Ampersand Gazette #65

Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest … 

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What Happens to Gifted Children 

What happens to the extremely intelligent? Do they go from success to success, powered by their natural brilliance? Or do they struggle in a world where they don’t fit in?…

When you get a glimpse of the real lives of gifted people, you see that it’s a mistake to separate this thing we call intelligence from all the other aspects of their lives. A person’s intelligence is embedded in and interacting with all that person’s other qualities—whether she is self-confident, conscientious, resilient or open to new experiences, whether she has experienced unconditional love, deep friendships, rich intellectual conversations. Just because some traits are easier to measure doesn’t mean we can isolate them and not see everything that goes into this precious and never-to-be-repeated person. 

When you glimpse these lives, you also see the special power of drive. The people who change the world may be brilliant or not, but they almost all work their rear ends off. As Lubinski and Benbow wrote in one of their papers, “Arguably the most widely agreed-on finding in the talent development literature is the inordinate amount of time truly outstanding performers give to their craft.” 

Great accomplishment is the marriage of ability and interest. The latter is what T.S. Eliot once called “the thrilling wire in the blood.” It’s the vital spark that makes people passionately curious about a subject, that makes them determined and relentless, that causes them to say to themselves: I’m going to figure this out, no matter what it takes. The people who contribute most aren’t worrying about how smart they are; they are focused on continual improvement, compounding what they learn day by day. 

Yes, a child born extremely intelligent is lucky and likely to do well, but we want to see each person whole. I’d put it this way: It’s nice to know who is good at taking intelligence tests, but it’s more important to know who is lit by an inner fire. 

from an Opinion Essay by David Brooks in The New York Times
What Happens to Gifted Children
June 13, 2024 

“Great accomplishment is the marriage of ability and interest.” What a great sentence. In my less-than-humble opinion, the Western system of education diminishes both in favor of a singularly human habit: measuring. 

Now, don’t misunderstand. There are all sorts of reasons to measure things, and I needn’t enumerate them here. There’s definitely a reason carpenters intone their mantra: Measure twice, cut once. It only takes one time to learn its ineffable truth. 

However, because Western education chose the easy route—namely, measurement as value—we are both as educators and as educatees (Is that a word? Now it is.) robbed of both our abilities and our interests. 

During my sophomore year in college, I got a panicked phone call from my mother about my youngest brother John, ten years younger than I. She’d just come from a parent-teacher conference, and apparently, by the third grade, my brother had neglected to learn how to read. It happens; kids fall between the cracks. 

I soothed my mother, and eased her worry by saying that when I got home, I’d make it my business to teach him to read that summer. Fast forward a few months. When I got home, I watched my youngest brother for a few days. He could sing every advertising jingle on television. Every one. 

I turned off the box, grabbed him by the hand, and said we’d be back. We had a mission to accomplish. The one thing that could slow John to intense concentration, I’d noted, was anything to do with cars, and how they function. 

I marched him into the mall, to Barnes & Noble, and we sought out the technical section for a how-to book on car engines and maintenance, and brought it home. He could read in a week. I did nothing but match his interest with (what he wanted to be) his ability. 

Turned out he was indeed interested—I might go so far as to say fascinated, and it was definitely an ability he suspected he had, but also dearly wanted.  

Spot, Dick, and Jane did exactly bupkis for him, and he had three older siblings who, obligingly, whenever he asked what something said, read it to him. Not meaning in any way to cause a learning problem. 

Years later he was the top radar scrambler in the Air Force. Soon after he left, he was offered a chance to be in on the ground floor of robotics use in chip-making for Intel.  

Interest, yes, but also an innate ability to take anything in the world apart AND put it back together.  

What his teacher had said to my mother that had so upset her was that he was of subaverage intellect and had multiple learning disabilities. Neither thing true. 

I used to think that was a teaching disability, and to some extent it was, but also a dramatic technique perfected by all patriarchal societies and institutions. Namely, over-emphasize what we can measure. Forget the rest. 

Well, what happens in that devastating divide-and-conquer strategy is that you “separate this thing we call intelligence from all the other aspects of their lives,” and who suffers? Those to whom we do this. Not only that, but because it’s so insidious and prevalent, we learn, almost defensively, to do it to ourselves. 

So the next time you feel less than capable, or unfairly measured, stop. Are you dividing yourself in an attempt to conquer something for which you have little ability and less interest? Cut it out. Go do something you love that you excel at, and to hell with the numbers. 

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I Had a Difficult Childhood.

It Made Me an Amazing Employee. 

“COME SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU’RE IN,” concludes the flurry of Slack messages from my manager, an all-caps tirade that began at 4:56 a.m.  

The term “workaholism” didn’t land until I took the Work Addiction Risk Test, a questionnaire developed to identify five dimensions of overwork: compulsive tendencies, control, impaired communication and self-absorption, inability to delegate, and self-worth. When I took it, I scored a 96 out of 100, I was near perfect at working and not much else. 

I’d grown up rough, the unplanned child of two in-love Italian American teens. In this environment, I never felt good enough. Reacting to my childhood, I set out to prove my worth. I started working when I was 13 and basically never stopped.  

I was unnaturally driven to prove my own competence; so unable to absorb criticism that I’d work to avoid it at nearly any cost. In corporate parlance, employees like me tend to be proactive, high-performing, self-starters — in short, a manager’s dream. 

By the morning of my manager’s all-caps diatribe, I’d somehow had enough. Maybe it was the therapy I’d recently started or maybe it was the wisdom of age, but I didn’t answer my boss’s messages. Our meeting never materialized, and the crisis simply dissolved. 

Healing often feels like a scavenger hunt, clue upon clue leading toward a kind of emotional liberation. After that day, I became more interested in understanding myself than in proving myself. 

I’ve learned to right-size my relationship with my career, work manageable jobs that allow me to live a balanced life, invest in community and enjoy my family and friends. What I failed to consider in my years of striving was that building a connected, contented life outside of work would be the most rewarding success of all. 

from an article in Well by Jennifer Romolini in The New York Times
I Had a Difficult Childhood. It Made Me an Amazing Employee.
June 13, 2024 

So many of us grow up with that feeling that we have to prove ourselves. It doesn’t always stem from a rough childhood either. Sometimes, there’s a particular rival in school. Or a promised reward. Or a judgmental parent. Or any one of another personal reasons. 

The issue isn’t the proving—it’s the proving one’s self, code for: proving one’s worth, and thereby, worthiness, over and above understanding one’s self and what you truly need. The reason for that is that proving 99.999 percent of the time is dependent upon the measurings that others make of you, and not at all what you make of you. 

For me, the proving arena wasn’t intelligence. I was most often top of my class. It wasn’t talent or creativity. I had both of those in abundance and knew it. My proving arena was social. I just wasn’t cool kid material.  

It took me years to understand that cool kid was a chimera. Now, of course, I’m so uncool that I’m cool again. My mom used to say the same thing about Koolaid with sugar and Koolaid without sugar—wait, it’ll change. So does coolness. So did I. 

When I finally understood that Melody Thompson, the coolest of all the cool kids, wanted to be the weathergirl on the local news (not understanding that most of them these days are highly educated,) and I wanted to create world peace, I let it go. 

What I’m really saying here is that I think striving is over-rated. It comes from the word strife, after all. Its etymology is an Old French word meaning conflict. Working at something that fascinates you or intrigues you or makes you think or hope isn’t striving because there’s no conflict—it’s dedication. There’s a world of difference between the two. 

Working at something you deem worthwhile—see that worth word in there?—is best contextualized by a “connected, contented life outside of work.” Bosses like Ms. Romolini’s tend to treat work like it’s do or die. My criterion for that is: Are you working on the cure for HIV/AIDS? That’s do or die. If not, the rest is just work. 

An old-time Broadway press agent I used to know named Milly Schoenbaum used to say in her best Brooklynese, “Darling, this is show business, not cancer research.” Same, same. 

Don’t get me wrong here, either. Meaningful work is a high priority in a connected, contented life, it truly is. Work that you love makes your quality of life much, much better. But without other things to balance you between work and everything else, it can end up feeling hollow even if you love it. The reason is because work can’t give you everything you need. 

Proving your worth is a slippery slope, Belovèd, because it means you are subject to the whims of opinion. (See social media, and the Surgeon-General’s new warning if you don’t believe me.) So I’ll tell you a little secret about worth … the best place to find it is in your own bathroom mirror, because what you think of you is light-years more important than what I, or anyone else, thinks of you. And isn’t that a good thing to know? 

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Here’s a universal affirmation. It works every time, for everyone, always and forever …  

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And in publishing news … 

A BIG ASK … PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE 

If you have bought Jezebel Rising, and liked it, I have a personal request to make.  

There is a special promotion I want to do for the series, but I need to have over ten 4+Star reviews on Amazon Kindle to qualify.  

If you loved it, would you please take a few minutes of your valuable time to go HERE, and write Jezebel a review? Thank you, thank you, thank you! 

If you want the paperbacks of The Subversive Lovelies, look carefully. There are Two Volumes for each title.  

If you want the Kindle, there’s One File for each title. 

The first two of the tetralogy, Jezebel Rising and Jasmine Increscent can be found at these live links for ebooks and paperbacks. And here’s Gemma Eclipsing, which is Free for three weeks, in honor of it being the third book, until June 25th. 

I’m still writing Jacqueline Retrograde, the first half of the eldest Bailey sibling’s story, every day about fifteen hundred words. I’m guessing I’m a little more halfway through. Writing Jaq’s backstory, and the Bailey sisters as children, is a lot of fun. I think Jaq’s story will come out in two separate launches—#3.5 Jacqueline Retrograde, and #4 Jaq Direct. When I finish the first one, I’ll know for sure. 

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I’ve switched from reading about shame to reading about one of its opposites—Pride. Interestingly, I’ve looked for books about a cultural history of pride, and the dearth of them is shocking. Oh, there are books about honor, war, different cultures, patriotism, but not the emotion itself. 

As I’ve said, this is an eight- or nine-book series. A client of mine asked how I knew that. It’s because I’ve figured out that the books will be based on the structure of the human energy system, the basic building blocks of which are the eight major chakras. And speaking of that … 

My chakra work is ongoing, as it has been since I fell over them in the early 1980s. I haven’t mentioned the Energy Integrity books in a while. These are eight paper workbooks on how to learn about, heal, and reclaim your own energy system. CAVEAT EMPTOR: They only work if you do the work. I wrote the books! Now you fill them in.  

In preparation for my secret series, I just reread the first one, and realized that most of the series is structured on the scaffolding I built in the workbooks! Amazing. Who’da thunk it? 

If you live in a territory where you can’t get the paperbacks, go here, and you can get them in ebook form. They definitely work better if you’ll print them out, and handwrite your answers in the pages provided. 

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Have you got an idea for a book lurking in your heart or mind? Is it time to arrange your life so that it can come into form? Some of us function best in accountability agreements. You know what I mean. I agree to account to someone I trust, and that person agrees to hold me accountable, or help me figure out why I’m not being accountable.  

Seriously. That’s what makes for writing a book. You sit down, you write, and you prioritize your writing. The thing is, take it from someone who’s written a lot of books (over 40!), it’s always worth it—the time, the energy, the work. If you’re holding in your heart a book you want to write, Beloved, I know a guy. He’s edited my books for twenty years, and counting. 

Tony Amato was my editor and my friend long before I got smart enough to marry him. He’s a singularly outstanding book coach and editor. May I encourage you to reach out if you need book-husbanding, which includes coaching along the way? Like I said, if you need anything in your writing life, Tony Amato is the person. Without him, my books would be nowhere near as good as they are. Find him here.  

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It will not surprise you that as I have been working with the idea of shame, and discovering, basically, that so much of the structure of our collective psyches is based in it that I have, as a very timely and welcome antidote, turned to Pride in rebuttal. Just as I have been researching shame, I realized that I only sort knew the history of Gay Pride. So I decided I needed to raise my Q.I.Q.—queer intelligence quotient. Hey, I’m a fiction author—I get to make things up with impunity!  

I chose this little book because it’s mostly about British Pride, and I knew very little about Pride in that culture. Amazing! One of the first things I learnt was of an entirely secret language called Polari. 

Comprised of flotsam and jetsam of all sorts of languages, it was meant to be an indecipherable hodge-podge used for the express purpose of dodging The Law. It used English grammar, but borrowed words and phrases from Thieves’ Cant, Lingua Franca, Cockney Rhyming Slang, and Romani.  

I’m still reading and re-reading my notes from Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber, the Lutheran pastrix who founded House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver. Oy. The book remains brilliant. And challenging. And worth every syllable. 

I know that hidden within Rev. Bolz-Weber’s distinctly inspired theology, there are secrets for me to uncover for my secret series. I just know it. 

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Are you waiting for a sign?

How about this one? 

This is one of my favorites.
The totally coolest thing about this sign is that, like
the Universal Affirmations I share,
it applies to everyone, everywhere, everywhen.
We play life like we’re missing something,
but what if we’re not?
What if all we’re missing is the intelligence to get still
and ask The Divine Within to help us?
That’s under your own control, Belovèd,
COMPLETELY. 

I am, without doubt, certain that And is the secret to all we desire.
Let’s commit to practicing And ever more diligently, shall we?
Until next time,
Be Ampersand.
S. 

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