Understanding what it means to be a “Twice Exceptional” student
As I have written many many times throughout this semester, my childhood and teen years were filled with constant difficulty in school. In some subjects, I was able to perform exceptionally well, and in others, I was constantly drowning and couldn't seem to recover. In these more challenging subjects, my teachers just assumed that I was being lazy and unmotivated because they could take a look at my other grades in English and music and see that I had consistent A’s. However, this is a real issue that some children have which characterizes them as being “twice exceptional”.
In elementary school, I was diagnosed with ADD, which explained my fidgety behavior and back for daydreaming, but it still didn’t fully expose why I was having such trouble with math. Only fairly recently after a lot more research, my mom discovered that I most likely have a math learning disability called “dyscalculia” which explains why I could be so high and low achieving at the same time. In high school, I had already (finally) been identified as gifted, but before I knew about dyscalculia this only reaffirmed my fear that I was strikingly incapable of doing math. However, after learning about 2E everything made a lot more sense. An article I read explains that “Children who are both gifted and challenged can be tough to understand. Gifted kids can use their strengths to compensate for the special need, and in the process mask their learning problems. Or the special needs can mask the giftedness. In some cases, neither the disability nor the giftedness is recognized.” My issue was that my giftedness was obvious when it came to writing and art, but my disability tanked math and science, which overall made it look like they canceled each other out, presenting me as just another average unmotivated student. When your perception of yourself and ability doesn’t match reality this can cause many students to go off the rails. Another common issue with 2e individuals is that the constant highs and lows and conflict between exceptional intelligence and disability lead to mental illness and/or behavioral issues.
“They know that they’re capable of more and yet something is holding them back, and they can’t really figure out why,…That’s why you often see a lot of frustration and anxiety and even behavioral dysregulation in a lot of these kids.”(Dr. Laura Phillips)
For me, this was the most painful part of my entire experience. When my performance in school didn’t match up with the ability I knew I possessed I started to feel like I was going crazy! It got to the point where I turned into the student who wouldn’t try because I knew what the outcome would be, and I was so tired of putting the work in, getting my hopes up, and just disappointing myself for the millionth time. During this time in my life (basically all of middle and high school) I wasn’t even myself. I was like a wounded feral animal that would lash out whenever it felt attacked by anyone because I was already so injured by my own self and experiences. I didn’t even recognize my depression because I had felt that way for so long I just thought that was the type of personality I had grown into, this is adult me I guess. What sucks even more, is that I couldn’t even control my anger or pain, because I wasn’t even able to fully recognize where it was coming from. Only now, after spending a year and a half learning about who I really am, am I able to see what was going on. When people told me I was selfish, rude, a bad person, and detached I realize that I behaved in those ways because I was barely able to hold myself together most days, and anything else added on top of that made me feel like the house of cards was collapsing. I am not a bad person now and I wasn’t one then, I was just a sad kid who couldn’t understand how I could identify as an intellectual but everyone else saw me as an idiot.
I am lucky to have learned about 2e and my learning disabilities when I did, because there are many other students and now adults in the same situations that I was who haven’t learned how to recover. I know multiple people I went to school with who had similar problems and weren’t able to heal in the ways that I have. the healing isn't necessarily dependant on making yourself feel smart again (believe me, there are plenty of days where I slip back into my old feelings of worthlessness and fall into a pit) but more centered around creating you own identity outside of school and being proud of that. I learned to respect myself as an intellectual outside of the standards of high school and understand that just because I couldn't learn something then doesn't mean that I can't learn it now.
I am currently working on reframing the way I view what I went through; I’m still upset about it but I am trying to glean more important lessons than just pain and suffering. I think the most important thing I’ve learned now is that gifted or not, I understand who I am, what I want to learn, and how I need to support myself to get through challenges when they arise again. Overall, even though the process of learning about myself and putting names to my difficulties felt painful at first, understanding and accepting myself for what I am has been the most important part of feeling like a real intellectual and well-rounded person again.
Works Cited
Arky , Beth. “Twice-Exceptional Kids: Both Gifted and Challenged.” Child Mind Institute, 10 Nov. 2020, childmind.org/article/twice-exceptional-kids-both-gifted-and-challenged/.
