It's really been quite the ride, and I'm ready to find a rest stop... To take a nice, long nap and wake with a different way of experiencing the world. To join the crowds and feel like I fit in. To hit pause and resume life unimpressed by this aura (shadow?) that clings to my heart and my mind like a weight.
Because sometimes it just gets to be too much.
For just a little while could I just be able to feel real contentment? To be able to sit in one place without feeling guilty because of all the things I want to do (no, NEED to do) with my life for the next millennium? Maybe to not feel so frustrated with ridiculous laws in my community or "the way we always do things" at work... Or to dread small talk at my children's events with people who probably think I'm as different as they seem to me...
I would love to be able to watch the news without sobbing uncontrollably about the horrible stories of children dying or stay up all night trying to figure out how to find a way to do search and rescue at the latest natural disaster site in countries on the other side of the globe (and of course how to get a dog trained to search with me, which I've tried before and then lost interest in when I realized how repetitive it was to actually train anything...) in fact, it would be super to be able to stick to one task at a time, rather than doing several things and planning five zillion other tasks in my head at the same time.
And can you imagine how sweet I would seem if I didn't want to argue with everything or insist on my way when I have "the best" way of doing something? Perhaps I could be easier to live with if I wasn't always so restless and needing to explore the world, or if I could be happy with my love relationships that never seem "enough" in so many ways, no matter how much the poor saps who have loved me tried to be what I needed.
I often think it would be great to go to the local stores and not have to talk myself into being more patient with the people in line in front of me who can't figure out how to unload their carts, or to not feel responsible to help the clerk with all their problems when they get confused about the coupon combinations or whatever else that makes them have to stop and light up their light on the check stand. It would be easier to feel like I was more confused at times so I wouldn't always get frustrated with what confuses others around me. (Yes, seeing ten different alternate solutions for each problem gets a little tiring, but it's much worse to have to keep myself from bursting out of my own skin due to boredom when I have to stand in one place for more than a few minutes!)
I would love to not constantly wish I could just take a USB cord and plug it into my head so I could download everything exciting about my day into someone else's mind, so I wouldn't have to try to explain it. Because others often don't understand it when I try to describe what made me feel those roller coaster emotions.
And how much nicer would it be if I could stop stressing how someone else cleans or cooks or fills out a form, etc...? It probably would be great to not feel that twinge of perfectionism kick in, or the knowledge that I could do the task in half the time and with less errors if I did it myself. (This is why maids and hair dressers don't last long around here...)
Driving would be much easier if I didn't anticipate the moves of every too slow or too fast or too inattentive fellow driver on the road or spend my time moving out of their way so they don't hit me. And maybe it would be ok to feel more road rage instead of imagining all the reasons they might be having a bad day or need to get home, and then worry about those imaginary situations for them.
I would probably live longer if I could sleep through the night without waking up and having restless legs or dealing with scratchy tags in my clothing or having to sit up and check the news and make sure I haven't missed out on interesting (yet often nonsense) things on social media.
It would be great to have had hundreds more people to choose from for friends, rather than having one or two people who ever truly understood me. Or to feel content to follow the teacher's expectations in school rather than making games out of procrastination, underperforming to the very minimum acceptable limit for each product, or getting the work done much earlier and more detailed than anyone else (with my internal drive determining which of those options I would choose on any given task.)
It sure is annoying when people roll their eyes at the mention of giftedness, and I especially dislike it when people say they think all kids are gifted. Or the ones who try so hard to get their kids labeled as gifted when they aren't. Those people don't understand how much extra stress this "blessing" brings along with it.
It is a nonstop anxiety overload filled with moments of pure bliss, and moments of pure heartache, with tons of adrenaline and extra heartbeats in between. It's having ADHD and Bipolar Disorder and ulcers that make tummies ache and skin disorders that make you itch for no reason at all, often all together in one week, or even one day. It's an intensity of emotions and hopes/dreams/desires on fast forward, with depths of loneliness and frustrations all at once. And no one who isn't gifted would ever understand because it's not possible to really describe it.
Ok, maybe most days I'm pretty comfortable with who I am and this gifted thing isn't really such a curse. But when I say that sometimes it would be nice to take just a little break from this "gift," only a few of you will know what I'm talking about. (And if you know what I'm talking about, you probably wish you could take a break sometimes too.)