Gillian
Gillian is a seven-year-old girl who cannot sit in school. She continually gets up, gets distracted, flies with thoughts, and doesn't follow lessons. Her teachers worry about her, punish her, scold her, reward the few times that she is attentive, but nothing. Gillian does not know how to sit and cannot be attentive.
One day, Gillian's mother is called to school. The lady, sad as someone waiting for bad news, takes her hand and goes to the interview room. The teachers speak of illness, of an obvious disorder. Maybe it's hyperactivity or maybe she needs a medication.
During the interview a doctor was called in to assess Gillian. He asks all the adults and mother to follow him into an adjoining room from where she can still be seen. As he leaves, he tells Gillian that they will be back soon and turns on an old radio with music.
As the girl is alone in the room, she immediately gets up and begins to move up and down chasing the music in the air with her feet and her heart. The doctor smiles as the teachers and the mother look at him between confusion and compassion, as is often done with an old doctor. So he says:
"See? Gillian is not sick, Gillian is a dancer!"
He recommends that her mother take her to a dance class and that her teachers make her dance from time to time. She attends her first lesson and when she gets home she tells her mother:
"Everyone is like me, no one can sit there!"
In 1981, after a career as a dancer, opening her own dance academy and receiving international recognition for her art, Gillian Lynne became the choreographer for the famous musicals Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love.
Hopefully all “different” children find adults capable of welcoming them for who they are and not for what they lack.
Long live the differences, the little black sheep and the misunderstood. They are the ones who create beauty in this world.
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