Who Am I?

I’ve been so seriously overmedicated for four years that I don’t even remember who I am anymore. It’s really strange. I’m reading everything I can find on gifted adults, there tends to be more literature about gifted children than adults, but I’m still finding out some fascinating stuff. One is that a high number of highly gifted people need either significantly LESS sleep than average and some need significantly MORE. I thought I was someone who needed more, but I’m realizing that had more to do with my medication. In fact, I’ve been doing really decently on four hours of sleep, which isn’t entirely uncommon in the highly gifted population. And when I think back to when I was a kid, I was the same way. I went to bed at around 10:00, but I lay awake in the dark until 3:00 am usually. And yes, I was busy entertaining myself during those hours, but that’s probably TMI. It was strange at first, I got a bit freaked out by it because all those psych pathologies started going through my head about mania and no sleep blah blah blah. But I go to sleep at around 2:00am generally and wake up pretty much automatically at 6:00am. WEIRD!!! I lay in bed for the required 8 hours though, just because I like the physical rest even if I’m not sleeping.

What other weird things have I noticed? Oh yeah, sensual overexcitability. Well, since most literature on gifteds is around children, they tend to talk about more neutral things like being irritated by sock wrinkles and tags in clothing (it’s true, tags will drive me spare!). But sexually it’s like being on low grade ecstacy, it’s fuckin’ intense!! Lovely intense obviously, it makes everything so exquisite. I found out that it makes my experience of sex quite different from the experience someone without sensual OE would have, and I guess I never knew that. For instance, people with sensual OE often experience sex in more spiritual terms, and I suppose I never understood why so many people didn’t feel the same way. It’s a religious experience man!! It makes sense though when I think about times in my life I really did do ecstacy, and it seemed to hit me far more strongly than my friends. I’d be laying on a couch wiggling my toes for an hour in total bliss and unable to walk around, and meanwhile they’d be dancing and fucking and generally being busy bodies. And I’d be like “Oh, I can only move my toes, well that is still nice.” And it turns out that early sexual development happens in gifted children, which explains a lot about me.

Ooh! I also found out that really highly gifted people have a tendency towards androgeny, which is SO me. Fuck I confused everyone from when I was a baby until now and probably until I die. I know I used to drive FTM’s crazy because they thought I was just some kind of stubborn hold out, and then other people thought I was quite feminine and didn’t see the butchy side of me at all for some reason. I don’t know. I did seriously consider the hormone option, but I let it go when I decided I prefered negotiating my complex gender, which is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both, and sometimes neither, from this particular body. It’s too fluid for me to contain it into a specific gendered role, sometimes grasping my gender is just like trying to impose solidity on mercury. As soon as I try to say I’m a boy, I’ll do something so typically girly like write someone’s name in the margins of my paper and surround it with dozens of tiny hearts, and vice versa. Which is why I date bisexuals mainly. Once I did date a lesbian who was calling herself bisexual at the time and I remember we hit a wall when I wanted to be a boy with her and she suddenly had to admit she didn’t really like boys. Yeah, awkward!! But she was still terrified of being a lesbian. It was ridiculously bizarre. She couldn’t be seriously with me because I was a girl, but she also didn’t find me sexy the few times I was a boy. WTF?

Silly big breasted boy!

I’ve also realized I do background thinking, which is hard to describe. I process several things at once, but some things I am thinking about in kind of a quieter way at the back of my brain, and they’ll be a different thought in the forefront (and several in between) and suddenly the deep background thought will have a breakthrough and just pop up out of seemingly nowhere. I’ll be talking to someone about say, uh, Quaker oatmeal, and then suddenly from the back of my head I’ll switch to talking about ideas around translation and where meaning is lost, and people will just be baffled by it. I’ve compensated by tracing the conversation backwards to pull it back to what we were talking about before, but still somehow I’ll end up mixing Quaker oatmeal and translation together and SOMEHOW it will make sense. I’ve never had that specific conversation though, it’s just a random example.

I’ve also found that I’ve made myself less threatening to people by being ridiculously funny. I don’t know why, but people are more willing to grok an idea if I inflate it with Wildean wit, even if it’s quite a serious idea. I’ve even been able to ridicule people who are nasty in disarmingly charming ways, I don’t know if that’s good or not, but it’s something I’ve noticed. I try not to do it though because teasing can be really mean, and I don’t want to be mean. But I will do silly things to an idea just so people will follow me with it. I play a lot, and even thinking and reading serious heavy tomes is still quite a playful experience for me.

A side note about Oscar Wilde. I went to Pere Lachaise Cemetery when I was in Paris (to see Jim Morrison, among others) and I got to see Oscar Wilde’s grave. It has this huge granite masculine angel on it, but someone hacked the penis off and took it away. Who has Oscar Wilde’s guardian angel’s penis? Someone must repatriate it immediately.

And onto this idea of repatriation, I had the most humourous faux pas with a Wiccan friend the other day. I was trying to talk about how sad I was in the Wizard of Oz when the witch gets melted, and I said “That is a terrible thing to happen, even to a witch!” Oh fuck. I got the most nasty look directed at me, and for good reason, so I started qualifying in a ridiculous way. “Even for an evil witch.” Another nasty look. “It was a travesty of justice!” And now a weird look. “But it was an accident” because it was, she was just trying to put the scarecrow out, who was on fire, and the Wicked Witch got in the cross fire. But by then I had just done some very silly roundabout and so my friend just shook her head.

Really though, all the Wicked Witch was doing was repatriating the ruby slippers from a colonialist in a gingham dress. Is that a crime?