9:09am July 18, 2014

Have you ever had one of these conversations?

I was talking to a former teacher about my IQ testing as a kid.

I was trying to explain to her that something the tester saw as a mark of maturity was actually a sign of lack of maturity, or at least a total lack of understanding of certain things.

Basically, she’d been surprised that I did not brag, show off, or act like I was better than other kids. She said most gifted kids did all of those things, and that I seemed totally unaware that I had exceptional abilities.

This was, of course, because I had not yet developed the ability to compare myself to other children in any respect, and because I had no awareness of what these abilities were or how they differed from what they “should” be or even what the word “testing” meant or what they were doing to me.

So I was talking to this former teacher.

And I said “She said I didn’t act like I was better than the other kids –”

And her response was to get extremely angry – interrupt me before I could finish the sentence – and snap at me: "You weren’t better than the other kids.“

Which left me with no words left for explaining what I meant. Which was that what the tester deliberately chose to interpret as a sign of maturity, was actually a sign of developmental delays in several different cognitive areas. (This particular tester did that a lot: She’d find something I was bad at, and spin it into something I was good at, because she was, this teacher told me, "very traditional” and could not handle the concept of “twice exceptional”.)

And it also left me with someone who was angry at me because she thought I was implying that I was actually better than other kids. And I had no way of explaining.

And that’s what I don’t understand.

In conversations like that, my ability to explain things goes out the window. I mean, at the time this conversation took place, I was still using speech, which means that my ability to communicate was already very impaired and my ability to handle unexpected turns in the conversation was nonexistent.

But even today I would have a hard time dealing with a conversation of that nature. It’s like, suddenly, there’s no way of saying what I meant to say. Even if the words haven’t totally gone away, there’s just no way to say what I mean. And I don’t understand why conversations of that nature always rob me of my ability to communicate, which then leaves the misunderstanding unsolved and leaves the other person mad at me for something I never said.

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