So I'm all emotional and crying and stuff (or in my case, NOT crying, cuz I have to always be so tough or it pisses a certain someone off).
Anyway, I was sitting outside reading and listening to the radio and someone requested the song "Baby Mine" by Bette Midler from the movie "Beaches." Well, I went along reading and then as I listened I realized it was the song from "Dumbo" when his mom gets locked up and he goes to see her and my heart just tightened and broke right then and there imagining the cartoon images in my mind. I started to remember that when I cried at movies as a child or teenager it was always scenes like this -- Bambi's mother dying did not get me as bad as Bambi calling out her name over and over. They tell me that I cried at the end of "Frosty the Snowman" because Frosty left the kids. Today, I get really upset watching cop shows and unsolved crime shows that involve kids. It just now really hit me that I have always had a very strong maternal instinct, I guess... or a really strong emotional bond with kids that are abandoned or hurt. There's nothing wrong with that, really, it just never really was as clear to me as it was last night and this morning.
Now, as an adult the same kind of scenes will make me tear up, but the last movie that I really cried at was "Shine." Hard to explain unless you know the movie and see the scene I'm referring to, but I'll try. This guy is a piano genius and gets exploited, more or less. As he grows older he starts to lose it and turns into a bum, pretty much. A woman finds him and realizes who he is and tries to introduce him back into society and having him come along with her to play piano at her parties, etc. She realizes that the piano is his escape and joy. However, he is still not mentally all there and the scene that got me was when he was mingling at one of the parties, he started to babble a little and someone mentioned the planets or the solar system and he immediately started rattling off the names of the planets and facts about them. Almost RainMan-like. It upset me so much I started to cry. Seems pretty dumb on the surface, but I realized why almost immediately -- that is the kind of thing that happens to ME in my brain when people are talking or I am reading or watching tv -- I make all these connections to facts that I know in my brain and then I can't just enjoy the conversation or the book or the show or whatever. In the movie he was deemed a little crazy because he just let those thoughts blurt right on out -- I hold them in, and I imagine all the GT kids that are truly at that level of giftedness do too. It boils down to a burden of self-censoring. What "average" people don't get is that the torture of giftedness is not that we are "smarter" than everyone else, but that we have to constantly hold in so many random thoughts on details that probably are insignificant to other people just to conform to society's norms!
And on top of that I have to hold in my emotions.
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