The women around me

Noticing beauty

I’ve been reading a lot about giftedness lately. I sort of touched on it for a while but now I’m doing a deeper dive and lots is resonating very hard. It feels like a tricky topic to mention because I think giftedness is a bit of a contested label - certainly I think it’s unusual for there to be gifted and talented programmes anymore in the UK anyway (I mean, it’s unusual for there to be enough stationary in many schools at the moment, so extra programmes for seemingly smart kids maybe are a luxury now?!). But also, there’s often a perceived arrogance to it - because usually giftedness is associated with intellectual giftedness and that can feel snobbish maybe, to many.

But my understanding of giftedness - and twice exceptionality¹ (also a cringe-festy phrase) has expanded miles over the past few months, and the concept of a ‘rainforest mind’ which I love. To me this is less about having a special gift, and more about a heightened sensitivity to multiple things like emotions, and colour, and smell. And of course this means there is loads of overlap with other neurodivergence to the point where it’s really hard to untangle what is what. And there is intersectional elements to it too - like, who is more likely to get labelled gifted vs ADHD? Where is the line between autistic sensory sensitivity and gifted sensitivity? Does it matter anyway? It does in that my understanding is that some gifted communities distance themselves from autism because of the continued stigma of a diagnosis. And there’s also a bit of a double edged sword because there is perhaps an increased sense of acceptance if you are autistic and have a special skill (Rain Man style) vs being an ordinary autistic person or even being an autistic person in need of high levels of support. I guess the difference is in how the other person perceives their need to shift their way of interacting with you, and if you’re autistic plus special skill then you can be viewed as an interesting object, whereas if you’re autistic and in need of support someone might have to actually, I don’t know, be supportive.

I’m a bit cynical today, I’m tired from asking for accommodations and being met with minimisation or ridicule. I have the phrase ‘invisible disability’ working its way round my mind as an earworm at the moment.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Something that shows up in both my reading on autism and giftedness is sensory sensitivity and noticing beauty. In 'Your Rainforest Mind’, Paula Prober describes this as ‘your perception, awareness, and sensitivities are turned up high….This combination of awareness and sensitivity can be both breathtaking and crushing’. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Why? Because there is jasmine flowering in the garden next door.

When I stand in my back garden, I have jasmine coming over from my neighbour on one side, and I have a clematis coming over from my neighbour on the other side.

Both of these are flowers I love, sometimes to the point of pain in my chest. Jasmine in particular, my mother’s favourite scent, a smell from my childhood. I can feel the hint of it still in my nose right now as I write. When the jasmine flowers in the back garden around this time of year, the smell drifts in through the kitchen door and sometimes I can smell it from the front of the house. As dusk falls, the smell becomes so powerful you can taste it, and I go out in the evening and stand with my face in the flowers, surrounding myself. On really hot days, there is a smell of hot stone alongside it and I can hear people in their gardens. This year we have a family of foxes behind our wall that snuffle about and occasionally creep out to stare at us before getting driven away by our dog.

On the other side, the clematis meandered along the fence and into our garden, and after we moved here we asked our neighbour if we could put some wires along our back wall so it could continue up above the kitchen window. Heavy, taking over that side like a benign Triffid. Earlier this year it needed to be cut back, and my neighbour warned us because she knows it means something to us. As soon as it started to grow again, she climbed on to the wall to reattach it to the back of our house.

We moved to Brighton in 2020, between lockdowns. It was a very impulsive move, we left London which had been my home for nearly 20 years, where I was a student, then a worker, then a mother. We’d never planned to leave, but a series of events made us long for a fresh start. Brighton was chosen because it is easy to get to from London but also because it reminds us a lot of Newcastle - close to the sea and the countryside, left-leaning, creative, a bit quirky. We decided to move and then moved within 6 weeks. It was probably madness, but it has mostly been a great decision.

We happened to find a home between two couples - couples who have known each other for many years, who have grown up children and grandchildren. Both with women at the helm of these families, women who at times have gathered me in, have told me in spoken and unspoken ways that I’m doing ok. At this time of year, the flowers these women have grown come into my garden and surround me, and I stand between them. And they are entwined, in my mind, with these two women, one on either side of me, who are where I will be in another 20 years or so. I hope.

They unknowingly stand shoulder to shoulder with me, and often bring me strength without doing anything at all but being there next door.

I don’t know about gifted, the term or how it applies to me. But I do know that I notice gifts, perhaps where others don’t always. And for that, I am thankful.

1. Twice exceptionality refers to being gifted and disabled, e.g. gifted and autistic, gifted and ADHD etc etc