Urgent, Paralyzed Possibility

My continuing search for information was often debilitating, mired in ambiguity and desperation to  find clarity not for myself but for my students and my own children. Questions that started to plague me included some of the following: Does learning disabled mean broken? Does an affinity for aesthetic beauty and art become void when paired with dyslexia? What about a need for movement? If someone can’t sit still, are they less intelligent? My own giftedness is firmly rooted in my openness and welcoming of possibility.

How does giftedness show up in my daily life? It shows up as urgency, paralysis, and possibility.

As a gifted person, I feel a profound sense of obligation, urgency and need to do my part and help, and desire to contribute and make a difference on earth—for other people. I walk the line of being a workaholic, when I feel that I always should be working on something that matters. I should be helping, doing more, saying more, and being more.

My life is enriched and complicated by my insatiable, urgent curiosity. My need to understand more things, more ideas, more systems, more people, more everything. Learning about my own disability, dyslexia, led to the life-changing discovery of audiobooks. Yearning to slake my thirst for information, I began drinking from the firehose of knowledge, listening to book after book with a clear preference for non-fiction. I had just crawled out from the desert to find an unending well of the purest water imaginable. I can easily forget about people and relationships when deep diving into learning and exploration with my unquenchable need for understanding and enlightenment. However, reading at that pace and filling oneself with more information and knowledge can leave one bloated, lethargic, and a bit panicked.

The phrase analysis paralysis describes what happens when my need to do more and my need to learn more collide. I often drown in the vastness of the overwhelming possibilities. It’s like really exploring all the available tools when creating a PowerPoint Presentation. If you have ever formatted yourself into a coma, then you know what I mean. Who seriously needs that many choices? My default when confronted with this stress? Avoidance paralysis disguised as contemplation. I often find myself “thinking” and reflecting on a project or idea. The truth of this state is that it is an intellectual’s clever mirage, disguising the fact that they are in essence held hostage to insecurity and indecision—carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Finding out at the age of forty-two that I was indeed gifted, dyslexic, and had ADHD was an apocalypse of sorts for me. The third definition of an apocalypse, as listed on The Free Dictionary, is “a prophetic disclosure; a revelation.” My apocalypse, my personal enlightenment, showed up in the very personal understanding of the definition of smart— of what intelligence really is. It was here that I started to pull apart the ideas of achievement, aptitude, and ability. The constructs of collaboration and compliance are not synonymous with intelligence, potential, or ingenuity; yet they are so closely connected to achievement within a stale, stable systemic ideal. These understandings allow me the luxury, as a non-classroom elementary teacher, to dwell in the possibility of each individual student I meet. My focus is not the entire group, but each little nugget of energy, potential, and promise.

My continuing search for information was often debilitating, mired in ambiguity and desperation to  find clarity not for myself but for my students and my own children. Questions that started to plague me included some of the following: Does learning disabled mean broken? Does an affinity for aesthetic beauty and art become void when paired with dyslexia? What about a need for movement? If someone can’t sit still, are they less intelligent? My own giftedness is firmly rooted in my openness and welcoming of possibility.

As a teacher, I began to see how a factory-style model makes sense, when taking large numbers of individuals in large groups, with the objective of having an educated populace. Spiritually, however, it is a type of genocide. It is a systematic destruction of the treasures each of us brings to this life to contribute to the greater good of society. Those treasures—those sparks—are never allowed to ignite in our factory model of education. There is no time, no attention, and no space to attend the growth and development of these individual flames.

In my daily life I am a teacher. A teacher of children, adults, hearts, and minds, and my life is about creating ripples. Urgent ripples of possibility for one kiddo, one person at a time. When I become paralyzed feeling like I am not doing enough, I try to remember that just being myself is one way of creating ripples. One statement, one smile, one observation, one compliment, one question. Each of us has been impacted in powerful ways by one “something.” If I can be a ripple for someone, that has a positive impact on their menu of possibilities. My giftedness is embodied in my urgent commitment to creating possibility ripples for those around me.