Coping with life during the pandemic

I ran across an article this past weekend that resonated with me, significantly. Disturbingly. It could have been me.

It begins with a discussion about a kid who was identified as gifted and talented at an early age, who would often correct his teachers when they wrong, and was an outsider among his peers, eventually leading him to struggles with mental health that ultimately resulted in his killing himself at the age of 21.

This past weekend, as I sat in the backyard with my pod, I tried to explain to my husband exactly how much of a nerd and geek I was as a kid, sitting at the freaks and geeks table at lunch, hair parted down the middle in junior high with braces and the worst acne I think I’ve ever seen on a child. It goes without saying that I was identified as gifted and talented very young, and was shuttled off (quite literally, in a short, yellow school bus) to a school that I wasn’t zoned for that actually had one of those programs, where I was further isolated from the general student body by being pulled out of class to attend regular classes for the gifted.  I would go on to achieve high standardized test scores, scoring a 720 on the math SAT when I was 12 years old, blasting past standard coursework in high school to the point that my parents were told I should skip the last 2 years of high school and go straight to college. Instead, I went to a boarding school with my lifelong friend who was going there for the swimming program.  As academically gifted as I was, she was equally as gifted in the water. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but doing this, which I definitely wanted to do, was the most important gift my parents ever gave me—they gave me two more years of being a kid.  More than that though, is that they likely saved my life in the process.

In therapy today, I was talking about this article, and wondering what it was that made me different than this kid who committed suicide at 21.  My path changed when I went away to finish high school.  I was suddenly in a mix of students that were at my level, and on a swim team where, while I was more like an outsider, I was accepted and there was very definitely camaraderie among myself and my teammates.  With 5 hours a day in the water, my therapist pointed out that this echoed the lifestyle of the hunter/gatherer phase of humanity—exposure to sunlight, time with my friends even if we were all face-down in the water for most of that time, and constant movement and exercise.  There really wasn’t depression in the hunter/gatherer days, and all of those things likely helped to cause that.

Swimming, in all likelihood, saved my life back then, just as being in a school with others like me saved my life.  It has been a common theme across time—I would quit swimming in college, come back to it, and quit again, never really achieving anything great in the sport—technically, I was a high school All American.  I qualified on a relay and, individually, barely missed cuts for junior nationals, by tenths of a second. I worked my ass off to get there, and it was likely the farthest my very limited talent in swimming could have taken me, but that wasn’t the real benefit of the sport.  The real benefit was all about how it calmed my mind.

This sort of thing happened time and time again over my life—I would get engrossed in my studies or in my career and eventually it would all fall apart, creating what seemed like the end of the world for me.  Eventually, I would find my way back to swimming, or now to triathlon, and it would help to calm my mind again.

That has come to a head during the pandemic.  I can’t swim—at least not the way I need to in order to calm my mind.  I could theoretically bike or run for the durations I need to in order to get there, but the big problem I have with that is the fact that training outdoors now comes with a constant focus of staying away from people. It’s the opposite of camaraderie.  It’s the opposite of calming your mind. Recalculating your path while on a run to avoid the possibility somebody might kill you by breathing to close to you does not calm your mind.

So, I’m on drugs.  A lot of them.  My previous psychiatrist didn’t know what the hell to do with me.  My current one seems to be better—I hope it stays that way.  I’ve already had the test of a drug I had a bad reaction to a couple of weeks ago, and I started a different one yesterday…she’s taking it in stride, and searching for the thing that gets my depression induced anxiety knocked down to the point that I can sleep again.  I slept well last night which I’m hoping is not an anomaly.

But I digress.  

I don’t think I’m special.  I don’t think that being identified as having high intelligence as a child makes me better than anyone else.  If anything, I think the opposite.  

I think that, at any given moment, there’s probably one of me in every grade in every high school in the country, and I think that as those kids become adults, there are thousands of them trying to navigate the world in ways that a lot of people take for granted. People don’t know what causes these issues—I would have to guess there’s some genetic abnormality that causes the cluster of symptoms including high intelligence, social awkwardness, an inability to process emotions correctly, hypersensitivity to sound…I’m sure there are more to add to that list.

I’m not a loner, though I wind up alone a lot of times.  During the pandemic, I’m cut off from my friends, as we all are.  I’m not doing well, like a lot of people.  I’d say that my specific personality issues make me uniquely incapable of coping with the pandemic, except that I don’t think I’m unique.  I think that talking on the phone is exhausting for me, and I think that Zoom and Facetime are only marginally better.  I don’t interpret social cues correctly unless they’re visual, and being physically cut off from people only makes that worse.  My therapist said something about investigations related to human-horse heart coupling where horses are able to detect the heart rhythms of humans, as a demonstration of the effect of physical closeness in connection with other people.  I don’t really understand what that is except on a very basic level, but being physically close to people is gone, so that benefit is gone for me too.

I think that parents probably know that their smart children may not be doing well emotionally, but I think it goes way deeper than just getting them back into class together.  I hope we all make it, to whatever this new normal is going to be, and I hope we’ll all discard our preconceived notions of what it means to be…well, anything, really.  But I hope we’ll all shed our tendency to categorize people by whatever we perceive their traits to be.

My triathlon coach, well before we had any idea how long this would last, told us that our only goal should be to get through this pandemic alive. If there’s one piece of advice I’ve been given that’s the most apropos, that’s it. I’ve been barely succeeding at achieving that goal, but all I need to do is to keep barely succeeding until we get past it.

Link to the article I mentioned: 

https://calgaryherald.com/life/swerve/gifted-children-are-frequently-misunderstood