When I was just under three years old, my mom began taking me along to her lab hours at our local community college. I would mostly listen to other people’s conversations as I sat and put together little wooden dowels and colored balls that were meant to be used to build 3D molecule models. Sometimes though, I would answer questions or comment, and even back then I was a bit of a talker. My mom’s friends and classmates (wherever they encountered me) would titter and make occasional remarks about how precocious I was.
To me, my abilities always made sense in the context of my genetics. My mother was a gifted woman and mathematician who had rather rudely, as she described it to us, declined an invitation to join Mensa. She believed such organizations are stuffy and overly concerned with status, and she never felt comfortable being defined by that score on her IQ test. Her opposition to them in general is so strong she threatened to sue the middle school I was in when she realized that they had begun administering an IQ test to me. I had been pulled in for two days of testing, ostensibly for the purposes of being moved into their gifted program. When I described this and the test to my mother when I came home after the first day, she lividly phoned the school and insisted that day two and the completion of that testing would not be happening.
My mother and I are incredibly different in several key respects, but I agree with her that numbers shouldn’t define a person or their opportunities. These types of numbers can be skewed by many things, and a high IQ score is no guarantee of success or functionality. And I might add, the same can be said of a lower score also.
On the surface, the opposite ends of the distribution of normal don’t seem to have much of anything in common. And yet, the individuals on both ends will be teased for their actions, choices, and way of verbalizing. I spent my entire childhood being teased by my peers for my vocabulary, and I can only say that my younger self was nowhere near so peaceful, and I always snarked back. I even had a fifth-grade reading teacher (who was also the football coach) that seemed to be a bit intimidated by my standardized testing scores and would call me “Ariana Airhead” in front of the entire class, eliciting snickers and laughs…and since this was clearly teacher sanctioned, it caught on like wildfire until I left that school. I got pulled out of art class far too many times in one of my sixth-grade schools so that the principal could lecture me on how a person as “gifted” as I was should be more social, make more of an effort to fit in, and try to have “normal” friends. For the record, my friends have always been the very best of people as far as I’m concerned.
Years of these types of experiences have caused me to prefer to be obscure, and my forays into any sort of public discourse over the past few years have been driven by my desire to see an expanded understanding and compassion in our communities for families of individuals whose disabilities have them labeled as “lower-functioning.”
If you live on the opposite sides of normal, you will spend countless moments proving yourself. These groups will face a continual tidal wave of disbelief from the middle of the bell curve about what they can truly do that will require repeated demonstrations of ability just to be taken seriously or exonerated from the shadow of fraud. They and their loved ones will face repeated accusations of falsified or misrepresented capabilities. Nobody on any part of the bell curve should have to hide out for fear of the social smackdown that results from other people’s insecurities publicly playing out either.
Perhaps we should all stop looking at what we expect to see based on the typical distribution of a bell curve and start looking at people as individuals. Our attempts to label people wherever they fall on that distribution often fall short of the truth and fail to capture anything more accurate than a caricature.
