble because I had undiagnosed ADHD and autism, but got slapped with the lazy label early and often. Nothing I did was ever enough, and I was told my whole life that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. All because I learned to read before kindergarten and scored in the 99th percentile on standardized testing.

    Meanwhile, the 5-6 people from my elementary gifted classes that graduated with me all kept excelling through school and into their careers. Which also contradicts the easy narrative that sprang up around “gifted.” Not sure how many of them had concurrent neurodivergencies… but I was the weird one even among the weird kids lol.