If you're here, you may have just heard me tell my story. Maybe some of it sounded familiar in a way you didn't expect. Maybe the floor moved.
I want to say the most important thing first, because I remember needing to hear it first:
You're not alone. You never were.
GATE was real school, real testing, real enrichment. For almost everyone who went through it, that's the whole story, and a good one. I'm not here to tell you your gifted program was a cover. It almost certainly wasn't. GATE was the outer circle: a system built to find a certain kind of mind. What I lived, and what I've testified to publicly, is that something else was waiting inside that circle for a few of us — something that wasn't school at all.
If you're in the 99%, I'm glad you found a program that saw you. This letter isn't asking you to doubt your childhood.
And maybe the program left marks on you anyway: the perfectionism, the worth that got welded to performance, the feeling of being a category before you were a person. That's real too. It doesn't need a conspiracy to matter.
But maybe you're carrying the other shape: the years that don't add up, the rooms you can't quite place, the feeling of having been known by people you can't remember meeting. If that's you, here is what I wish someone had told me when my own memories came back. What you're feeling has a name. Other people carry it too. And surviving it doesn't require anyone else believing you first.
I'll be straight with you about my own account, because you deserve the same honesty I'd want: I'm certain of what I experienced. I'm humble about what it means. Memory that comes back after a long absence is real and it is fragile, both at once, and I've never claimed every detail of mine is beyond error. Anyone who offers you certainty in this territory, in either direction, is selling something.
What helped me, when it finally broke open, wasn't anyone's verdict. It was slower than that. Giving what surfaced somewhere to land: quietly, on paper, at my own pace, with nobody to perform for. Letting my body catch up. Finding the few people who could sit with not knowing. If writing stirs more than it settles, stop and come back to it with someone steady beside you. There's no deadline on this. There never was.
I won't promise you things I don't have. There's no program to enroll in, no answer waiting at the bottom of this page. What I can tell you is what we're building at The Telepathy Center, slowly and in the open: a community where this can be talked about without ridicule and without exploitation, serious tools for understanding consciousness, and real work underway with people in the psychology space who know how to hold this kind of weight. We don't fully know what the help looks like yet. I'd rather tell you that than pretend.
If you want to be in contact as it takes shape, the door is there. If you never write, this letter is still yours.
You're not crazy.
It wasn't just you.
— Jordan