Does every kid who got A’s in elementary school and a decent amount of parental validation suspect that they might be a prodigy? Despite having no extraordinary skill, I’ve ridiculously wondered if I might be… a Chosen One.
Writers are addicted to the term wunderkind—German for “wonder child.” Search “prodigy” or “wunderkind” in any major publication, and I’ll bet $5 you’ll get a hit from the last week. In the literal sense, a prodigy is a child who is astoundingly gifted in some way. The math wiz. The virtuosic violinist. Malala. Our culture prizes wunderkind because we love tiny versions of bigger things. We love little rubber renderings of hamburgers, but we LOVE Greta Thunberg. And while child prodigies are not mini adults (most probably still prefer dino nuggets to foie gras), we can’t help but marvel at the way that their skills match and exceed those of people who have lived on Earth much longer.
“He looks precocious, for God’s sake.”
In thinking about this topic, I was called to reread one of Salinger’s Nine Stories—“Teddy.” It’s the last in his collection of nine, and possibly my least favorite when I first read it. It’s a 14-pager about a ten-year-old boy awakened to the truth about eternal reincarnation. He is both a regular kid (“He shifted in his seat and took out an eyesore of a handkerchief—a gray, wadded entity—and blew his nose”) and enlightened (“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that”).
Upon revisiting, I’m struck by how Teddy is coded as pretty autistic (or “A Little Spectrum-y,” to borrow the language of a recent article). Aside from being able to predict when and how people will die, what makes Teddy different is his disconnect from human emotions. Some such evidence:
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
I wish I knew why people think it’s so important to be emotional. My mother and father don’t think a person’s human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or very-very unjust, sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I’m inhuman.
I know I should resist this desire to diagnose. It’s a common and fallacious cultural assumption to associate autism with prodigies. People love to speculate about characters and historical figures and authors (even Salinger himself) being “on the spectrum” for having any variety of traits tangentially related to autism spectrum disorder. To revisit the aforementioned Drift article:
Today, you can take online tests to measure how many autistic traits you have or what your “Autism Spectrum Quotient” is. For autistic people, this idea is frustrating. Having some autistic traits is not the same as being autistic. Everyone isn’t a little bit autistic; rather, some are autistic, and others are not. The spectrum, as it is now generally understood by the scientific and autistic communities, is a way of capturing autism’s range and complexity within the subset of people who have it, not the span of all human experiences. (Lucey 2022)
It was a popular topic of speculation growing up, and I’ve noticed that calling things “autistic” has recently crawled back into casual discourse (*cough* Red Scare). While there’s been some research that suggests a possible genetic link between autism and extraordinary talent, it’s incorrect to take the two as necessarily connected.
Before rereading the short story, I assumed I would find Teddy obnoxiously precocious. I was on high alert for how the author would render a ten-year-old wunderkind: I tend to be skeptical of literature for adults that is about children. Isn’t every child protagonist a prodigy? To merit intrigue, one has to be rather extraordinary, after all. But, I liked Teddy this time around. He comes across as plausible enough. The character that actually grated me was the grouchy little sister, Booper. I raised an eyebrow at the six-year-old’s hateful diatribes more than the protagonist’s philosophies. Regardless, it’s a quick read—let me know what you think: is Salinger’s child prodigy precocious, plausible, neither or both?
Arrested Development
To return to my initial question, I’ll add that my desire to be a prodigy isn’t really about wishing I was a baby Beethoven. Of course, it’s actually a yearning for validation that my life is amounting to something. To achieve my goals eventually is fine, good and normal. But to get recognition at a young age is tantalizing because it would quench the ghastly uncertainty that my efforts have meaning. It’s an impatience for satisfaction. Kids these days! All they want to do is watch Tik Tok and fast forward past the tumultuous, untethered years of toil and uncertainty.
At 24, I feel envy so much more potently than when I was younger. I wrote a small blurb on my website bemoaning the fact that the entire cast of Euphoria is roughly my age. I assumed they’d all be thirty because they’re all, like, hot and successful. New York makes it easy to feel inadequate: I can’t make it 15 minutes in SoHo without getting physically bumped aside by a spandex-clad betch. But in truth, my jealousy is worst when it comes to career stuff. It’s hard for me to see peers doing cool, seemingly-fulfilling things when my current job is… not what I expected to be doing, to say the least.
I sigh in audible relief when I discover that someone I admire is older than me. Haley Nahman is a good example. Former Man Repeller editor & current author/podcaster behind Maybe Baby (subscribe if you don’t already!), I look up to her insightful reflections and writing style that feels like a smart, funny conversation with a friend. As arbitrary as age is, it still soothes me to know that she’s in her early thirties.
There was a moment in the latest episode of her podcast that really struck a chord. A caller left a voicemail explaining that she and her partner of 2.5 years had split up due to miscellaneous irreconcilable differences. Voice audibly shaking, she said: “I think I just need some reassurance that 27 is young, and that these years we spent together weren’t wasted and that I can learn and grow from it.” Haley and her co-host Danny were audibly devastated and repeated the refrain: “27 is so young!” Their advice boiled down to the following: the caller was in the weeds. She had to endure the awful part after a breakup that unfortunately no one can skip. Time, of course, is the truest salve.
This led me to a thought. Can the muddy years, tromping through your early-to-mid-twenties, be compared to a post-breakup haze? The “breakup,” in this analogy, is the departure from all the comprehensible signposts present in earlier stages of life: upon leaving the school calendar and other coming-of-age landmarks, life is no longer sectioned off into bite-sized pieces. Age starts to matter less and less. The cycles of life grow longer and longer.
I’m not sure when my friends and I will be able to see the forest for the trees. The kids who graduated during the pandemic constitute a new lost generation of sorts. We had the misfortune of clawing our way into the workforce during a recession, and beginning our first real jobs online. The experience was flattening. Working remotely cut off opportunities to demonstrate our personalities and make social bonds with coworkers. But, we can’t pretend that WFH didn’t allow for more fuckery. We could do laundry at 11 AM on a Tuesday, disappear for long walks, and take any number of other liberties.
The pandemic provided us with the wildest scapegoat imaginable. For once, we had a tangible excuse to not be immediately achieving our wildest dreams. I didn’t get that prized NPR internship because the world was falling apart! Not due to any personal deficiencies. In truth, young adulthood is always a reckoning with disappointments and unfulfilled expectations. By being robbed of a more normal debut into the world, the lost generation has been granted righteous indignation and denial. This has likely stunted my personal development. I was only 21 when the pandemic started, and I can’t tell if I will emerge from these years feeling like a mini adult or a tall child. I know I return to the topic of age again and again, but I suppose that’s the theme I’m seeking to clarify through Insecure Tea.
Having one outsized skill would be a way to make sense of my life. It would be a pleasure to have such a decisive calling. Sure, I love writing, but that’s just one piece of my personality. I’m not “writing girl” the way that Beth from The Queen’s Gambit is “chess girl.” While I do write every day, I spend much more time eating and drinking and cooking and cleaning and commuting. I have other hobbies that are often more pleasurable. I suppose this is a good thing. Life has more balance. It’s worthy to note that not all child prodigies grow into adult geniuses.
5 Songs for Wunderkind
“Too Much Too Young,” The Specials
This song always puts me in a good mood. The lyrics crack me up and the peppy ska beats are satisfyingly syncopated. The lyrics decry tradwifery over a more boisterous lifestyle.
🎶 You’ve done too much, much too young. Now you’re married with a son when you should be having fun with me! 🎶
“Kids Turned Out Fine,” A$AP Rocky, Skepta
This song will make you feel like you’re on drugs and give you the sinking feeling that the kids may not have turned out fine. Hauntingly gorgeous.
🎶 The kids turned out fine. I pour a line. I lose my mind. 🎶
“This Boy Wonders,” Aztec Camera
This one’s a double entendre. While the chorus rings “Now this boy wonders,” there’s also the pun of a “Boy Wonder” (aka wunderkind) rather than a boy who wonders. Further, the mind behind Aztec Camera, Roddy Frame, was a bit of a boy wonder himself. He released the album High Land, Hard Rain at the ripe age of 19, getting attention from the likes of Elvis Costello. Much like EC, Frame tends toward precocious double-meanings in his songwriting.
🎶 We clicked our heels and spat and swore we’d never let it die. 🎶
Side note: Looks like I’m not the only one to dub Frame a wunderkind. Harvested from the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page: “Aztec Camera wunderkind-turned-elder statesman of intelligent, melodic, wistful Scotpop.” Couldn’t say it better myself.
“Mold Baby (& The Queen Midas),” The So So Glos
Just the right amount of screechy. A song about comparing yourself to someone extraordinary.
🎶 Everything I touch will turn old. And everything you touch will turn to gold. 🎶
“Just Call Me Joe,” Sinéad O’Connor
Thought of this song because I met a guy named Joey two nights ago. It hurts my feelings that Sinead O’Connor released this album at 21. Just another talented spring chicken.
🎶 Don’t call me mister, just call me Joe. 🎶
🫖 Thanks for reading! It may be too late for you to be a gifted kid, but you could probably still reach Enlightenment with enough meditation! 🫖