Twice Exceptional

what we hide is who we are

Prince and his father arriving at the American Music Awards in 1985. Brad Elterman/FilmMagic, via Getty Images

I’m not sure how I missed this Sasha Weiss article on this ill-fated Prince documentary when it came out in NYT Magazine. I think I was getting the kids settled into school, and it was a rock-bottom kind of fall. I was preoccupied with their emotional lives, and barely holding together my own.

It tells the story of the nine-hour doc that was painstakingly crafted by Ezra Edelman (OJ: Made in America), and which Prince’s estate has successfully shut down. Weiss, who is one of the handful of people who has ever seen it, calls it “a cursed masterpiece,” refers to its legally-mandated disappearance as “like watching a monument being swallowed by the sea.” After a viewing, Questlove “went home that night and spoke to his therapist until 3 a.m. He cried so hard he couldn’t see.” I have obviously never wanted to watch anything more in my life.

I am, of course, a huge fan of Prince’s music (although haunted by his treatment of Sinead O’Connor), but I must admit I can only feel so devoted to the kind of polished performer who doesn’t want us to see the human underneath. Weiss refers to Prince’s rejection from his father, the visible moments of self-doubt and loneliness in this film that he went to great lengths to hide.

He had a troubled childhood, behavioral problems in addition to his preternatural musical gifts. They way he’s been described as a child, he seems to fit the profile of what we now call 2E, or “twice exceptional,” which is what they call neurodivergent people who excel in other areas. I wonder if he, and subsequently the people around him, would have suffered as much if he had the kind of parents who spent two months settling him into school. But without the anguish, what would the art have been?

I know this is a question beautifully examined in Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, of which I have read bits and pieces but am slightly avoiding diving into, because I worked with famous people for too long, and I know it will re-open a portal to hell for me. But when I read about the people around Prince, the ones he abused the most, and their tenderness toward him, I can guess why they protected him—because he was so obviously a broken child, which they clearly saw, and they also thought him responsible for their own success, which they will feel like they’re paying off for the rest of their lives.

Shame is so powerful, isn’t it? Gnarling and twisting us into shapes to protect the things that we don’t want to come out. I think for a second about my own family, and how lucky I was to have the support that I did. It’s what’s allowed me to be an open book, I say. Everything’s out there. Ask me anything. But then I think, that’s not true. There’s something I didn’t talk about in the first book, and found difficult to put in the second, and that’s my handwriting.

When I was a little girl, I struggled with what I now know was a pretty severe dysgraphia, which I can only describe as a disconnect between my brain and my hand. It makes writing slow, painful, and frustrating. So I avoided it, basically for as long as I could. I didn’t do one day’s homework for the entire third grade, for example. And it’s probably why I never thought of myself as a writer, because I couldn’t write. It was especially excruciating for a girl who loved to think, and who loved to read.

Dysgraphia brought me many superpowers in school - my truly bizarre level of recall, because I never wrote anything down. I don’t think I studied for one test until I got to college. Exceptional standardized-test-taking skills, because bubbles are easy. I can spend hours alone with my mind, and little else, because it’s my friend, even when my hand was not. I had the annoying ability to expound at length, out loud, on almost any topic, in fully-formed paragraphs. Because if I couldn’t write, by golly, I’d talk circles around anyone. By middle school I caught up, in that I understood that I simply had to work twice as hard to get my work down on paper, and I was stubborn and competitive enough to do it.

And for the rest of my life, I have pretended that organizing my thoughts and expressing myself on the page is easy breezy. And writing’s not easy for anyone. But I write on an incline, at altitude. Large chunks of my book were transcribed from voice notes. If I’m out an about and write down ideas on the fly, you’d better believe I cannot read that chicken-scratch once I’m back. Not once. I have to close my eyes and think of the memory of what I was trying to write out, to boost my recall. If you’ve ever received a handwritten note from me, know that it was probably transcribed from a recording, took way longer than you’d expect, was likely my second attempt, and I may have yelled. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” said Dolly Parton once, and I think of this every time someone calls my writing voice “effortless.”

It’s such a small thing to be embarrassed about, but it’s my own little performance, the thing I gloss over and minimize and stress out about. A part of my process, as much as I have one, is “why does this thing make me think of that thing.” I don’t build every essay like this—many are just “_____ is my personality this week”—but a heck of a lot start out when I (alone) sense tenuous links between two seemingly-disparate ideas, between which I then have to build out a connection. Often, it’s just the whisper of a feeling, reminding us that even lives lived in completely different universes are linked by shared human emotion. In no other way am I able to compare myself to Prince Rogers Nelson. There’s just a secret shame that propelled us to create, tucking us away in the same file.