Gifted.

I’m pretty sure I did it to myself, mostly. I always had the choice to ignore my own press and take a more reasonable view of things but when you’re young it’s pretty seductive to be told you’re “exceptional”. So I bought it.

As the oldest of four, my parents were absolutely relentless in telling me how much potential I had. Potential for what, they had no suggestions. I got vague shit like “you can be whatever you want” but then I remember asking my dad about college and being told “college isn’t for people like us”. My parents had no lofty aspirations themselves, so I had no model for what to aim for, no resources to get me there, and no guidance from the two people I was led to believe were in charge.

I was designated as gifted sometime around the 3rd or 4th grade, if I’m remembering correctly. I would get yoinked out of class sometimes for some kind of “enrichment activity” but it wasn’t until 6th grade that I was actually put into a “Gifted Program” which meant once a week I would spend my day in a trailer parked on school grounds with other such wunderkind doing weird shit projects that were meant to keep our little gaggle of Very Talented Smartasses from being a total fucking drag to the rest of our teachers. As I moved through school the opportunities for stuff like this decreased rapidly and the expectation was simply that we would all take AP courses and that would be good enough. Which turned out to be a fucking grand lesson about how being really smart did not equal really studious, and I watched as myself and many of my compatriots either aced these classes without trying or failed them completely, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to explain our fates other than “I liked where my desk was” or “it was after lunch and I was more agreeable”.

The never-ending chorus of “you’re so gifted” both inflated my ego and became a weight I could barely lift. I craved the validation and the recognition of how special I was and equally fucking hated the idea that this obligated me to fulfill other people’s expectations.

I discovered theatre in 9th grade. With theatre I was surrounded by similarly fevered egos, but the validation only came when you did the work so I learned how to really bust ass to get that high five (or in the case of my acting teacher Mr. Higgins, a sneer and an almost imperceptible nod. When he bared his teeth you knew you nailed it.) It was an antidote to the “gifted” trap…no one in theatre gave a shit about how special you were, they only cared if you showed up and delivered in that moment. Potential meant nothing, everything focused on the actual work. Great show last night? Don’t give a fuck, you still have to deliver tonight. And the moment the show was done, you were allotted a brief moment of afterglow and then you got right to work on the next one. Theatre is where I learned that gifted only mattered if you could deliver. Theatre is where I got my work ethic.

I graduated high school in ’94, and moved from Jacksonville to Tallahassee almost immediately. I had no friends there except the two roommates I’d brought with me and they turned out to be not really friends, so that whole situation imploded fairly quickly. Another rapid series of bad luck and bad decisions ended with me couch surfing and sleeping outdoors for a while.

When you’ve been told how brilliant you are for your entire life, finding yourself unemployed and homeless is a hell of a blow. My ego was annihilated. When I was lucky enough to get a couch somewhere I was all smiles and jokes until the lights went out and then I would quietly cry myself to sleep wondering how the fuck I was going to get out of this. When I didn’t have a couch I had a couple of spots on FSU’s campus that I knew how to get into and tuck myself away if the weather was shitty, and I had a great spot on the roof of a Subway next to the heat exhaust from the ovens that was pretty cozy. I scrounged spare change from parking lots and pay phones, I shoplifted, and I relied on the kindness of friends who didn’t realize quite how fucked I was because I refused to tell them. I was a loser, an even greater failure since according to everyone I knew I was destined for greatness and had, you know…all that potential.

I eventually bullshitted my way into a job at a toy store that sold kites, darts, boomerangs, juggling equipment, and….yoyos. And for whatever reason, I really took to yoyos.

When I started yoyoing, the technology was just beginning to outpace the abilities of the people using it. So what was possible grew exponentially, but the number of people doing it didn’t. It was the perfect time to get into something….doors are wide open, you have almost no competition, and barely anything existed at that point so almost everything we could come up with was legitimately new.

I was a prolific trick creator during this time. New ideas just exploded out of me, and I quickly gained a reputation as an innovator. Even as a worldwide yoyo boom hit and the number of players started growing exponentially, I was regularly placing in the top five at the World YoYo Contest and built a name and reputation for myself as someone who was on the cutting edge. In 1998 I went from “guy at store” to touring yoyo demonstrator and my reputation grew quickly. In 1999 I created an entirely new style of play that is now one of the five codified styles at contests worldwide, and started working at Duncan Toys, the legendary yoyo company. I redesigned their product line, led a full re-brand of the company, scouted and managed their first demonstration team since the 1980s, and turned them from lackluster drugstore nostalgia brand to the coolest company in the industry. People begged to be on our roster of sponsored players, and I was the guy at the top of all of it. I was touring the world, I had a signature model yoyo that was one of the best available, I was in television commercials in multiple countries, I had become a huge name in an industry that I loved and you’d have been hard-pressed to find a yoyo player anywhere in the world who didn’t know who I was.

After all those years of resenting other people for placing their expectations on me, I found myself in a position where I was the one creating the unfulfillable expectations for myself. I was at the top of my industry, I was making big moves, I was one of just a handful of voices who were defining an entire generation of yoyo players. And I drove myself into depression with my own expectations for myself. I was working 15 hour days, I was traveling at least half the year, I was constantly pushing myself to create more tricks, design more new products, grow the team, grow the brand, go go go. I quit Duncan and moved to a small company called YoYoFactory to be just a demonstrator again but it wasn’t enough of a downshift and I burned out hard and stepped away from yoyos for a few years to regroup. I became a father, I started other businesses, I explored other industries, and I enjoyed starting from the bottom in a much larger pool where no one expected anything of me because I wasn’t large enough to even register.

My next crisis of faith came when I re-joined the yoyo industry in a more paternal role…that of organizer and planner instead of player. I got involved in the inner workings of the National YoYo League and the International YoYo Federation, I became an organizer for the World YoYo Contest, and I became the Operations Manager for CLYW, a small yoyo brand based in Edmonton, Alberta. Instead of centering my contributions on what I was directly creating, I was centering them on what infrastructure I could produce for others to create on top of. And it was hard, allowing myself to remove some of those old expectations from myself. I’d made my name as a player, as a trick innovator…I literally created an entire style of play! To set all that aside in favor of spreadsheets and event management and long-term strategy was crushing for a while, until I finally accepted that I am not beholden to anyone’s expectations, mine included.

I can wax and wane like the moon. I can deliver when I have something to deliver, I can choose to stay silent when my voice is not needed. I am allowed to ebb and flow, and that’s both acceptable and healthy.

Being labeled gifted convinced me early on that like Spider-Man, it obligated me to constantly deliver. With great power, and all that shit. You either deliver, above and beyond, constantly, or you aren’t living up to your potential. That phrase is poison to me now, and just typing it taste like ashes on my lips. It drove me to great highs and much greater lows and helped me create a difficult and antagonistic relationship with something I love. I’m still struggling to overcome the promise of my own potential…because what I would really like is to be gifted in just loving and accepting myself.

Now I’m hard at work finding a way to contribute to yoyoing at my own pace, in ways that make sense for me. I have another company doing web3 stuff and my partner Dylan and I are both very careful about how we grow and manage the business and what expectations we place on ourselves. It’s honestly probably one of the first truly healthy work relationships I’ve ever had and being away from the loaded history of my place in yoyoing has helped me gain some perspective and figure out who I am when I’m not Steve Brown™, Creator of 5A.

I’m finally accepting that maybe my gift doesn’t have to be for everyone else, it can be for me. I can be gifted at taking care of myself, and that’s enough. That’s not a waste of my potential…if anything it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Let’s see how I do.

Originally published at https://unklesteve.substack.com.