One of the few strong memories I have of my childhood is entering the Gifted program. I was really proud of this, especially because I was tested to be borderline retarded in second grade. Additionally, that cute blond girl Ruschelle Jones (my second childhood crush! First one being Flavia from first grade..) was in gifted, and I was always a bit envious when she and a couple other students would abscond the classroom on Fridays. “What secrets of the universe were revealed in that room down the hall?” wondered I since the beginning of my third grade. More than two years later, I’d finally find out.
On my first Friday of being part of the smart cabal, I walked into the gifted room, looked up, and saw a poster. “Your ‘I Will’ is more important than your IQ.” Naturally, at the time, I was a bit miffed by this, since I was quite fond of my newfound high IQ. In retrospect, the great irony was that my IQ was directly a product of my ‘I Will:’ I worked actively at learning, with getting into Gifted being a goal, and managed to raise my IQ by over 40 points over the course of 3 years. But at the time, I was just ecstatic that my IQ was “misreported” earlier, and that I was actually one of those lucky winners of the genetic lottery. I believed that IQ was immutable (though not necessarily easily revealed by tests), and that success was necessarily my Destiny because I was one of the Gifted.
It would be another 11 years, 40 IQ points, and a major life crisis before I finally fully embraced the message of the poster that I saw on the first day of Gifted. Along the way, I’ve seen many of the Gifted stumble and fall, some never to rise again. I came awfully close to being one of latter. You see, we who believed in our Gifted Destinies eventually put enough faith in it that we felt we no longer needed to contribute to keep it real. And when the image flickered as it had never done before, we were struck with a sense of panick we had previously never encountered. The later in life this happens, the greater the panick, for reality betrays a firmer belief. This is often life’s major turning point: some disappear forever into obscurity (or in some cases the Pacific Ocean), some turn to a different brand of faith, and some start again by picking up the pieces after a good, long cry.
Gems are often valued by their purity, their uniformity, their wholeness. Destiny, however, is a patchwork, a gestalt, a Frankenstein. Each surviving one is built on the ashes, chips, and splinters of its brothers. The starting reagent is usually a good mind, but those are plentiful compared to the unguents that hold together completed Destinies.
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