My sixth-grade teacher told my parents that I was never going to amount to anything because I talked too much. If she had been interested in connection rather than perfection, she could have seen my heart through my eyes. She could have seen that I was hurting and needed to be validated and supported.

Perhaps she could have realized that I had been fed sugar in the morning before I arrived at school and was hyped-up beyond my capacity to settle into the day. Perhaps she could have recognized that all that chatter occurred because no one was truly hearing me.

Intuitively she saw that I had the gift of talking, which I have been doing successfully all my life, but because she was not connected, she saw my gifts as negative. Her perfectionism caused me to doubt myself for many years and to die a little until I woke up to my own true “GIFTS” of gab!