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Do you owe your gifts to the world?
Just because you’re good at something, doesn’t mean you have to do it
Where are my gifted kids at? The kids who are incredibly adaptable, can pick up a new skill overnight and be proficient in a week, are valued for the quality and volume of their output — this one is for us.
I’ve always been a high-performing person, since early childhood. I was placed in honors classes in the fourth grade and began taking national aptitude tests for college prep in second. I was always in the top percentile of my classes, and my best friend and I in high school were in a playful competition to rank either 8th or 9th in our class (I don’t remember where we each landed now).
This set me on a pathway to success, graduating Magna Cum Laude with my Bachelor’s and with a 4.0 with my Master’s. I published papers and presented at conferences before I was 23. I don’t believe in the myth of meritocracy, as a baseline, but I certainly didn’t have the advantages of a lot of my peers that often leads to success in traditional contexts.
I wrote about this in my essay Moxie, and the summary is this: I have some intrinsic driving force that pushes me to claw my way toward any goal I set my mind to with a low margin of failure.
This is not a self-aggrandizing essay, as I actually find these qualities to be value-neutral. Something I’m discovering as I enter 2024 (the year with which I will turn the big 30), is that these qualities are only valued because of the transactional, outcome-driven society I was raised in. The U.S. Empire is barreling faster and faster toward late-stage capitalism, and my high-output work ethic is especially valuable in this context.
I’ve been rewarded for this over and over again, since before I understood how it feeds the machine. I’ve been addicted to the dopamine hit of success, praise, and triumph since before I ever hit puberty. As a result, I have been largely divorced from what it is I want to do. I’ve been presented with this question many times in my life:
Do you owe your gifts to the world?
I’m still discovering the answer, but I’ve been in therapy a long time to unlearn my performance-driven worldview. The…
