I have been in GT (also known as Gate-Ten, or the Gifted and Talented program) since first grade at Lovejoy Elementary.

My mom is a member of the Lovejoy Gifted Association. Maybe it’s because I’m a girl, maybe it’s because of the social anxiety, or maybe it’s just because I’m an angst-ridden teen, but I am so tired of hearing about how special I am. I don’t want to be special. Special means different and different means wrong.

I’m probably just over correcting because I was so full of myself in elementary school that, the minute I realized that I really wasn’t that great, I felt like I had nothing to identify with. I have been “the smart one” my whole entire life, regardless of how much “smarter” I actually was.

My mom comes home from her meetings and talks to me about how “GT kids look at problems in a different way” and how “GT kids often have trouble fitting in with their peers because they’re advanced” and that can either make me completely full of myself or make me self-conscious because I’m so “different” and either way I walk away from the conversation with either unrealistically high or low expectations for myself.

If I hear about “10 tips and tricks to overcome perfectionism” one more time I’m going to go insane. I didn’t ask for this. Other kids look at me and think that they could never understand what it’s like in my brilliant mind and- believe me when I say this- I just learn things early and I remember them.

Yeah, I’m on my phone in class but I still seem to be understanding the lesson. That just means that this particular statistics lessons resemble a certain concept in Pre-Algebra or that I happen to be able to use the formula chart in Physics.  I’ve always been rewarded for understanding things quickly and finishing things before others, so I have a tendency to just ignore concepts I don’t understand instead of working to understand them.

Yeah, I’m unreasonably good at standardized tests. That’s because I just, don’t, care. They’re not hard tests, okay? A lot of the people I talk to say that they freak out about them and either cram the night before or have a nervous breakdown during them. It’s miraculous how much good relaxing does. It also helps that I remember things I learned in Algebra I and third grade English.

And okay, yeah, occasionally I read the dictionary to help me sleep, but there are some neat words in there, and you can genuinely never know too many words.

Does that make me sort of a geek? Almost certainly. Does that make me a wonderful and unique shining star with the whole entire universe ahead of her? No. It makes me a person. Maybe I function a little differently, but that shouldn’t mean that I grow up being told that I’m “better” than everyone else while being put in “gifted and talented” classes that are “better” than the other classes and essentially being forced to define my own self-worth by my superiority to others. That doesn’t do anything except severely disillusion me to the whole process of the school system.

And GT doesn’t even count as an advanced course on college applications.