gifted kid burnout things that no one seems to talk about:
- the raw panic of hearing about your potential, positive or negative
- a weird brand of imposter syndrome where you genuinely think you’ve fluked your way through every success and you’re gonna be Exposed as a Fraud
- never having learned how to study and having no idea where to start now that you need to
- reading college level books as a kid but being basically illiterate now
- dismissing your struggles as irrelevant because other people have it harder and i should be smart enough to handle this
- feeling like you’ve lost all control over your life (maybe manifesting into depression, anxiety and disordered eating in a grasp for control over something)
- being unable to decide on a career path because you could have had everything, only to watch those opportunities disappear as you fail to commit
something i have always hated was when someone would say things like “yeah, but you’re smart” or “you don’t even have to try to do good” because literally that makes me feel so incredibly bad about myself now. once you’re told you’re above everyone else intellectually and are treated as such, it seriously damages how well you function when you finally realize you aren’t.
i was in gifted programs since kindergarten/first grade and even went to a special gifted school. except where i live now there is no such thing as gifted so no one even knows what i’m talking about. and now if i get a grade less than 95/90 depending on the subject i feel like i’m a complete failure and everyone’s like oh my god stop asking for attention you’re passing. and like i get so freaking jealous? i guess of people who are smarter than me? and i don’t know how to actually study or anything like that to ever improve and i just hate school. and that last sentence oh my god @lupin-for-president
i used to come close to the top marks in primary school fox six years, i spent 11hours in the library near my home every day for three, and i was told that i was smart and had potential to do great things. but then when i grew up, i realized that knowing how to complete a 50cm high stack of practice papers in half a year didn’t mean anything when i had to start writing essay after essay for my uni degree. my grades were dropping to a near failing point and i kept believing that i had fluked my way through my younger years. i didn’t know how to study for something that wasn’t a multiple choice question or a question that only required me to write numbers in lines to get a final, correct answer. this time, there is no correct answer. and it tore me apart because how could i be so clueless at doing something i love? i love reading books and watching films, breaking them down and analyzing them. but because i‘m not doing well in school (due to the different nature of how i was conditioned to study), i went through a phase where i hated books and films, to the point where i decided to take a gap semester (which i am doing now) to rediscover my love for them. all because i was told i was smarter than other kids when i was young.
My friends are constantly saying stuff like this, like I’ll get upset because I wrote an essay that was a lot worse than my others and my friends are like ‘oh come one you got like 80% it’s fine,’ and yes, it is fine. But I’ve had smart and gifted and perfect drilled into my head so much that fine doesn’t cut it, okay? I’ve been told that I’m going to be famous and rich and successful and it seems like a compliment but all I see when I hear that is an expectation. Because what if I’m not? What if I flunk my history essay, or I don’t study for my math test? What if I don’t live up to that perfect expectation? So yes, it’s fine, but it’s not good enough.
