In our English class, we were given the assignment to write a lyrical essay. Lyrical essays combine elements of essay and poetry together, and there is a lot of freedom regarding the subjects they can cover. I wrote mine about gifted kid burnout.
The Gift of Flight
You’re sitting in your third-grade classroom, and your test results flash across the paper. A+, with a note that you’re beyond advanced. Suddenly, it’s as if wings are fused to your back. You realize you can fly! Your reading, your writing, your entire academic career rises with you. That is where it all began.
↞↠
How did it feel to be given the gift of flying?
Imagine the feeling of being able to see emerald forests of check marks on all your papers stretching all the way to the sea and beyond. It’s the view of all the exceptionally beautiful things, the wonderful knowledge the world has to offer. You sit upon a throne of silver clouds and the wind carries praises for you from every direction. Your back and wings are bathed in radiant sunlight. Nothing can touch you as you soar through the heavens. The sky is your kingdom and you never want that feeling to end.
However, what people don’t realize is that your golden wings came with a heavy price. They are hollow and fragile. You happened to be born with feathers upon your back but you never had to earn them. Now you have no speed, no strength, and no charisma. You cannot dance with the others on the ground below. You tell yourself it’s because you’d rather keep gliding but deep down you know it’s because you can’t. You’d be useless anywhere that isn’t the air. Your feet can’t ever touch the ground. That is the cost of flight.
You make sure your feet will never touch the ground.
⇜⇝
Icarus don’t fly too close to the sun. You will burn. The warnings ring in your ears, growth mindset this, and fixed mindset that. But what’s the point in having wings if you’re not going to fly? Higher, higher, higher! It’s not enough just to be airborne anymore. It never is.
The wind has stopped for a while. There is no point in praising what is expected to happen. Your once perfect view is now obscured by clouds. Stop trying. If you don’t try, you can’t really fail for real right? No one has to know your wings are hollow. The sun is eclipsed, painting each of your papers with a scarlet X. Wrong, late, missing. What happened to you? Wrong late, missing. What’s wrong with you!? It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. You can’t be failing at flying, that’s literally the only thing you can do! False king. Oh, how hard it must be to have everything handed to you. Crybaby. Calm down, you’ve never fallen before. So if you just reach a little farther, maybe you can make it past the layer of crimson clouds. Just a little bit higher, and maybe you can touch the sun again. Higher, higher, higher! Your feet will never touch the ground. They can never touch the ground. They can never-
But the F on your paper hits you like a tidal wave.
It’s only then that you realize the clouds aren’t clouds.
It’s smoke rising up from out of your back.
You’re burning.
The tips of your wings curl and blacken like paper tossed into a fireplace.
Flames scorch down your shoulders and spine.
Melted flesh drips down your limbs.
Your castle of clouds whips past your face.
How bittersweet to experience the feeling of soaring again.
Tears, embers, and feathers spin upwards towards the sky you loved so much.
Meanwhile you plummet towards the earth like a falling star.
It’s too agonizing to scream so you laugh instead.
The weight you’ve been carrying on your shoulders for years is finally gone.
How ironic that the grade meant for failure is what truly freed you.
↼⇀
Your entire body is on the ground now, sprawled out in the mud; a doll that got run over by a race car. All that’s left of your wings are dark, twisted bones that sprawl out from your back like the branches of a dying tree. Rain drips gently down the sides of your face, dissolving the remnants of your feathers to ashes. In spite of it all, you feel yourself finally relax in the embrace of the earth. You had forgotten what it felt like to rest, to have the soft touch of grass carry the weight of your broken bones and bruised skin. You have no speed, no strength, no charisma, and now you have no wings. But maybe, without the weight of them to drag behind you this time, you can learn how to dance with the others on the ground below.
It’s the lightest you’ve felt in what seems like an eternity.
↞↠
Annotated Bibliography
Milot, René. The Fall of Icarus. 2016. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JJ3z0
The Fall of Icarus is a digital painting by René Milot. I knew flying imagery and Icarus metaphors would be very prominent in my essay, so I wanted a picture of Icarus falling at the beginning to set the tone for the essay. I chose this one because of the vividness of the golden colors. I think it helps portray the vividness of the colors I was imagining when I wrote the essay.
Daniel. Web log, November 10, 2013. https://disloyalorder.tumblr.com/post/66640680069/here-is-what-they-dont-tell-you-icarus-laughed.
What They Don’t Tell You Icarus Laughed is a poem about the fall of Icarus. When I first came across this poem, I immediately thought that was exactly how it felt when I realized I wasn’t a “gifted” kid anymore. It perfectly described how the fall was painful and bad, but so oddly freeing. Not only that, but the story of Icarus in general fit the theme of the essay very well. The poem heavily inspired the imagery and metaphors I used in this essay.
Yu, H. “Gifted Kid Burnout: Breaking Free of ‘Smartness.’” Medium. Mindsets, August 9, 2019. https://medium.com/mindsets/gifted-kid-burnout-breaking-free-of-smartness-2c29e71a6cd0.
“Gifted Kid Burnout: Breaking Free of ‘Smartness” is an article about how labelling children as “gifted” makes them think that they are born with their intelligence. As a result, as soon as they come across a challenge that could bring their inherent intelligence into question, they avoid it so they won’t fail and stop being “smart”. I’ve been told about this since early middle school, and I thought the article gave a pretty accurate summary of the two mindsets and the negative effect that the fixed mindset could have, even if someone continues to succeed. This helped me with my “king” metaphor, since that word has the connotation of flawed greatness.
“Why calling kids ‘gifted’ can backfire.” Age [Melbourne, Australia], October 28, 2019, 19. Gale In Context: Global Issues (accessed December 11, 2020). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A603916742/GIC?u=moun43602&sid=GIC&xid=51380266.
Why calling kids ‘gifted’ can backfire is an article about how labelling children as gifted can cause them to value looking good over putting in effort. It was very similar to the previous article, but focused more on the effects on the children rather than the mindset it left them with as adults. I added it to emphasize the feeling of needing to maintain a reputation as “smart.”
Intention Statement
The Gift of Flight is about what it feels like as a (former) gifted kid. I chose to write this essay in the second-person perspective because not everybody grew up gifted, and in order for the whole audience to relate I needed to put them directly in the point of view of a gifted child. I began the essay with context to the flying metaphor so the audience would understand what I’m referring to at first. I used lots of positive imagery to represent how being called “advanced” makes you feel invincible as a child. It’s the shortest section because most people probably know that one really smart kid and they’re so good at things it’s almost like they’re the “king” at it so I didn’t feel the need to elaborate further. I spent more time on what most people don’t see, because speaking from experience, kids that were called smart will hide the not- smart part of themselves at any cost to maintain their appearance. Personally, I felt like I could not devote my mind to anything else other than academics because I knew I wouldn’t be able to maintain that perfect “advanced” appearance if I stretched my brain any farther than I already was to keep my straight As. I alluded to Icarus because he was explicitly warned not to go too close to the sun or his wings would melt. The same thing happened to me, I was told about the growth mindset, my parents told me I’d burn out if I kept freaking out over an A-, and I didn’t listen. According to my research, neither did the other gifted kids. Since I had given everything I had to schoolwork, if I failed at that, then I’d have nothing I could say I was good at anymore. So I panicked, (“What’s wrong with you?”), went into denial, (“just a little bit higher”), and flew directly into the sun and burnt out hard in junior year in terms of mental health. I arranged the text vertically to represent the falling. It did feel like burning, figuring out that there were tons of other kids that went through the same thing, which basically meant I was never special, just always “average” but there was an odd comfort in feeling like I didn’t have to try to keep up an illusion anymore. I tried to use similes and metaphors to make the ending a melancholic kind of beautiful. During peer review with a few of my friends, they helped me figure out the ending and rearrange some of the text to make it flow more smoothly. I also tried to emulate the techniques of “Consider the Lobster Mushroom”, where the metaphor(s) were woven in throughout the essay. Overall, while The Gift of Flight was about the experience of a former gifted child, the main theme behind it is about not letting labels blind you into burning yourself out and avoiding new experiences.
English Honors: Citizen Review
A Critical Look at Citizen
In The Limitations of Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Common Project, Clara B Jones evaluates the effectiveness of Rankine’s Citizen and Ta-Nehisi’s Between the World and Me approaches to racism. Jones believes that while both books highlight institutionalized racism through people’s interactions, they fail to promote change because there is no call to action for how the current system could be restructured. Jones critiques how Citizen focuses solely on racism rather than addressing the hierarchical structure that racism is built on, and how the descriptions in Citizen lead to having a more pessimistic view of racism rather than inspiring people to want to change it. While I agree with Jones that Citizen is limited in its approach to racism, I understand why Rankine chose to write about racism in the way that she did. Those choices should be taken into account when reviewing Citizen.
First and foremost, Jones argues that there is no direct call for dismantling the system in Citizen. She claims that “The wide appeal of and popular support for these authors, then, might be explained by their proposals to reform the operations of institutional racism rather than to dismantle the elitist, hierarchical, and capitalist structures of which institutional racism is only one component.” Although it is true that Citizen doesn’t specifically address that structure, the point of the book was about highlighting racism in society to make people more aware of it, particularly relating to microaggressions. Rankine writes about a man that is implied to be black sitting on a train with other people refusing to sit next to him. “When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. He is gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.” (131) Rankine focuses on interactions such as this one because microaggressions can often be overlooked, especially in comparison to more violent acts of racism (which are still commonly forgotten). Rankine is trying to point the spotlight at this specific issue rather than the larger picture behind it because it gets glossed over very frequently. Another example she gives is when she describes an interaction she had with her friend. “Despite the fact that you have the same sabbatical schedule as everyone else, he says, you are always on sabbatical. You are friends so you respond, easy. What do you mean? Exactly, what do you mean?” (47) It was a relatively small, simple interaction, but the reason Rankine included it was to show how much those assumptions hurt. She compiled many of them into Citizen, so show the negative impact it has on people when all the microaggressions start piling up. Though Jone’s claim that Citizen didn’t give a direct call to action to dismantle the capitalist system is true, that was never the intent of the book to begin with. While it is important to note that racism is only a single component of another broader classist structure, the purpose of Citizen was to highlight racism in particular. Therefore, it was not a fair critique for Jones to make in terms of Citizen’s effectiveness.
Apart from this, Jones also claims that Citizen creates a pessimistic attitude towards racism instead of inspiring people to want to create change. Jones writes “This is to say, a truly radical critique of social relations would outline pragmatic initiatives to address and to change the causes and consequences of racism as one symptom of broader deficiencies in the structuring of social, cultural, and economic relations in America.” Citizen creates a very grave view of racism. Rankine features a page with the names of the many black people that have died as a result of systematic racism, and the next page reads “because white men can’t police their imagination, black people are dying.” (134-135) Rankine wanted to emphasize the pain that often goes unnoticed because of racism, but the countless names and other instances of suffering and injustice in Citizen could form a negative approach to racism that might demoralize people. They may feel that if it’s been going on for this long then there’s nothing that the reader as an individual can do to change it. In addition, it could make black readers more upset with the unjust situation they are born into rather than making hope that people can change the current racist structures of society. Rankine ends Citizen with “I had to go, I was expected on the court, I grabbed my racket. The sunrise is slow and cloudy, dragging the light in, but barely. Did you win? he asks. It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson.”(159) That ending insinuates that the lesson is black people in America will always be treated as second class citizens. It does not inspire hope for change, even though it is effective at getting the point about injustice across. Jone’s critique is reasonable considering the negative impact that mindset could have on the audience’s approach to addressing racism.
Ultimately, Jone’s critique of Rankine’s Citizen addresses where it falls short in its approach to racism. Citizen does an excellent job highlighting the more unseen aspects of racism, but it may lead people to overlook other influences on systematic racism. In addition its solemn nature does not inspire its readers to want to create widespread change. In spite of those flaws, overall Citizen effectively emphasizes the often overlooked aspects of racism that cause injustice in our society.
Works Cited
Jones, Clara. “The Limitations of Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Common Project.” ENTROPY, 15 Apr. 2016, entropymag.org/the-limitations-of-claudia-rankine-and-ta-nehisi-coates-common-project/.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen an American Lyric. Penguin, 2015.