Talent is Just a Diving Board

Sep 8, 2026 in Truckee, CA

This morning, I got an email announcing that Alexander was invited to apply for the National Junior Honor Society, thanks to his GPA.

For many gifted students, this is a predictable milestone. For Alexander, it was a threat that ultimately triggered a full-blown elopement by the afternoon.

When I asked if he wanted to write the required essay to join the "national good student coalition," it was a hard pass. His reasoning, quoted if not exaggerated: "Getting in means more work. Expectation is pressure, praise is control. "

I immediately shared this with Tyler, his freeride skiing coach and kindred spirit. Tyler just laughed, recognizing his own childhood in Alexander yet again. "I had the exact same thought when they invited me," he told me.

Truthfully, I messed up. I nudged Alexander to finish the application. I didn’t actually care about the club; I just naively thought it could be a low-stakes way for him to practice navigating neurotypical rules through a "positive" experience. But what the rest of the world sees as recognition, Alexander experiences as a trap.

He was furious. He bolted straight out the door and into the neighborhood, moving so fast I had to chase him outside before I even had time to put on shoes. When he finally circled back to the house, he looked at me and asked, "Would you like to talk?"

"Yes," I said, catching my breath. "What would you like to talk about?"

He flipped me the bird, said, "But I don't," and marched straight back into his room.

Tyler’s verdict when I told him? "He’s hilarious. Hurtful, but funny."

And honestly? I had to agree. I assume most parents would have been outraged, demanding respect and escalating the situation into a massive fight. But I couldn't be mad. I knew exactly what I was looking at: a kid so terrified of being swallowed by a social system that demands he be someone else, that his instinct was to fiercely defend his autonomy.

At that moment, the middle finger wasn't about disrespect. It was about his dignity.

There was a hilarious twist to the story, though. That evening, after we smoothed things over and I officially took the application off the table, Alexander actually took the initiative to open it up himself the very next day. When he encountered the prompt asking, “How much work experience do you have?”, a question presumably designed for eager students to flex their community service and leadership, Alexander simply typed: I am 12, how much work experience do you expect me to have?  

It isn’t easy to remain calm during these episodes. But I am able to give him this grace because I never forget the little girl still living inside of me, the one who wasn’t built to fit into the box, either.

By almost any definition, I was the ultimate model student. I competed in Math and English Olympiads, won writing contests, held top grades, and played soccer and basketball.

The dark irony of all these shining "achievements" was that I never actually liked school, and academics rarely appealed to me. I loved the thrill of solving a complex problem, but I despised being punished with endless, repetitive practice simply because I was good at it.

But I felt like I had no choice. Being "good" meant I was expected to be "better," and being better just meant doing more work. No one ever told me that opting out was an option.

So, from a very young age, I learned how to weaponize my intelligence and my presumed innocence as a "good girl" to survive the system—whether that meant faking a fever to escape elementary school math drills, exploring rebellious phases on weekends, or staging a silent, year-long protest in high school by answering every single exam entirely in English just because my teacher couldn't speak it. Looking back, am I proud of all of this? Not exactly. But as a kid trapped in a rigid educational machine, it felt like an absolute triumph.

By now, you can probably guess that I wasn’t exactly an easy student, either. To the outside world, my behavior might have looked "oppositional," even though I never saw it that way. Alexander and I don’t inherently despise authority; we just have zero tolerance for things that don’t make logical sense to us. Arbitrary power is at the top of that list.

This dynamic played out perfectly when Alexander was about 9 years old. We were doing an intake session with a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW). Alexander casually asked me what we were doing and how long it would take. I naturally started explaining the details—who I was meeting with, and that it would take about an hour. The LCSW immediately cut me off.

"You shouldn’t explain things to him," he preached. "He is a child, and you are the parent. You are too soft. Believe me, you have to break him first before you can make him better."

Unfortunately for the LCSW, Alexander overheard every single word. Naturally, my son flat-out refused to see him for the next two years until we finally switched medical plans.

I understand why traditional, authoritative parenting exists. But how could a "break him to fix him" approach possibly work for a kid with a profound PDA profile? Back then, I knew very little about PDA. My gut screamed that this approach was wrong, but I didn’t know how to push back. So, while Alexander successfully boycotted him, I actually kept going to my parent-guidance sessions with this guy for a long time. I was exhausted, constantly asking my own psychologist, "Should I be listening to him? Am I making a huge mistake?"

That wasn’t the only gaslighting I experienced on this journey. Because of Alexander’s outward

"smartness" and academic performance, I was constantly judged by other parents and even educational advocates about how to "maximize" his giftedness. One advocate actually criticized me for letting him spend so much time on the mountain: "You shouldn’t let him just ski. You are ruining his chances of being a normal, productive person. It’s such a shame. He is so smart and he needs to go to a 'good' college and get a 'real' job so that he can be normal."

They clearly didn't know Alexander's grand life plan. His absolute dream school? CU Boulder. Why? The mountains, obviously. Oh, and after thoroughly consulting a map, he excitedly informed me that Boulder has a 24-hour McDonald’s. That was the clincher. Otherwise, he was holding out for some imaginary college at Crested Butte, a small ski town in Colorado. 

His master plan is to major in Marine Biology (so he can alternate scuba diving in the summer and skiing in the winter), work the night shift at McDonald’s so he can "observe how people live their lives," and teach skiing on the weekends. It’s another story entirely that his dad and I later realized CU Boulder is actually an excellent, highly competitive academic institution; to Alexander, it’s just a ski town with convenient fast food.

Honestly, neither his dad nor I have even bothered to point out the logistical flaw of studying Marine Biology in a completely landlocked state. At one point, his dad just thoughtfully asked me, "Do you think Colorado was a coastal state a long, long time ago?"

By now, you’ve probably realized that Alexander’s dad isn’t exactly "typical," either. Frankly, neither am I, and neither is anyone in the carefully curated village that truly supports Alexander's needs. We are all a little mismatched for the standard world, which is exactly why this community works.

Take Tyler, his freeride head coach and the rare person who can consistently nudge Alexander past his rigid boundaries. Over the years, Tyler has intuitively mastered what therapists call "co-regulation." The defining milestone happened in Chamonix. Alexander had a massive, two-hour meltdown triggered purely by the demand to put on one extra layer of clothing—classic PDA. It was painful for me just to watch the GoPro footage Tyler sent later. But throughout the entire two hours, Tyler never lost his cool. He didn't yell, correct, or blame. He just stayed present, speaking in a steady, calm voice. At the very end of the recording, panning across the breathtaking French Alps, you can hear Tyler sigh to himself, exhausted: "I need a break." Because Tyler offered unconditional psychological safety instead of judgment, Alexander would now walk through fire for him. 

Then there’s Drew, a two-time freeride world champion. During their very first meeting, riding a steep T-bar up Farellones ski resort in Chile, 10-year-old Alexander was hyper-fixated on politics and economics, spiraling into a monologue about global conspiracies and economic depression. Standard behavioral guidelines will tell you to redirect or distract a kid from "age-inappropriate, heavy subjects." Drew didn’t do that. He didn't dismiss Alexander as naive. Instead, he listened, agreed, and engaged in the debate. Most importantly, he offered a lifeline: "Reality is depressing, man. But fortunately, we have skiing." That single sentence snapped Alexander right out of his doom-loop.

Tristan, his adaptive coach at Kirkwood, uses a similar approach. He never judges Alexander’s emotional floods; he just takes him out for a ride to process it. Because of Alexander's severe hypersensitivity to heat, finding a summer mountain biking coach was nearly impossible. Tristan stepped up without hesitation. Over two years, they progressed from tiny, tantrum-filled rides to this summer, where Alexander completed a 14-mile mountain ride without a single meltdown.

And I will never forget Kat, who invented a brilliant workaround for Alexander's spatial awareness. When he was 8 years old, he struggled to notice other skiers on the snow—a major safety hazard that usually gets a kid kicked out of any ski lesson. Instead of removing him, Kat promoted him. She made him her "Junior Safety Officer." She didn't lecture him; she just handed him the safety manual and tasked him with explaining the protocols to the other campers using declarative language. By teaching to learn, Alexander instantly developed the spatial awareness he had been lacking.

Being twice exceptional allows us to solve complex problems, but it can also make us painfully, acutely aware of exactly how we don't fit into the system. It gives us the tools to mask our struggles, which only means we suffer in plain sight. The outside world sees the 4.0 GPA, the articulate vocabulary, and the "good student" facade, and assumes we are thriving—completely missing the sheer exhaustion it takes just to exist within the neurotypical norms. 

I’ve talked with Alexander about his "giftedness" multiple times. He already understands what took me decades to figure out: he views his high intelligence not as a destiny, but simply as a tool. As he puts it: "Being gifted just means I have more choices. It doesn’t mean I have to put on the shoes they pick out for me."

I love the metaphor he left me with during one of our deep dives. "A talent is just a diving board," he told me. "It isn’t the pool but it would help you enter the pool."

So, when people ask me why I don’t push him academically, I just look at him standing on that diving board, and I remember the little girl inside me who was constantly pushed into pools she despised, just because she knew how to swim. My job as his mother isn’t to force him to jump, or to make him swim in the lanes society has painted for him. My job is simply to stand guard at the edge of the pool, make sure the water is safe, and let him decide entirely for himself when, where, and how he makes the splash.

About the Author

Sibyl JING Wenting, veteran published writer, autism researcher and advocate, a neurodivergent mother to a PDA systemizer son. Follow her substack: https://toemmachow.substack.com/