Whole Body Listening ; Ableism in America

A Simple Poster

The room is bland and white. It feels manufactured to you, as you glance around the classroom. long rectangles of light loom above you, giving off a faintly blue glow. This is the gifted program, and you are "gifted."

         The most comprehensive definition of my predicament is the following quote; "Children who are gifted are defined as those who demonstrate an advanced ability or potential in one or more specific areas when compared to others of the same age, experience or environment." This is professional and manufactured, I know it. I know it because it's not me. I'm not advanced for my age, I often see myself as quite dumb. Others don't observe this, however, and decide to put me into the 'gifted program.' I am not smart, everyone else is simply slow. 

     People describe me as slow sometimes, too. This is my tug-of-war within the world; I'm not fast, i'm not slow, yet i'm not average-paced either. I am a never-ending smudge frame; always in motion, yet never in motion. Simply in a state of being. I am not still; I realize this as I look around the classroom. My eyes pierce into a simple poster behind me. 

"Whole Body Listening!" is shouted at me in a bold, and somehow bland, font. That damn poster. I know that schools are no place for foul language, however there is no other verbal expression I can find for my feelings; I am inhumanly fucking irate when I see this. There are so many parts to this "bare minimum" that I can never live up to. I must keep eye contact at all times, which, funny enough, is a sign of hostility in the animal kingdom. The most common example of this evolutionary fear is within house cats; which have barely evolved in about six hundred years. If you have a cat, you may notice it often blinks slowly at you in moments of calm and/or comfort. This is to let you(whom, from the cat's perspective, is a much larger, yet much less intelligent, version of them) know that you are not in danger. In order to survive in the concrete jungles of the human world, however, you must ignore that instinct for social validation. 

A lot of things about us as a species are questionable. We have completely overridden the food chain, created complex constructs such as language, government, and personal identity. We have ruined the Earth that nurtured us, found out how to cheat death, and even traveled to Earth's moon. If God exists, i'm not sure that they would love to see what we've become. It's even possible that there is no God at all, that the world is an endless cycle of life and death, all rotating evenly. Everything about life is circular, somewhat. The pores in your skin are circular, the pixels on your screens are rounded, the very atoms that make up what we are; circular. Counterclockwise, as well, which, as a rule, is only countered by the existence of the clock. 

My desk is too solid and I can feel the gaps between my teeth passing air between them. Despite how much of an empty void the classroom is, I can still see all of it. I can still hear all of it, all of the time. The right side of my head pounds as i ponder, "have I drank enough water today?" Which, Obviously I have, I plan my hydration down to the drop. This happens fairly often in my classroom, never have I experienced this mind-drowning surplus of sound, sight, audio, feel, and taste at home. Each and every noise is multiplied until I can't take it anymore. My limbs are both locked and seizing at the same time. This is the essence of the smear frame, this is my school life, and this is all of my faults.