What I Learned As An Ex-Gifted Kid | Caroline Cannistra | TEDxAshburnSalon

when I was 13 I asked my parents if I could drop out of middle school and go to college I had been in and out of various gifting program since I was about six at the time I was in seventh grade the only advanced class I was taking at the time was geometry and I had already finished all of geometry two months before the year ended I really wanted to do math but I wasn't getting to do the type of math that I wanted to do and I wanted to do history I wanted to do

English I wanted to do a lot of things but I was limited by the coursework that was given to me and I didn't have a lot of friends I couldn't relate very well to the other people at my school and I didn't know when things were going to get better and then I had a conversation with somebody who told me about an opportunity to change everything he told me about this little program at the University of Washington in Seattle where I live it takes middle school students who are bored and frustrated and looking for a

new challenge students like me it takes them into this year of grueling college preparatory work they take lots of classes it's reported to have five hours of homework a night this was one of the most exciting things to me and then after the end of that year they go to the University of Washington as freshmen I was a lot more enthusiastic about this and my parents were at first one of the first questions they asked me was but what about the prom this is a really common question that parents have for students who want to

do stuff like this they were concerned that if I didn't go to high school I wouldn't get those high school experiences that everybody gets like prom parties hanging out with friends but they let me apply to the program anyway after some convincing and I got in and I ended up going through the program and what I discovered was I ended up getting a lot of those experiences anyway we did have our annual spring dance we called it not a prom we also had a Drama Society which would put on a play every year I like

to think of it more like a small high school on a college campus rather than a sub of a college today I'm going to be talking about the lessons I learned starting seven years ago when I asked my parents about college I graduated college last year first lesson I learned the ability to fail is a valuable skill I spent a lot of time failing especially in that first year and I had to learn how to take that information not take it personally and use it to better myself number two it's okay to have unique needs

what I'm talking about unique needs here and referring to things like accommodations for disabled students I'm also referring thing abstract things like needing support from your family during difficult times number three the type of person you are is a choice you make I call myself an X gifted kid because being gifted is not something I choose but being things like driven and compassionate is something that I do choose and I make those choices all the time number four most importantly ask for help I've been asking for help ever since that day I talked to my

parents I'm still asking for help now and it's a valuable skill and if you want to accomplish things and be successful you need to understand that you can't do that alone so the ability to fail is a valuable skill I started the first year of college preparation in September 2011 this was about six months after I had that talk with my parents in the first few weeks we were going through a course load that's a lot heavier than what's usually expected of a college freshman we're taking five classes English history precalculus ethics and physics and

we were expected to start performing at a college level very quickly we're getting a ton of feedback from our professors I remember one paper I got about two weeks into the program I had these paragraphs of feedback from my teacher explaining everything I did wrong and a grade of one point seven out of four which was like the worst grade I had ever gotten and I was kind of devastated by that at first I wasn't used to not succeeding at things especially not succeeding at things that I did try to succeed at and what kept

me going was the knowledge that everybody's expected to and fail when you're doing something like this I mean a lot of pressure was put on us we put that pressure upon ourselves too but it was important to remember that I was asking a lot of myself and I needed to learn and I needed to grow by talking to people and I ended up spending a lot of time talking to my history professor about that paper and it took the whole year I'd argue but eventually I did learn how to write at a college level but

the other thing I learned was that failure is not a personal judgment against yourself it's not a final statement of who you are as a person it's a bit of information and you can use the information to become better and that's something that you have to do continuously and it requires a bit of humility to know that you can't succeed at everything but that humility carried me very far number two it's okay to have unique needs so I graduated from that first year that was kind of like my high school graduation and I started at

the University of Washington I went there for a couple years and when I was 16 I moved on campus it was my first time living away from my parents and a lot of things started to come up a lot once I was having trouble taking care of myself as I think many sixteen year olds would without their parents one thing that happened that was a little ridiculous was I would go to class and I'd be sitting in these big lecture halls with up to 700 students it would be full people are starting to get sick

so I'm sitting in class taking notes trying to pay attention and I hear a noise like that and it breaks my concentration and it's a lot more anxiety inducing than it used to be when I was younger so I try to get my focus back on the teacher and I'm just like desperately trying to ignore the sounds it's just it keeps happening and throughout that whole class period I'm no longer paying attention I'm just focusing on trying to predict when it's going to happen again and trying to deal with that and I ended up skipping

a lot of class that year because it was just too much for me and I wasn't getting anything out of class anyway and after a while I realized that this could not continue I ended up talking to a psychiatrist who told me about something called misophonia this literally means hatred of sound it's something that people one study estimates that 20% of college students have and it's having a fighter but a fight-or-flight reaction to a relatively innocuous noise like sniffling she also told me that I have ADHD which explained a lot of the problems I was

having with self-management and it also explained other things about myself and it was really useful for a couple different reasons one was I legally had the right to go to my school and say hey I need accommodations and they set me up with the system so that I could wear headphones and the input into the headphones would be whatever the teacher was saying into this little microphone that I carried around with me which meant that I could filter out all that background noise and just focus in class and it was like a miracle how quickly

that improved everything in my life not having that source of stress and as for the ADHD thing there's this concept of twice exceptional which refers to gifted students who have disabilities and I think it's a little bit misleading because in my case I consider my giftedness and my disability to come from the same source which is ADHD because I have ADHD I can do things like make connections very quickly and when you're working in research that's a great thing to be able to do because you're looking at data all the time and you need to

make those connections and I talk to a lot of people with ADHD who are incredibly successful and who have found ways to manage the more negative parts of it like being disorganized for example and what I've learned is that once you can manage that and once you have that knowledge about yourself the positive aspects of it can really shine so I consider ADHD for me to be kind of like a superpower because it gives me the ability to do things that other people can't do and all superpowers come with the weakness in my case I'm

pretty disorganized and I get easily distracted but I know how to deal with that now and because I'm not ashamed of that part of myself it means that I can really appreciate the parts of it that really improve my life and make me the person that I am number three the type of person you are is a choice you make so I graduated last year I've always wondered when you're in high school there are a lot of bullies and there are a lot of geniuses I've wondered where they go after high school because you don't

use those words for adults a lot of the time sometimes you do but not as much as you do in high school so what happens where do they go in my experience the label of gifted kind of fell away after I graduated from school it's something that people don't really care about once you're in the working world especially in a field like scientific research where everybody is brilliant the only time I really talk about my age in a professional setting is when I need to tell people I can't meet them at a bar and this

can be a little bit difficult to deal with if you spent your whole life calling yourself gifted having that label and having that be your entire identity because it means that once you lose that you kind of lose your entire sense of self and so what I've been doing is I've been working to replace the label gifted with things like driven and passionate and for example I consider myself to be good at educating people I've spent a lot of time helping people with math right now I volunteer every week helping kids with social skills that's

not something that was born knowing how to do it's something I had to learn and I made that choice a few years ago to have that be part of Who I am same with music I played piano for a really long time these days I sing in a choir I've been doing that for a few years now and that's also not something I was born knowing how to do it's a skill that I had to hone I am from a family of people that I consider to be incredibly gifted my brother Michael is the starting

quarterback at his high school my sisters Kate and Coco do track and field and they're really good at it they they really impressed me and they're that way because they've chosen to work really hard and make sacrifices and give up their time and all this commitment so that they can accomplish these things my brother would not have made it to starting quarterback if he didn't make the choice to be that type of person a leader and athlete and same with my sisters they made the choice to commit themselves to track and field and its really

paid off for them and I'm really proud of them and I'm trying to internalize the idea that I can be like them in a way I can work really hard to meet my goals and I can make the type of person I am be a choice and it's a choice that I make every day what type of person I am to the world it's not a label that was imposed on me when I was six it's a choice and it's completely controlled by me and that's really important the theme of all of this is asking

for help I have been asking for help ever since I was 13 when I was 13 I didn't really think I needed help with anything when I talked to my parents I thought all I was asking from them was for them to sign a consent form but I was asking for a lot more than that I was asking for their support and I was telling them that something was wrong and that I needed help I wasn't getting the love I needed from my peers I wasn't getting the stimulation I needed from school and something had

to change so even that saying that I wanted to go to college was a cry for help in a way and that's a good thing I think if I hadn't made that choice I would be a much different person and I asked for help from my teachers I asked for help from my family all the time I asked for help from professionals who can give me the help I need I asked for help from my co-workers and my bosses and asking for help is sort of it requires a lot of humility but it also requires

an acknowledgement that nobody can do anything alone some people including me when I was 13 think that you can do everything alone but I can't and acknowledging that means that I can really succeed because I surround myself with people who will help me and support me in anything I try to do so I'd like to invite all of you no matter what your background is no matter whether you consider yourself gifted no matter what you've been told about yourself to always challenge yourself always strive to provide for yourself whatever you need and through that always

ask for help thank you [Applause]