Finding Forty

Descended, Not Defined

I come from a line of women who were never quite “typical.”

My mother. Her mother. Her sister.

All likely neurodivergent—undiagnosed, unsupported, and uncontained.

Not women you’d call “high-functioning.”

They didn’t mask. They didn’t assimilate.

They lived on the margins—off systems, disconnected from stability, estranged from each other… and eventually, from me.

Survival looked more like chaos than triumph.

We weren’t close.

The relationships were fractured, frayed.

Generations of misunderstanding and unmet needs passed down like heirlooms.

I’m estranged from my mother.

She was estranged from hers.

And still, I carry the imprint.

People love to romanticize eccentricity.

I didn’t see brilliance—I saw instability.

I saw what happens when difference goes unsupported for generations.

Their creativity was bizarre—sometimes fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking.

Purses made from candy wrappers. Baby blankets stitched for grandchildren long before their daughters had even finished childhood.

Fabric scraps and strange collections strewn through cluttered homes, filled with the remnants of projects that never found purpose.

Self-made artists without an audience—compelled to make, but with nowhere to place it, no one to receive it, no grounding behind it.

There was something original there, yes. But it lived alongside chaos.

And often, it was hard to separate art from dysfunction.

And now—this fall—I begin the school year as a Gifted and Talented teacher.

I’ve wrestled with the word imposter.

Because I didn’t come from excellence.

I came from dysfunction, dependency, systems that swallowed people whole.

I don’t come from a legacy of achievement.

I come from women who weren’t understood, and who ultimately didn’t survive in the way we often mean when we say “survive.”

So how did I end up here?

Maybe not as an expert.

But as a witness.

As someone who knows what it looks like when a bright mind is missed—because I grew up in that shadow.

Giftedness isn’t always tidy.

Sometimes it screams. Sometimes it withdraws.

Sometimes it shows up as a child no one wants to test because they’re “too emotional,” “too distracted,” “too weird.”

But I see them.

Because I come from them.

And I don’t want my students to grow up misunderstood, misdiagnosed, mislabeled—

or to be someone’s strange memory decades later.

I want better for them.

This isn’t about honoring a legacy I want to continue.

It’s about interrupting one.

I’m not here because those women taught me.

I’m here because they couldn’t.

And in that space—between estrangement and empathy, between survival and hope—

I teach.