I did not do well in school at all when I was a kid. I was an average to below average student. I was once told by a teacher I should put a sign on my back labeled “end of line” because I was always trailing behind the others. When I played piano for our chapel event, the same teacher gave me the back handed complement of “so you do have some talent.” Years later another teacher told me “we never thought you’d make it.” Yet I read books daily since I could read, “homeschooled” my younger brothers for fun (taught the little one algebra at 6), and was always pursuing home learning like kitchen science experiments, craft projects, and even workbooks. Both of my younger brothers got into the gifted program at our school. The older one is a musical genius, graduated high school valedictorian, and all that stuff. The youngest one was 3 years ahead in math, has so far taught himself Chinese and Japanese, and is crazy good at trivia. When I was around 12, the light switch finally went on for me, and I started caring about school. Pretty much overnight, they had me skip a year of math. I scored extremely high on a national French exam for non-native speakers and was in the news for it at 13. I graduated high school and college with a perfect 4.0 GPA. I earned two degrees in four years, a B.S. in Nutritional Sciences and a B.A. in Arts and Humanities, both through the Honors College. I became a childbirth doula and did research and taught myself farming (and now I’ve started two inner-city gardens which supply a local food pantry for which I’ve twice been interviewed for publications). I got 94th percentile on the MCAT, for which I self-taught a substantial portion of the material. And I’m now a medical student. I still force myself to find time to read classical literature and books about self-improvement or whatever topics I’m curious about, and I love to create recipes which I share online in my spare time. And I tell you all this because I STILL feel like the stupid one. My mom read a book about gifted children sometime when I was in high school, and she says she believes I was gifted all along, but I wasn’t in the right environment to show it. Perhaps that’s true, but my subconscious is still not convinced.