Doublement exceptionnelle

There are things I can do that many people cannot. There are things that many people do without thinking that I struggle to do at all.

I have spent much of my life attempting to reconcile these two facts, as though one must somehow explain, excuse, or compensate for the other.

I'm beginning to think that reconciliation may be unnecessary.

I am doublement exceptionnelle.

The French term describes an individual whose exceptional intellectual or creative abilities coexist with significant difficulties or disabilities. In English, the term is twice-exceptional. It is a curious expression, and one that I find increasingly appropriate.

Not because I believe myself to be twice as remarkable as anyone else. Rather, because the distribution of my abilities is profoundly uneven, and because both ends of that distribution have shaped my experience of being alive.

I am an artist. I have spent more than thirty-five years working with sound, images, technology, and the relationships between them. I compose, perform, design, manipulate, synthesize, and experiment. I move between disciplines with a fluency developed through decades of practice, curiosity, and persistent investigation.

I also think philosophically. I am interested not simply in what things are, but in how they become what they are. I have developed my own conceptual framework, process paraontics, an evolving, process-oriented approach to investigating how phenomena emerge, interact, acquire identities, and become intelligible through relationships and transformations, rather than assuming that reality consists primarily of fixed, independent things.

Much of this feels natural to me. Complex systems interest me. I enjoy discovering relationships between apparently unrelated ideas. I can lose myself for hours in the intricate architecture of a composition, an image, an experiment, or a philosophical problem.

And then there is the mail.

The bills. The appointments. The cleaning. The phone calls. The mundane requirements of maintaining an ordinary human existence.

Tasks that seem almost absurdly simple compared with the elaborate creative and intellectual work I undertake can become extraordinarily difficult to initiate, organize, or complete.

This is not a charming eccentricity. It is not some romantic artistic temperament. It has consequences.

I have experienced the distress of watching practical obligations accumulate while knowing perfectly well what needs to be done. Understanding a task does not necessarily produce the capacity to perform it. Wanting to do something, even desperately wanting to do it, does not guarantee that intention will become action.

That distinction has been among the most difficult realities of my life.

I have repeatedly tried to make myself function differently. Systems, schedules, disciplines, strategies, and assistance have all been part of that effort. Some things have helped. Others have failed. And sometimes, even things that work for a while cease to work.

Meanwhile, my creative and intellectual capacities remain very much alive.

It is an extraordinary contradiction to inhabit.

Or perhaps it isn't a contradiction at all.

Perhaps the contradiction exists only in the expectation that ability should be uniformly distributed, that someone capable of complex achievements should necessarily be capable of simpler ones, or that intelligence ought to translate into competence across the ordinary requirements of living.

But a human being is not a machine possessing a single quantity of capability that can be allocated equally to every task.

We are configurations of capacities, limitations, histories, circumstances, and processes. These configurations are not static. They interact with the environments in which we live, and they change over time.

My own configuration happens to be unusually uneven.

For much of my life, I have judged the difficulties by the standards of my strengths. If I can accomplish something enormously complicated, why can't I accomplish something apparently simple?

The question seems reasonable until one examines its underlying assumption.

The ability to do one thing does not establish the ability to do another, regardless of how their apparent complexity compares.

Exceptional creative intelligence does not automatically confer exceptional executive functioning. Artistic mastery does not guarantee the ability to manage an appointment calendar. Intellectual sophistication does not make the difficulties of daily maintenance disappear.

And the converse is equally important.

My difficulties do not negate my accomplishments. They do not make my gifts less real. Nor do they render my understanding of myself unreliable.

I have begun to recognize that accepting my limitations is not a concession against my abilities. It is simply an acknowledgment of what exists.

I can recognize my gifts without vanity. I can recognize my limitations without shame.

The two recognitions belong together.

This is where doublement exceptionnelle becomes meaningful to me.

I am not particularly interested in using the phrase as a medical designation. I am interested in it as a description of a lived reality, an identity that acknowledges an extraordinary and sometimes bewildering distribution of human capacities.

There is relief in having language for something that has been present for so long. Not because the language resolves anything, but because it permits a more accurate recognition of what is already there.

I have no desire to abandon the responsibilities of everyday living. My difficulties still have consequences, and those consequences require attention. But I am increasingly able to entertain the possibility that I may need considerable assistance in some areas without regarding that need as a personal defeat.

That is not easy to accept.

I have spent a lifetime developing capabilities, acquiring knowledge, making art, and investigating the world. My relationship with competence is therefore complicated. It has been a source of profound satisfaction, but it has also provided a merciless standard against which to measure my failures in other domains.

Perhaps the standard itself deserves examination.

I do not believe my life can be adequately described by either my accomplishments or my difficulties. Nor do I believe the two can be added together to produce some final measure of my worth.

They are characteristics of a life, not its verdict.

There is something deeply interesting to me about this from a process-oriented perspective. I am not a fixed collection of attributes. I am an ongoing configuration, changing through interaction, experience, effort, limitation, and circumstance.

Even the things I call my gifts are not entirely mine in the sense of being self-created. They have emerged through countless relationships between temperament, experience, exposure, practice, opportunity, and the world itself.

I am grateful for them.

Not proud, particularly. Grateful.

There is a kind of awe in recognizing what has become possible through this particular arrangement of a human life.

And perhaps the limitations belong to that recognition too. Not because they are secretly blessings, or because suffering must be given some redemptive purpose, but because they are also real.

I do not need to turn every difficulty into a virtue.

I do not need to make my disadvantages beautiful.

I do not need to prove that they are the price of my gifts.

I can simply acknowledge that both exist.

There is still work to do. There are practical problems I have not solved. There are areas of my life that need attention, assistance, and change. Acceptance does not magically remove those requirements.

But it may change the nature of my relationship with them.

Instead of repeatedly demanding that I become someone whose abilities are evenly distributed, I can begin to work with the person who actually exists.

I can act without requiring a particular outcome. I can make efforts toward a better life without making my acceptance of myself conditional upon their success.

I can seek assistance where I need it and continue exercising the extraordinary abilities I possess.

I have spent a great deal of my life trying to understand the world, and a considerable amount of it trying to understand myself.

I am beginning to wonder whether one of the more significant discoveries is also among the simplest.

I am exceptionally capable.

I am significantly limited.

I am both, at once.

Doublement exceptionnelle.

And perhaps, for the first time, I am learning to regard that entire configuration with something approaching clarity.