2:42am June 13, 2014

What I mean by exgifted.

I’ve said this before but:

Age 5, my IQ went off the charts of most of the tests they could do. So roughly 135-160 range depending on the test.

Age 15, my IQ was 120.

Age 22, my IQ was 85.

This means that sometime between the ages of 5 and 15 (and we’ll never know when), I stopped being able to get the test scores that formally qualify you as gifted. And sometime between the ages of 15 and 22, I dropped down to the border between low average and borderline. I have no idea what’s happened since.

I don’t believe in IQ scores.

But I do believe that the concept of giftedness, as currently used, is fundamentally connected to IQ scores.

You don’t get kids in the gifted programs unless they’ve passed an IQ test or some other test past a certain level.

You don’t get kids in the gifted programs because they just happen to be an extremely original thinker with an IQ of 70.

You occasionally get kids in the gifted programs because they passed some test other than an IQ test, but there’s always a test, it’s always connected to test scores of some kind, specific measures that they believe show your achievement and potential.

At this point in my life, I fail at those measures of achievement and potential.

That makes me #exgifted. This does not make me a #gifted person who just happens to have a low IQ. This does not make me some weird exception that you can tuck away and pretend that my unusual developmental pattern and test scores never happens. This does not make me someone where you can trot out abilities that I happen to have and say, “These show that you’re still gifted.” I don’t have any abilities that aren’t shared by tons of people who never had an IQ above 85 and therefore never had a chance to be considered gifted. When people focus on my talents as an excuse to call me still gifted, what they’re saying is that they believe that the test scores I got at the age of 5, mean something about me, and that the test scores I got at the age of 22 are just wrong somehow.

This is offensive to me.

I have talents. I have an IQ of 85 (or higher, or lower, it could be anything by now). These things are not mutually exclusive. This combination is not rare. It does not need you to explain it away somehow.

Moreover, I do not have a real IQ that is different from my tested IQ. I don’t believe people have a real IQ. An IQ is a test score. It measures how well you did on a test – that depends on emotional state, cognitive skills, motor skills, attention span, comprehension of the instructions, and a whole lot of other things that all vary moment to moment for any given person, and are even more erratic for people with any kind of cognitive disability or movement disorder. Your IQ can cause people to overestimate you. Your IQ can cause people to underestimate you. Or your IQ can cause people to estimate you just about right. But your IQ is not a thing that is divorced from a test score. It’s just the test score. That’s all it is. There’s no thing inside you that’s an “IQ”, the same way you have eyes and teeth and ears. And IQ scores are not about how intelligent you are.

I generally get two reactions to my IQ scores.

Either people think that my IQ was right when I was five, that I’m a super-genius, that I’m this thing they call gifted, and that all my talents can be explained that way. And usually at that point they refuse to recognize the magnitude of my cognitive impairments, which are huge.

Or they think that my IQ was right when I was 22, or even that my IQ at the age of 22 was much higher than they would have expected. At which point, they see all of my cognitive weaknesses, but they do not see any of my talents. Or they write off my talents as meaningless splinter skills that don’t really come from anything real.

I find both of these equally offensive.

Because both of them make it sound like my IQ meant something.

But I am #exgifted. And being exgifted means that I once was considered gifted. I was set on a certain path through life that everyone but me thought I could handle. I couldn’t handle it. My brain broke. My brain broke in a really huge and spectacular way. And in the process of that, my tested IQ went down, so I stopped counting as gifted by any normal measure of giftedness.

But what also happened at that point? My brain went in the right direction. Because the direction that ‘giftedness’ expected of it was never the direction it could have gone in. I was considered gifted because I had a few talents that were well beyond the average 5-year-old. But not beyond the average 22-year-old by any stretch of the imagination. To stay 'gifted’, I would have had to keep developing all these testable cognitive skills by leaps and bounds ahead of my peers. That’s obviously not what happened.

What did happen? My brain took over. It said, “This is who I am. This is where my real talents lie. And I am going to drag you in this direction if it’s the last fucking thing I ever do.” And my brain pulled, and yanked, and dragged me towards the talents that actually meant something. The ones that were actually part of me. Everyone has talents, and mine were never the ones people expected. I had other ones. And while most of my 'gifted’ talents were falling apart, my other talents were growing and blossoming totally unnoticed by anyone, including me, for years. Only later, in hindsight, could I see how lucky I was. Because if I’d stayed gifted, I would have spent the rest of my life trying to be something I wasn’t, which is all that ever happened for me in the gifted programs. Becoming free of giftedness was traumatic, but it was also necessary, because my talents had always been elsewhere, and I needed to become who I was, not what a test score predicted I should be.

So in the end, everything happened as it should have.

And I wish I could talk to all the other kids who were once gifted and fell off the conveyor belt, as I put it, at the time, in my head. Because it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it shouldn’t have to be traumatic, it only is traumatic because of the horrible messages you’re hearing about yourself.

I’ve met a lot of other #exgifted people along the way. Most of them are autistic or have other learning or developmental disabilities that caused a very atypical pattern of development – sort of jump-started in some areas, but then lagging behind later, at least in the skills usually measured on IQ tests. Others had some kind of event, like an illness or brain injury, that changed things for them. But most of us have had the experience of being told we’re one thing and having to learn that we’re something else. Of having to learn the cruel lies that hide behind the bright promise many see in the gifted system. Of having to look things in the face about the idea of giftedness, that other people can choose to ignore. Of having people say “That’s not your real IQ” – both about our “gifted” IQ and about our “non-gifted” IQ. And being equally offended either way, and not being able to explain why. Having people explain to us at length why they think we ought to qualify as “still gifted” (even while other people who have the same talents but never had a gifted IQ are somehow not “still gifted”), until we want to bash our heads on something. All of these things happen to you when you're #exgifted.

I like #exgifted a lot better than I like #twice exceptional. #twice exceptional is about being gifted and disabled. #exgifted is about what happens when you fall out of the category of giftedness entirely and have to navigate an entirely new landscape and there’s nobody to help you because nobody understands WTF just happened to you. And I’ve found it really hard to even talk about it, because too many people want to deny that it can even happen. And they deny it in so many ways that you can’t even talk about it. And people who’ve found refuge in giftedness get defensive and don’t want to hear what happens to you when you can’t measure up anymore. And people who think you’re smart think that means you’re gifted and can’t see how offensive that is.

So once upon a time, I tested into the category of gifted, and that created a lot of unrealistic expectations. And once upon a time, I tested out of the category of gifted, and some people were willing to let go of the unrealistic expectations, while others continue to hold onto them. I think that falling out of giftedness was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I wish other people understood that. I wish other people understood what this experience has been like, overall. For me. Not for their experience of me. Not for their estimations of my abilities and intellect and 'cleverness’. For me. For my experiences. For my actual skills, both good and bad. For who I actually am, not who they want me to be. And that’s why I think #exgifted is one of the better personal tags I’ve come up with.

I know there are tons of other people like me.

I know we very rarely speak up because nobody ever wants to really hear our experiences.

As in, really hear them, without all the while trying to decide “Is this person still gifted or not?” Even asking that question shows a way of thinking that can never understand the experience of exgiftedness.

I’m putting this out there for the other #exgifted folks, everyone else be damned for once. There’s too few of us talking about this and too many other people telling us who we are or who we ought to be or who they think we ought to be. But we are what we are, and that’s different for every single one of us. I just want a place where we can be us.

[And if anyone replies to this by telling me I’m too smart / talented / special / something else to be #exgifted, I might actually block you. That’s not a threat, that’s an “I’m so weary of this I don’t think I could take reading it anymore and I want to warn you before you run off at the mouth like that.” I know several different people who refuse to tell anyone their (85 or lower) IQs because they’re sick of the ableist crap they hear when they reveal them. Much of the ableist crap means well, but it’s still ableist.]