Today, Fanny Vella, choosen by Cevanny, gives us her vision of giftedness through the “gifted” questionnaire. Thank you, Fanny! She is Author and Illustrator. She lives in Lyon (France).
.IF I COULD CHOOSE, WOULD I STILL BE GIFTED?
Looking back, I realise that a lot of what makes me proud of myself today comes from this atypicality. I’m sure I could have blossomed differently without it, but it’s hard to project yourself into another model of myself, without knowing what results from giftedness or not.
.WHAT (MY OWN) GIFTEDNESS MEANS TO ME
For me, it often manifests itself through a flood of ideas. For a long time, I thought I wasn’t clever enough to know how to arrange and synthesize my ideas. This large tree structure sometimes makes me lose my thread, but it also allows me an unlimited imagination which makes me earn a living professionally today.
I’ve always had a deep sense of justice. It seems obvious that it’s something quite common in most people, but it takes me to the guts and makes me sick. It’s also what others might call excessive in my reactions that defines partly my giftedness.
I don’t really know how to differentiate between what is related to giftedness and what is not, but empathy is very important to me, it was even stifling in the past. I wanted sometimes to cut myself off and sometimes to save the whole world. There is also this feeling of being on a different frequency and sometimes looking at things from the outside. And then definitely the fact of not knowing how to make short sentences haha.
.IF I HAD TO CHOOSE AN IMAGE OR A KEYWORD THAT SUMS UP WHAT GIFTEDNESS MEANS
To choose an image, I like very much this one of a tree with the branches going in all directions, giving birth to other branches and so on. The tree structure thinking is one of the most obvious signs in my opinion. It is both magical, infinite, and dizzying.
.HOW LONG HAVE I KNOWN ABOUT IT?
For a little more than one year. So very, very late and it could have been never as it’s the last thing I could have thought about myself.
.WHAT PHASES HAVE I GONE THROUGH SINCE MY DISCOVERY?
Denial, of course, I was convinced that the person who had diagnosed me was wrong. Sometimes, I found it so reassuring to finally fit into a box that I didn’t dare ask her again if she was sure because I was scared that she would say “ha! yes sorry, I was completely wrong”.
And then it was incredibly comforting, really, I have the impression that it was a real encounter with myself. I learned to love what I considered stupidity, excess, or weakness.
.HOW DO I EXPLAIN IT TO SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER HEARD OF IT?
Wow, I don’t dare to do that. The word is so associated with something intellectually superior. I would need the full attention of the person opposite to explain to him or her how much more complex it is than that. The times I’ve been able to do that, I’ve explained it through my own prism, what I went through, difficulties I faced, and how the diagnosis was life-saving. Mostly I explain that all these grandiloquent terms are just there to show a different brain functioning, there is no better or worse.
.THE REMARK WHICH BLEW ME AWAY MOST WHEN I TALKED ABOUT IT
My best friends said, “yes, I am absolutely not surprised”. I could have cried. When you feel silly and the people you admire and love deeply show you that for them it was obvious, it feels good.
Otherwise, I also had a reaction of surprise like “show your test because it’s surprising but if it makes you feel good, it’s great”. And some people (in reality they were the majority) bring it back to them by finding that in fact, it fits perfectly to who they were (barnum effect ^^)
.HOW IT CHANGED MY LIFE (TO KNOW IT)
It’s as if at the age of 30 I was finally given my letter to Hogwarts. I knew in my heart that there was something. Discovering this particularity opened up an unimaginable field of possibilities for me. One of the most obvious things is that I no longer force myself to fit into a box that doesn’t suit me. I accept more and more my extraterrestrial side even if it’s not easy every day to mourn the one I thought I was supposed to be for the one I really am.
.WHAT I HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF TO DO EVER SINCE
To isolate me when everything becomes TOO MUCH, to say that I don’t know when I don’t know. Before I was so afraid of looking stupid that I pretended to understand haha.
.WHAT IT CREATES TO OTHERS WHEN I TALK ABOUT IT
I have one of my best friends who has since taken the test (she is Gifted too). I think that for some people it arouses curiosity about their own characteristics. Even if they’re not concerned, it makes you be introspective and that’s great.
.WHAT IRRITATES ME WITH GIFTEDNESS
The completely erroneous beliefs of superiority that surrounds giftedness.
.WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO EMPHASIZE ABOUT GIFTEDNESS
Everything, the disabilities that accompany it when you are not identified need to be explained more broadly so that you can learn to bring out only the best in it, especially the wonderful creative abilities that can result from it.
.WHAT I PERSONALLY FIND TO BE THE MOST DIFFICULT
It’s only been a year since I learned that I was Gifted so I still struggle a lot against my need for conformism, not to “overflow” and correspond to what people expect from me, and again and again these lapses in confidence related to the feeling of intellectual inferiority that has lived in me too long to know how to get rid of it just thanks to the result of the test.
.WHAT I PERSONALLY LOVE
Feeling like I’m grasping very quickly, I’m rarely missing the point. Sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? Well, I find that we spend our lives apologizing for our qualities and pointing out our faults to reassure others. So here I say it, I’m a chick who understands quickly deeply things and people’s reactions.
.MY WELLBEING TOOL OR PRACTICE THAT HELPS ME MOST
My job, writing stories, and putting them into images, I only feel fulfilled when I create.
.A (MIS)REPRESENTATION THAT I WANT TO CALL INTO QUESTION
Giftedness is not equal to higher intellects. It’s because the gifted is curious and feeds his brain that he can claim results not because he is smarter.
.WHAT I WANT TO SAY TO GIFTED PEOPLE
Most of you, you must have been through a lot too, so I hope you’ll run into a lot of people who are on the same frequency as you are. It’s great not to feel strange when you talk to people who look a little bit like you.
.WHAT I WANT TO SAY TO PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT CONCERNED
Open up to what you don’t know without jumping to conclusions.
.WHAT I WOULD RECOMMEND TO SOMEONE WHO IS WONDERING
If you can, take the test, for me, it is the ONLY way to remove the doubt definitively (or almost).
.MY PROFESSIONAL ADVICE FOR GIFTED
Find a job with meaning, aligned with your values. Otherwise, you will never be totally happy.
.MY PERSONAL ADVICE FOR GIFTED
Be yourself right from the start, if people leave, you will save yourself a lot of adaptation effort.
.MY OPINION ABOUT THE WAIS IQ TEST
For me, a good test takes into account the emotional and physical state of the person on the day they take it, without it, it would be biased.
.IS IT A WASTE NOT TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE GIFTED?
No, because one can also live it extremely well, not suffer from it and therefore not ask oneself any questions on the subject.
.WHEN I MEET ANOTHER GIFTED PERSON, DO I RECOGNIZE HIM.HER? BY WHAT?
The way he or she grasps it when I say that, it’s in the sense of how quickly he or she understands a comment or a joke, for example; his or her empathy, the way his or her sentences turn and especially if it’s someone who’s going off in all directions, for me it’s almost “Bingo!” every time, haha. But it’s a personal interpretation, I’m not willing to say if a person is gifted or not.
.WHAT DO GIFTED PEOPLE HAVE IN COMMON?
A magical magnet. I’m always quite bluffed to see how unintentionally I’ve surrounded myself with Gifted people without wanting to, I think that in fact, we meet a whole bunch of people and that those who stay are often those with whom it requires the least effort to be oneself.
.A WISH FOR THE FUTURE
That we try to see ourselves a little less through the eyes of the other so that we will be less afraid to let all our particularities exist. That we stop comparing ourselves, so we can accept the atypicality of others without asking ourselves if we are better or worse than them.
