Cathy's Turning Leaves

This is a post I’ve been putting off, but it needs to get done and over with. It’s about me being born a little smarter than the average bear. No matter how many times I say I’m not bragging, some people will think I am. But the truth is, I have spent most of my adulthood hiding it due to the social difficulties it causes. As an adult, I often deliberately acted dumb about a subject I knew a lot about. But I’m tired of pretending to be something I’m not. And it’s impossible to tell my story without revealing my high intelligence (that phrase was hard to type). No,…

Things were different in the 1960’s. I remember feeling so sorry for one boy. Maybe nowadays, teachers would look into the situation, but back then, as long as there were no obviously visible signs of abuse, they would look the other way. He came to school every day in the same clothes, with no shoes, even in the winter. Yes, it was in south Texas, but it did get really cold part of the winter, with frost on the ground, sometimes windy with sleet or freezing rain falling. Not good on bare feet. On those cold days, he wore a thin, threadbare windbreaker. It couldn’t have helped much with the…

I was a troubled child. Besides my dysfunctional home life, I was intellectually several grades ahead of my peers. I didn’t know how to interact with people and I didn’t fit in socially. From the beginning of my school life, I had regular counseling sessions. Every time I started going to a new school, it wouldn’t be more than a few weeks when I would be told that I would be seeing someone. Large schools would have counselors on the staff, and small schools would have visiting psychologists. Either way, it was so normal to my school life, that I never questioned it or thought it odd. I did get…