When giftedness and disability share the swing

6 minutes on

Yesterday I made this reel on my IG page but wanted to share here because my Instagram reach is very low these days and PDA topics are close to my heart. The video touches on why praise and achievement are so hard for PDAers, because they set a standard which then becomes a burden. When you know you’re capable of great things, it’s easy to convince yourself everything you do SHOULD be great. It’s easy to feel like when you aren’t doing great things that maybe nothing you ever did was great, that you’re a fraud who fooled people that one time. My parents never required I excel at school but they did always say “As long as you do your best,” which was meant to ease pressure of needing to be perfect. But, when your “best” exceeds all expectations, grownups have a way of assuming your best applies to everything. I see this with my kids at school constantly. Teachers thing that because my kids are so smart, they should also have the ability to regulate their emotions. Turns out though, those aren’t managed by the same parts of us at all. We can trick ourselves into being accountable for things we are not accountable for.

The reel also talks about the dread I have this week after making four big sales that are accompanied by shipping demands. My inability to mail things has been a long standing family joke. It was probably the task that most obviously showed my PDA on the surface for years. It was my one allowed kryptonite because it was a hard limit I couldn’t seem to get past no matter how much I wanted to. Over the years before I knew about PDA I tried very hard to understand this avoidance. While family made jokes, only I knew the depth and seriousness of my avoidance because. I tried so many hacks and methods to get myself on track when mailing was required. Back when online banking wasn’t a thing, this avoidance cost me quite a bit of money because I was not capable of paying bills on time. My mail would sit in a pile of demands I couldn’t even open because I knew so many were bills. I went into secret credit card debt while in grad school because I wasn’t paying things on time and I was too ashamed to tell my partner. It took me years to admit all the things I’d been hiding from him, all the imperfections I tried so hard to compensate for but often couldn’t. To appear perfect and what others wanted was my sole life goal. I didn’t know how miserable and ragey it was making me. When I started selling work that required shipping, the avoidance really started making less sense because these weren’t bills, this is what I wanted to be doing, what I’d hoped for-to make art and have people buy it. This was my dream and I had to deliver what was paid for. The fact I still struggled led me to great shame but also helped me ultimately accept that I am truly disabled by the demands of contemporary life.

My son is high masking and he has also learned to look for what people want as a means of keeping himself safe. He will please others in order to stay positive in their heads, even if it takes a toll on him. Yesterday he came home with someone else’s login for a video game and told me the other kid asked him to pay for him because my son was better. I tried hard to have a conversation about boundaries around doing labor for others when we receive nothing but their admiration in return. At 9 he just wants the other boys to like him. But I see again again how he is taken advantage of because of his fear of being unappealing. How to make a fawning kid understand that even though it feels good to meet and exceed expectations, it’s best when the expectations we aim to meet belong to us and not others.

We aren’t responsible for being what others want. We are responsible for knowing ourselves, for holding ourselves accountable to the standards and values we claim to uphold. Figuring out when our feelings belong to us, and when they are being projected onto us by others is such an important lesson for kids and it does not get taught explicitly enough. Children need to understand how much the world will try to sway them, shape them, shift them, and they need to know what it feels like, when subtle external forces like expectation are acting upon them. If we can teach kids to recognize when they are being manipulated into compliance instead of authentic joy, we can maybe save the next generation from a life of fulfilling other people’s capitalist dreams.