throbbing light machine

I just had a major window into the formation process of my Issues. I linked my father to staranise's recent post on Giftedness, both because I thought he'd find it interesting and because I'm in a phase of helpfully trying to explain my head to others so that they can help *me* more effectively. And the first thing he did, even before reading the link, was to respond by equating giftedness with privilege. "What do you mean by gifted?" he said. "Because being free and housed and safe is a pretty big gift in this day and world." And of course it is, but - but -

My father taught me early on to conflate my mental gifts with social privilege. I've written before about our Thing with T.H. White's The Once and Future King - that was the vector for a lot of this. I was taught that I was lucky, because I could learn well and see the truth, and because my family were good to me, and because I was a middle-class-enough white girl in 21st century America. To some degree I am deeply grateful for this, because I think it prepped me pretty well for the demands of intersectionality. Because of what my father taught me, when Black feminism or trans*theory or whatever informed me that I had privilege, I didn't experience the sort of kneejerk denial reaction that seems common. So in that way my daddy did real, real good.

But one of the things in 's post that resonated most with me was the need to conceptualize giftedness as disability-like, in that it can create more problems than solutions. I started wondering if part of the reason why I've been academically borked this last year is that I haven't been thinking of myself as Gifted. I wanted to be like everyone else; I thought, well, I'm at university now, that difference should be irrelevant here. I've been trying to not think of myself as different, but that hasn't been working out so well for me. My father taught me to understand giftedness as privilege. If I turned that around, it could change a lot of things; I definitely want to talk to my counselor about it. It was still really interesting to watch the process between my daddy and I unfolding.