Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 11: March, 2025

This blog post was originally published in my March monthly newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

I've been seeing a lot of really good "where my lore started" posts going around, and I think it's great that other people have any sort of handle on their lore. I usually can't remember until someone else brings it up, or I suddenly feel the urge to rewatch or reread something, or I realize in retrospect that something seemingly unremarkable has been deeply embedded in me all along. Off the top of my head, the "What a Good Idea" song from The Swan Princess is in there somewhere, along with the fountain scene from The Princess Diaries II and basically everything about Anya and Dimitri in Anastasia, a film I watched every day for a year, but I digress. The point is that the lore I'm built on is something I usually only notice once it comes back around.

This happened to me recently while I was watching Cool Runnings, which is quite possibly my most rewatched film because it falls into the Venn diagram of interests I share with my husband. He particularly loves movies about the Olympics because, unlike professional sporting events, "it's not about the winning, but the taking part." In many ways, my husband loves athletics in a pure and wholesome way, similar to the way I love art or academia, where the act of competing and reaching the outermost constraints of what your mind and body can accomplish is its own pursuit of Truth(TM). It's a very Classical philosophy, which particularly comes through in Cool Runnings.

There's a particularly poignant moment where the main character, Derice, asks his coach, Irv, why he cheated in his own Olympics all those years ago.

Irv: It's quite simple, really. I had to win. You see, Derice, I'd made winning my whole life. And when you make winning your whole life, you have to keep on winning, no matter what. You understand that?

Derice: No, I don't understand. You won two gold medals. You had it all.

Irv: Derice, a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you're not enough without one, you'll never be enough with one.

It occurred to me as I was watching this scene again recently that this is a mindset I rely on critically now, but that I've only been able to make use of as an adult. While it's probably something I thought I understood when I was younger, in practice I thought my potential was everything; that I would only feel worthy of the things I wanted (love, stability, a home of my own making) after I had satisfied a checklist of desirable accolades or traits. On some level I believed—was conditioned to believe—that my achievements could account for what I so badly wanted to feel about myself, which was that I was enough.

In many ways this is the underlying theme in GIFTED & TALENTED, a book that is so named in reference to the Gifted and Talented Education program (GATE) that people who grew up in the US are likely very familiar with. I think there's this collective experience, especially among Millennials, where we have to recover from being gifted kids in some sense, because our education was shaped in such a way that many of us didn't know how to function once we stopped receiving gold stars, and also because the world is nothing like what we were promised it would be if we just did what we were told. Really, GIFTED & TALENTED is a book about the devastating crevasse of potential; the gap between who you are and who you thought you would become.

For the record, while I have you, it's also a book about how the tech industry is rife with fraud. We're definitely starting to hear terms like "enshittification" and techno-feudalism or techno-fascism thrown around more liberally, but at the time I was writing, I was more focused on how start-up culture led to the specific fraud of Elizabeth Holmes, and only after having finished the book do I understand that I was wrestling with what an obsession with efficiency at any cost has done for an entire industry and, inevitably, society as a whole. The tech industry is basically massive amounts of capital thrown around in pursuit of unlimited economic gain, and hasn't achieved any real innovation for at least two decades. There's excessive amounts of money, but no actual genius, and a requisite failure of policy to address what tech could become left unchecked. Not to run rampant on that particular topic here, but in so many ways, GIFTED & TALENTED is a book about illusions, about accountability, and about deceit.

Tara Lipinski, my all-time favorite Olympian, recently posted a video of the long program that won her the 1998 figure skating gold (she skated her short program to "Once Upon a December," so really, Anastasia is my lore on so many levels; this shit runs deep). And she said what she was most proud of wasn't the way she performed on that day, but the way she'd treated all the days it took to get there, and the work and sweat and pain that no one saw. To some extent, GIFTED & TALENTED is also the question of who are you when no one is looking? And if who you are is where you put the hours in, then what will you become?

I learned this month that the GATE program no longer exists as it did when I was a kid; at least, not at the state level. The specific California public school district my son will attend no longer bothers with the GATE program at all, and I think my relief when I realized it was bodily. For one thing, as a person in the social sciences, I believe there is more damage to be caused by the separation between gifted and "regular" than any curricular benefit to be gained; I think sociologically speaking, you wind up with systemic segregation that claims to be race or class-blind but isn't in actuality; I think there's more fruitful ways to approach pedagogy and to celebrate diversity in the classroom than by determining whether one kid or another tests well. But I also thought thank god because I'd rather my son be defined by what he loves than by what a metric identifies as potential. I hope he never does what I inevitably trained myself to do, which was to only look away from the enormity of what I wasn't to check worriedly over my shoulder, wondering whether I'd finally come far enough.

So basically, GIFTED & TALENTED is for anyone familiar with the feeling of not knowing who you are because you're too dazzled by the horizon of your potential. It's also meant to reassure a lot of those same people; to promise you that where no achievement can make you, no shortcoming or failure can break you, either. It took a lot of time and brutal missteps and countless victories that I didn't celebrate to get here (and it's also a reflex I have to keep in check all the time), but it matters. I thought the gold medal would make it all worth it, but Irv was right—if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it.

(And for what it's worth, it's also a book about happiness. Specifically that when it comes to life, happiness comes not in the winning, but in the taking part.)