"Excuse me 7"

We found out yesterday that Katie will start fifth grade in the Enhanced Learning (aka, Gifted) Program at school. She's super excited about this opportunity to meet some kids with similar interests and intensities. She's struggled with her peer relationships in the classroom since first grade, complaining that nobody understands her and she feels weird and alone. Here's an excellent post about the emotional intensity that often accompanies intellectual intensity:

Giftedness has an emotional as well as intellectual component. Intellectual complexity goes hand in hand with emotional depth. Just as gifted children’s thinking is more complex and has more depth than other children’s, so too are their emotions more complex and more intense. 

Complexity can be seen in the vast range of emotions that gifted children can experience at any one time and the intensity is evident in the “full-on-ness” about everything with which parents and teachers of the gifted children are so familiar. 

Emotional intensity in the gifted is not a matter of feeling more than other people, but a different way of experiencing the world: vivid, absorbing, penetrating, encompassing, complex, commanding – a way of being quiveringly alive. 

Emotional intensity can be expressed in many different ways: 

as intensity of feeling – positive feelings, negative feelings, both positive and negative feelings together, extremes of emotion, complex emotion that seemingly move from one feeling to another over a short time period, identification with the feelings of other people, laughing and crying together 

in the body – the body mirrors the emotions and feelings are often expressed as bodily symptoms such as tense stomach, sinking heart, blushing, headache, nausea 

inhibition – timidity and shyness 

strong affective memory – emotionally intense children can remember the feelings that accompanied an incident and will often relive and ‘re-feel’ them long afterward 

fears and anxieties, feelings of guilt, feelings of being out of control
concerns with death, depressive moods 

emotional ties and attachments to others, empathy and concern for others, sensitivity in relationships, attachment to animals, difficulty in adjusting to new environments, loneliness, conflicts with others over the depth of relationships 

critical self-evaluation and self-judgment, feelings of inadequacy and inferiority 

Many people seem unaware that intense emotions are part of giftedness and little attention is paid to emotional intensity. Historically the expression of intense feelings has been seen a sign of emotional instability rather than as evidence of a rich inner life. The traditional Western view is of emotions and intellect as separate and contradictory entities, there is however, an inextricable link between emotions and intellect and, combined, they have a profound effect on gifted people. It is emotional intensity that fuels joy in life, passion for learning, the drive for expression of a talent area, the motivation for achievement. 

Feeling everything more deeply than others do can both be painful and frightening. Emotionally intense gifted people often feel abnormal. “There must be something wrong with me… maybe I’m crazy… nobody else seems to feel like this.” Emotionally intense gifted people often experience intense inner conflict, self-criticism, anxiety and feelings of inferiority. The medical community tends to see these conflicts as symptoms and labels gifted people neurotic. They are however an intrinsic part of being gifted and provide the drive that gifted people have for personal growth and achievement. 

It is vitally important that gifted children are taught to see their heightened sensitivity to things that happen in the world as a normal response for them. If this is not made clear to them they may see their own intense experiences as evidence that something is wrong with them.

Last night, Will and I were talking about how proud we are of Katie's growth, and how excited we are for her future. He asked me, "Are you proud to find out our kid is gifted."

"I've known she was gifted for a long time. I didn't need her to take any test to tell me that. I started to figure it out when she was about two," I said.

"You mean when she memorized Goodnight Moon and 'read' it to us?" Will asked.



"Yeah, but also, remember that time she said, 'excuse me 7' to the magnet in our fridge?"

Katie, age 2

When Katie was two, she went through this phase of storing random objects inside the refrigerator. You'd open the door to get some half and half for your coffee and find your car keys.  Time to make lunch?  Oh, there's my hairbrush.  At least she didn't store her used diapers in there like she did in her play kitchen.  It's such a fun age when they learn how to take off their diaper after taking a crap, but they haven't quite learned what to do with it.

One day Katie opened the refrigerator to grab her cup of milk. On a shelf inside she'd left one of those plastic magnets you get with the set of ABCs and 123s.  The kind kids like to drop onto the floor for you to step on, put in their mouths to freak you out, lose under your frightfully dirty refrigerator.  Or, in our case, the kid likes to hide them in the fridge. As Katie reached for the cup, her hand passed over the magnet.  She said, "Excuse me L." Then she paused, picked up the magnet, flipped it over and said, "Oh, excuse me 7."

Brilliant AND polite. We're so proud of our Katie Bug.