Vol VIII, No 3 - March 17, 2026

Did you ever have one of those friends who could find four-leaf clovers without even trying? I did. It was uncanny. We would all be on the soccer field warming up, and she would look down and just start plucking them out of the ground. The rest of us would scour the weedy grass for the rare specimens and come up short, but my magical friend gravitated toward the "lucky" plants, or maybe they gravitated toward her.

Perhaps this is a great metaphor for gifted and 2e children or individuals of all ages. The hard is often easy; the magical often seems real; and the rare becomes status quo. On this day of leprechauns and pots of gold, it's a perfect time to think of the treasures that our gifted and 2e family and friends bring into the world.

This month, we are featuring a piece by a mother and cybersecurity expert-turned-author who came to understand her children's profound giftedness and twice-exceptionality as a "blessing in disguise." Katrina O'Neil, who has written for the Journey in the past and also served on our international panel during last year's GHF Conference, just published her first book about her family's twice-exceptional journey. Spoiler alert: it's in Russian! She's working on the English and Ukrainian translations, as well.

As we seek to expand our community to include more perspectives from other countries and cultures, we are very appreciative of writers like Katrina for sharing their stories. We welcome more voices that represent multicultural views of the gifted and 2e experience.

Also, please save the date for our GHF Conversations on April 9th with Heidi Lack, PhD, ATR-BC, as she shares her expertise on misophonia and how we can listen to and see gifted strengths and asynchronies in those we care for and support.

Now get out there and look for some four-leaf clovers and feel free to send in pictures if you find one! I'll publish them in the next issue. marna.wohlfeld@ghflearners.org.

Best,

Marna

The Woes of Wit

Profound Giftedness and Twice-Exceptionality: A Story of One Family

by Katrina O'Neil

A few years ago, I read a book by Maria Dubova, a Russian journalist who now lives in Israel, about raising her autistic son. It was meant to provide a glimpse into her day-to-day life, what it’s really like from the parent perspective, including the grief that comes with the diagnosis, attempts to understand and accept it, the constant chain of ups and downs, small victories and huge defeats, adjustments all family members intuitively and purposefully make, and the unbelievable lessons these kids teach us against all odds. And that’s when it hit me: as the mother of two profoundly gifted twice-exceptional children, I should write my own book about our own journey.

While I was battling doubts, an inferiority complex, and impostor syndrome – after all, I am no writer, journalist, or psychologist, and there are positively more equipped, experienced, and knowledgeable people to write a book like this – a few things happened. First, I realized that I reached a time in my life when, instead of acquiring, collecting, and absorbing, I feel the need to unload, share, and give back. Second, in true midlife-crisis spirit, after 20 years in the cybersecurity industry, where I had spent my time researching and finding ways to automatically detect security vulnerabilities in software, I went back to graduate school to pursue my doctorate in… cognitive diversity in education, of all things.

On the one hand, being a doctoral student in the field of twice-exceptionality made me feel less of a fraud tackling the challenge of writing a book on the subject. On the other, as I dug into research on giftedness and twice-exceptionality of culturally diverse communities – I guess I never mentioned that I am a first-generation American born and raised in the former Soviet Union and later Ukraine who immigrated to the U.S. almost 30 years ago (see the long sentences – this is the style of writing I inherited from my native tongue) – it became clear that the reason I was failing to find resources in Russian that would help me figure out what to do with my kids’ challenges at school as we were embarking on our twice-exceptional journey is that they were utterly nonexistent.

So, why not correct this? Finally, I realized that writing our story would be therapeutic for me personally: it would help me make sense of what we've been through over the past 17 years and maybe even prepare for what's to come.

For all the reasons mentioned above, I wrote the first version of this book in Russian and named it The Woes of Wit, paying tribute to Alexander Griboyedov’s classic comedy in verse of the same name, a compulsory work of Russian literature that so perfectly captures the dichotomous nature of twice-exceptionality: the wit of giftedness and the woes of special needs.

It tells a story of a bilingual family that faced unexpected challenges of profound giftedness and twice exceptionality; survived an endless series of assessments, diagnoses, therapies, reports, frustrations, anxieties, and doubts; resorted to an involuntary transition to homeschooling; and went through the five stages of grief, starting with denial (this is some kind of mistake), anger (no one understands what we are dealing with), bargaining (we just need to get through one more therapy, and then everything will be fine), depression (nothing helps), and finally acceptance.

However, despite these misfortunes, this is also a story about re-examining perspectives, rethinking values, and experiencing numerous epiphanies about the meaning of learning vs. education, the definition of happiness vs. success, and the value of being vs. doing.

The manuscript is now published and available in both ebook and paperback formats on several platforms. By popular demand, I’ve also been working on Ukrainian and English translations and posting them chapter by chapter on my Substack. I hope at least one of you finds these useful.

Горе от ума: Глубокая одарённость и двойная исключительность на примере одной семьи ИЛИ не было бы счастья, да несчастье помогло

Автор: Екатерина О’Нил

Эта книга — история двуязычной семьи, которая неожиданно столкнулась с проблемами одновременно глубокой одарённости (того самого Грибоедовского ума) и особых потребностей (соответственно, горя) — аутизма, дислексии, СДВГ, — то есть миром двойной исключительности или 2и. Непонимание окружающих, которые видят в 2и-детях только недостатки, бесконечная череда обследований, диагнозов, терапий, отчётов, разочарований, тревог и сомнений. Вынужденный переход на домашнее обучение и прохождение через пять стадий горя, начиная с отрицания (это какая-то ошибка), гнева (никто не понимает, с чем мы столкнулись), торга (нужно только пройти ещё один курс терапии), депрессии (ничего не помогает) и, наконец, принятия. Но, несмотря на кажущиеся несчастья, это история о пересмотре взглядов, переосмыслении ценностей и многочисленных счастливых озарениях по поводу разницы между обучением и образованием, определением счастья и успеха, ценностью процесса и результата.