Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,2

I had been an energized, confident, and curious child before, now I was noticeably shut down and had a new difficulty learning; I found it extremely hard to focus, I couldn’t concentrate, and my memory was awful. As you can imagine, school became an ordeal for me. Teachers would repeat themselves until I learned to pretend to understand. And while all the other kids were learning to read, I couldn’t make any sense out of the letters. Do you remember getting in those reading circles, passing around the book, and having to read out loud? For me, that was the worst—nervously waiting as the book crept closer and closer, only to look at the page and not understand one word (I think that’s where my crippling fear of public speaking initially came from). It would take me another three years to be able to read, and it continued to be a struggle and an uphill battle for a long time after that.

I’m not sure I ever would have learned to read if it weren’t for the heroes I met and saw in comic books. Regular books couldn’t hold my attention at all, but my fascination with comics drove me to keep pushing myself until I could read their stories without waiting for someone else to read them to me. I would read them by flashlight under my covers late at night. Those stories gave me hope that one person could overcome impossible odds.

My favorite superheroes growing up were the X-Men, not because they were the strongest, but because they were misunderstood and weirdly different. I felt I could relate to them. They were mutants, they didn’t fit into society, and people who didn’t understand them shunned them. That was me, minus the superpowers. The X-Men were outcasts, and so was I. I belonged in their world.

I grew up in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, and I was super-excited one night to discover that, according to the comic books, Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters was located near me. When I was nine years old, I would get on my bike nearly every weekend to ride around my neighborhood looking for the school. I was obsessed. I thought, if only I could locate it, I would find in that school a place where I finally fit in, a place where it was safe to be different, a place where I could discover and develop my own superpowers.

THE BOY WITH THE BROKEN BRAIN

In the real world, life was not very kind. It was around this time that my grandmother, who lived with us and helped raise me, started showing advanced signs of dementia. Watching someone you love lose their mind and memory is hard to describe. It was like losing her over and over until she passed. She was my world and, combined with my learning challenges, she is why I am so passionate about brain health and fitness.

Back in school, I was bullied and made fun of, and not just on the playground but in the classroom, too. I remember one day in elementary school a teacher, frustrated because I wasn’t getting the lesson, pointed at me and said, “That’s the boy with the broken brain.” I was just crushed to realize that this was how she saw me—and that others probably saw me the same way.

Often when you put a label on someone or something, you create a limit—the label becomes the limitation. Adults have to be very careful with their external words because these quickly become a child’s internal words. That’s what happened with me in that moment. Whenever I struggled to learn, did badly on a quiz, wasn’t picked for a team in gym class, or fell behind my other classmates, I would tell myself it was because my brain was broken. How could I possibly expect to do as well as others did? I was damaged. My mind didn’t work like everyone else’s. Even when I studied much harder than my schoolmates, my grades never reflected the effort I was putting in.

I was too stubborn to give up and managed to move on from grade to grade, but I was hardly thriving. While I was advanced in math because of the help of a few of my academically talented friends, I was horrible at most of the other subjects, especially classes such as English, reading, foreign languages, and music. Then, in my freshman year of high school, things got to the point where I