In the mental hospital, we were given hard-boiled eggs without salt. I came to see my time in isolation, and the forgoing of salt, as a form of slow torture. For over a month, I did not see anyone except the attendants when food was handed to me. When I bathed in the basin, I was watched, observed, and quietly studied. It was COVID-19, the pandemic. Millions perished. When I was in the ward with the other girls, they appeared, as the psychiatric nurses did, as angels. What was their story, I wondered. What were they doing here? What had possibly happened to them that this is how they had ended up? And then, much later, what was I doing in Provincial Hospital? Why had I had a nervous break from reality and landed in a mental hospital, a psychiatric institution for six months in my early twenties? Why had I faced social isolation from my peer group as a child?
It is my belief that people do not understand the gifted child. It is my understanding that people do not understand the child that is the exception to the rule. Yes, in my humble opinion, people, the world, society, even modern society, do not understand, do not know how to handle or cope with an extraordinary child.
The vision of the gifted child is known and understood only by them.
If one wants to talk on religious terms, then we must turn to the Bible, then we must turn to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
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I remember as far back as primary school how people, teachers and children would laugh at me, how I was picked on for talking in a whitey voice because I attended speech and drama classes (in other words, elocution classes from an early age) with other whiteys. As a child, I had no other words for them. The children were a different colour than I was, although I gathered later on in life that we had the same upbringing. My parents and the children’s parents at Marjorie Gilbey’s Speech and Drama Studio, we were being raised with values, and far from the madding crowd of apartheid.
Later, the gifted child, when ignored, when rejected by the peer group, will, come hell or high water, try to fit into the peer group, unfortunately.
The gifted child is at risk of suicidal ideation and suicide, and later in life, if they choose the wrong friends, they will fall into the trap of addiction, the druggie lifestyle, gun violence, knife crime, single parenthood, child out of wedlock syndrome, alcoholism, and other social ills, trials and tribulations.
They often commit suicide.
Kurt Cobain is an example. There are many examples like this. Jason Arday is another.
The film Little Man Tate could be the tale of any extraordinarily gifted child. It is a lesson that every parent must learn. To love the gifted child. To accept them for who they are, and not to be afraid of their intelligence, of their awareness, but to realise that they must give and allow their gifted child access and agency to harness their talents that has been bestowed on them.
The film Little Man Tate was directed by Jodie Foster, herself a gifted child.
It is not just what the gifted child can understand, it is not just about what they can sense and see without given it a second’s thought, it is about their unlimited thinking, their unlimited vision, their unlimited scope of understanding. It is also about the gifted child’s competency.
More resources must be made available to parents in sub-economic areas who are raising gifted children.
Every year, these children are lost in the foster care system. Without parents, without a mother and a father to guide them, to raise them, how does the gifted child navigate the dangerous waters of a world filled with sharks, sheep in wolves’ clothing, and predators?
We are all innocent from birth.
The gifted child will always retain a sense of innocence. The gifted child, if he is not confident in who they are as a person, will grapple with a fractured and spoiled identity.
I speak from my own experience here, and the experience of my brother.
We were both raised in a household where our parents loved us unconditionally. Our mother sacrificed, and our father saw to all our needs, even though they were only educationalists. They saw to it that there was a roof over our heads and food on the table. The cupboards were never bare.
If they realised our gifts early on in both my life and my brother’s, I will never know. I only know that, like Steve Jobs adoptive parents, they truly saw us for who we were, and gave us time to develop our gifts, and to find our purpose.
To find meaning in life is difficult for the gifted child.
Readers of my blog will, to all intents and purposes, probably all know my story by now. My troubled history with mental illness, the repeated stays in hospital for manic depression, for psychosis, for hypomania, for mania. The label of “Outsider”, and the psychological term, “misfit”, stays with one for a lifetime.
A man like Steve Jobs knew this, so did the poets Sylvia Plath, her nemesis, the advertising guru, Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s friend, Anne Sexton, the Russian Marina Tsvetaeva, the Bulgarian poetess Petya Dubarova, and others. The list goes on and on.
Is every person who commits suicide gifted? I don’t know the research.
What I can tell you is this.
In today’s society, especially in sub-economic areas, the gifted child is abused and malnourished. They later turn to gangsterism and prostitution to survive, and other torments.
So, gifted children should be encouraged to seek out other gifted children, and resources should be made available to them to nurture their gifts so that they can develop them, and so that they, as adults, can make a positive contribution to the rest of society. Don’t let another child fall behind. If you see a child struggling in school, struggling to make friends, make it a point to make the child feel visible; make it a point to make the invisible child feel seen and heard.
