(I almost did not post this one because I don't like it. I had trouble thinking of something to write about and finally put this together, but it is NOT my best work. Oh well.)
As I stood before the ugly mint-green doors of my high school on the first day of ninth grade, I fully expected to be denied entry. I was just thirteen, at least a year too young for high school, but I did not know that yet. I looked like a parochial school boy in my pressed khaki pants and tucked-in polo, but I was not yet aware of how completely wrong that was, either. No, as I stood before Maggie Walker Governor’s School in Richmond, Virginia on that September day in 2003, I was not worried about my youth or my clothes. I was simply absolutely convinced that I was not smart enough to be there.
Indeed, Maggie Walker is not just an average public high school. Newsweek and other national publications routinely rank it among the top twenty public schools in America. It is a school to which students must apply, and with an average yearly acceptance rate below ten percent, it is more difficult to get into than many Ivy League Colleges. And my own acceptance, I felt, was a fraud. I had gotten a phone call just a few weeks before, informing me that a spot had opened, and that I was the first person on the waitlist for my county. So I packed up my pastel purple backpack, ironed those khaki pants, and waited outside for the school bus.
Maggie Walker was supposed to be a Mecca of sorts for gifted students, a place where we could meet and make connections with people like ourselves. But for me, being gifted had been, and would remain, an experience of profound isolation. When I was a young child, being gifted meant nothing more to me than yearly ability and achievement tests, after which my twin brother and I would compare results and go out to lunch with our parents. But as I got older, my label as a gifted student started to bring teasing, and rejection by my peers. Worse than the teasing, it created in me a constant need to live up to the expectations created by that label; because I was considered gifted, I found myself constantly expected actually to be gifted. And now I had been accepted into a school in which those expectations would only increase and become more pronounced. It was anxiety over those expectations that caused me to hesitate before the doors on that first day of ninth grade.
After I walked through those green doors for the first time, it was many weeks before I stopped expecting to be called to the director’s office and informed that my admission to Maggie Walker was a terrible mistake. Eventually, however, I did settle into the routine of high school, which I suspect was not entirely different from that of most other high schools. I joined the academic team, started playing field hockey, and ultimately made some very close friends. I managed to leave my mark on Maggie Walker, and there are still plenty of teachers who remember me when I occasionally go back to visit.
In June of 2007, my friends and I donned our forest-green caps and gowns and strolled one last time through the halls of the school that had become as familiar to us as our own homes. In spite of my freshman-year anxieties, I had somehow successfully completed four years at Maggie Walker. But as I walked across the stage to collect my Maggie Walker diploma, I was still not truly convinced that I was smart enough to be there.
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