Comments on: My Gift

By: Ethan Moore

Ethan Moore — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:03:37 +0000

This was something I had realized before while thinking about careers, but I had never gotten around to writing it down so clearly. The personal profile prompted that. I think I’ve gotten the self-description down well, but this site’s structure didn’t lead me to describe what I’m looking for so clearly. At some point I’ll have to do that for a site with a more traditional format.

By: Amy

Amy — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:41:11 +0000

I’m a huge fan of writing a personal ad as a path to self-discovery. About 15 years ago, I started brainstorming words and phrases to describe myself and the partner I was seeking. After a couple of years I finally took two full pages and narrowed them down into 15 words about me and 15 words about “him” and actually got up the nerve to run my ad. (This was back in the print days when a 30 word ad would run for 2 weeks for free.) That ad led to about 50 messages, about 25 phone conversations, about a dozen dates, and one kinda-sorta-boyfriend for a while. That experience got me to be much more comfortable meeting people, and realizing that if I didn’t click with someone it was not a personal failing on my part.

The irony is that I met my husband-to-be about 6 months later. Although we did NOT meet through the ad, when I looked back at it, it described him perfectly! It makes me think that, maybe, after I figured out who I really was, and who I was really looking for, the universe said, “Oh, NOW I know who you mean. He’s over here. Come on and I’ll introduce you.”

By: Anita

Anita — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:48:40 +0000

Interesting… and sounds kind of familiar. I learned early (around the time I learned that I have no real fine art talent!) that I have an ability for (what I think of as) ‘collage’. I seem to recognize easily what will work together: colors and design styles especially (hence my career) but also in other ways. I am often a proofreader, but not much of a writer… I can generally recognize compatible personalities and love introducing friends to one another when they have things in common… though I’ve learned never to play matchmaker in a romantic sense!… and since I’ve started cooking, I’m finding that I seem to intuitively match flavors pretty well, too. The only place it really breaks down is aurally; I have no ‘ear’ for music and I am mostly tone deaf…possibly a result of chronic ear infections at the point in my development (infancy into toddler-hood) when the brain ‘learns’ to recognize pitch and such. Of course, that deficit may have allowed other parts to function *better*, but I’m venturing well into speculation here.

In any case, and just FWIW, I think of it as an enhanced form of pattern recognition. It’s also (among many other things) what makes me think I’ve got a touch of Asperger’s. I tend to see/recognize some things other people don’t. It seems too abstract of a concept for your “is this normal?” series, but it took me a while to realize that not *everyone* does this well.