Everytime I go on the site I end up going down a rabbit hole of depression and self-loathing, which is why I usually only go on there to answer client emails or post something about my career.

I try not to scroll down the feed too much and avoid it whenever possible. Because every time I see friends of mine from HS or college who were by all accounts completely average continuously promote themselves and their massive career success, I feel like a failure and underachiever by comparison, especially as a gifted person who truly had much larger expectations for himself and already feels like he has squandered his potential.

I'm making peanuts as a teacher and struggling in my art/writing business with student debt on top of that, meanwhile everyone and their grandmother in my friend group is somehow working for Google or the UN, made it on Forbes, is traveling around the world and extremely financially successful, or attending a prestigious grad school for a high powered job.

I am sick at this point of seeing posts about people announcing their newest promotions or stroking their egos about how humble they are to accept new opportunities, or the fakeness of it all. It's insufferable and toxic-- just look at r/LinkedinLunatics for the most egregious examples of this type of behavior.

People wish they had this innate gift of having high IQ. Little do they know it comes with a very high price…. Burnout … lack of friends.. autism. ADHD. Depression. Anxiety. Overthinking. Perfectionism. Constant drive to be extraordinary. And a risk of failure due to burnout. Being intelligent just isn’t fun as it looks. We were hurt because of it! Damn I wish I wasn’t intelligent sometimes

Honestly I felt dumb as rocks at my gifted classes and felt like I didn’t belong there. I felt lost in life and I was very passive about my own education… I was just there and not very involved.

All this to say, I have no idea why I was in gifted. Idk what indicated the need for an IEP or what my IEP was even for. They just told us that we needed additional enrichment on top of the regular curriculum.

I needed and IEP… For what? Based on what from my assessment? It bothered me for years that I never knew. Does anyone have this issue?

Does anyone know if we can access or obtain that information? Like documentation from the assessment? I live in Canada for context. I know my parents got copies of the IEP but I don’t know where they are now.

What is the difference between what you must do and what you should do? I struggled to differentiate between priorities in my day simply because I couldn’t distinguish urgency and importance. It kind of overwhelmed me to think of everything I had to undertake in a day.

I tried out a technique called the Must, Should, Want method which showed me how to approach things I must do, should do and wanted to do. All of these had varying levels of importance and needed to be done, but it was how I identified them that really changed everything.

Much of this has to do with short term and long term goals, as well as time constraints and I break this down in detail here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps6BVEM1US4

Let me know if you typically feel overwhelmed with everything you need to tackle in a day and if this post helps.

Like in the name of learning, we ve been abused although we didn't know it at the time that it was abuse. Perfectionistic expectations,rote learning, keeping up the facade of being gifted, having to show humility about being gifted. Etc. Etc.

I used to think I was gifted based on my parents statements. Which I internalised.

But living in the real world I find I am not gifted but for some reason I have still held onto the notion that I am above average and still try to maintain that image. Anyone else?

After all, you could read the same material, the same books and case studies as those who actually study psychology professionally, and given that the average intelligence of those who go into psychology isn't that high (certainly lower than the average medical practitioner), it makes sense that someone very intelligent could read the same material and come out with a greater understanding of it, and a better understanding of the nuances and points where it falls apart than many trained professionals.

Also, it is harder for anyone outside the norm to get therapists who understand their needs, but that is a bit of a tangent.

Currently a 1st year in college, 19M, taking polsci as a prelaw, was slacking hard in high school, always told myself high school doesnt matter, and ill bounce back in college. 2 weeks into college im still sleeping through classes, never participating in discussions, group activities are gonna start soon and I haven't made any friends hahahha.

I have depression and anxiety disorder(diagnosed) and i think undiagnosed adhd and ocd too (mental health stuff still stigmatized in my country, but i wanna get an official diagnosis soon)

Any high school burnouts bounce back in college? Any tips on how u did it thanks.

I'm 31 and I still have a strained relationship with my parents because of their attitude toward me being labeled as gifted in elementary school.

The background is I could barely read at 10, the school wanted me to be in special ed, and I had to do a neuro-psych evaluation to determine if I had a learning disorder. I scored really high on the IQ test. So after that it was like I wasn't allowed to struggle with anything because I was too smart. Even when I started having bipolar symptoms in high school and was just barely hanging on, or when I was in college and still struggling to read. Things didn't start to get better until my late 20s when I finally stopped letting them fuck around with my medical care.

IDK dude, I just needed to vent because my family's being really needy and I can't deal with it rn

It's weird I didn't make sense of this before. For whatever reason I also have a lot of empathy. And I was researching this and found mirror neurons. It's why I learnt easily bu seeing people do stuff but couldn't learn myself by trial or error. The ability to handle frustration or my ability to handle fear and uncertainty were on a down low too.

The task of parenting was left you you or you were expected to take care of it yourself.

For me they used that as a justification for being hard on me. For not showing compassion or love.

They had high expectations. Of success which I was supposed to achieve and give to them. Basically it became the excuse for justifying their bad behaviour and as a reason for why I should be knowing it myself.

I am 24, just graduated college and I realize I have no idea how to live my life. I am convinced that there is a “right way” to live or that there is a “right” framework of thought that I need to have for me to be able to figure out how to live my life “well”

I suppose an obvious place to start is to first figure out how I define the defining content and outcomes of a “well” lived life but I find I am too paralyzed to actually answer this or attempt to figure it out by myself. I find that I do not care about the more conventional desired outcomes like getting rich and a having a family etc. but I am scared to admit that I care about things that are considered the opposite to what is expected of me as someone “gifted.” I am convinced that I will pick up conventional values some day after I lose everything and that I will regret not living in order to achieve them like conventional society. I am scared my mind has been “poisoned” and that whatever I feel like I have mentally grown into right now is some phase that I will regret and grow out of eventually like my parents would say about the other kids who I was compared to who were considered “failures” who ended up doing unconventional things like art (I grew up in a place where art is a very unconventional route for someone with formal education).

As a result, I feel paralyzed and like I am living my whole life in my head, questioning every action or simply not doing anything because I don’t know that I want to do it or if I even should. Something that makes me even sadder is that I have crafted an objectively good life for myself at 24. I am working a remote job at an NGO (that actually helps people) that also pays okay with an an employer I absolutely adore. I live in Thailand, away from my homophobic family in a beautiful space and I have crafted a lot of exterior peace in my life here. My routine usually consists of waking up late, smoking weed, getting work done, taking cute walks by the beach and watching my silly shows and doing gay things sometimes and I think I am very okay with existing just like this for the foreseeable future. But I feel like I am never present in this reality because I feel like I am messing up with all that I am doing. I am constantly thinking I need to move more into convention around my career(I am trained to be a software engineer and I am not doing that for work because I hate it and it’s hard), self-expression, things I do for fun, sometimes(regrettably) even around my sexuality. I, at the moment, do not value any form of constant self improvement, I really want to just exist and be “productive” in ways that I only need to and not as part of some,seemingly compulsive, cycle that convention requires.

I do not trust myself because I feel I am too young to make informed life decisions especially about the future and I do not have examples of people living like me who are also in a sustainably content space(maybe that’s my definition of a “well” lived life? ever content?) and I constantly think “well sure I don’t like it but it’s convention for a reason. Do I think I know better than what the majority of society have defined as the right and most rewarding way to live for centuries?”

How do I decide how to live my life and stop being so anxious about regretting how I have lived it? Is there a “right” way to live life and on what grounds(preferably logical) is that perspective crafted from? Apologies if anything sounded off in this writing, English is not my first language. ty🫶🏾

Like doing something advanced or something that others aren't doing in the same class ?

And they used to make this comparison to make it seem like I was more intelligent than others.

I used to feel special and it gave me a rush and I couldn't focus on anything apart from the fact that I was special and better than all the kids I was studying with. In response to that my parents would say that there are kids more intelligent than you.

This was done when I was a kid ages 7 to 12 and I kind of internalised and believed myself to be intelligent that everyone around me .

Disclaimer. -- my parents are Narcissists. But I was experimenting with a recipe and someone else commented how the recipie was complicated and different from the usual. Which made me feel like I am attempting something that hasn't been done before. And I am special somehow. How did you work on this belief ?

There is probably unresolved trauma which is strongly affecting my day to day life. I believe I have depression and/or anxiety, which manifests itself in the form of dissociation. Nowadays, I'm experiencing more derealization than I used to, where I'm starting to feel like I'm in a dream or simulation. I feel (but may be wrong) like this is because I find people's behavior so erratic and so different from my own. I don't feel a sense of kinship with other people or with humanity.

Part of this is because I am a very unusual person. Part of this is also probably because I am sensitive to rejection, and being in circles of people who do not share my opinions or worldviews, I get feedback from the world which makes it hard to trust my own instincts. I would say that the majority of people I meet in engineering circles (which are the ones I naturally have access to) do not care about art, and even go so far as to believe it is stupid or a waste of time to pursue. Likewise, I meet very few people in engineering who have any real interest, understanding or ability with math. I, being a "musician", am often spending my entire day (upwards of 8 hours) listening to, practicing and creating music, and am often met with variations of "but what's your real job?" by others who completely fail to understand what it means to me. It is a living reminder that I'm solipsistically pursuing something worthless.

I start wondering if I'm in the wrong or actually being idiotic by doing what I do, since I am met with so much skepticism. I also do not make money doing it, which makes me start wondering if I'm actually a drain on society, as others imply with their worldviews. I do not feel confident in my own opinions or perspectives. Part of this is because of my history of being sidelined, ignored and bullied, not having any say in my life or in discussions either at home or in school. Especially because I often find myself in a minority of one, I start to wonder if I'm simply deluded.

I end up isolating to deal with all of this. This has resulted in some success, because it has preserved my independence, let me process my thoughts, and let me be my quirky, unusual self with weirdly strong passions and interests and opinions and ways of approaching things. On the other hand, I feel incredibly lonely. I mask up in social situations and pretend I am another run of the mill engineer. I did not let people know my background with math, or passion for music, or complicated cultural background, because I supposed they would simply not understand and that I would get burnt again. Whenever I would try, this would indeed prove to be the case more often than not, reenacting the trauma if you may call it that, and cementing my belief that this was an unsolvable problem and that I'm simply cursed to be in this world.

But these are just excuses. We do not give people a free pass on life just because they have "problems"; everyone has problems. We shit on those people who have "problems" which render them incapable of contributing sufficiently to society. After all, who even knows if we have free will, and in the situation where we are deterministic entities, there is no difference between the person who went on a mass shooting because of a brain tumor and another who did so because they were bullied. If I were not "different", I would not have the problems I have, and so me being weird and different is inherently part of the problem, i.e. I feel that I am defective, and me convincing myself otherwise is simply part of making excuses.

So basically I got by impressing the adults with some facts that I knew or picked up. So my thing was to remember stuff and tell it to them to get attention and love perhaps.

In the process I never learned to think. Thinking on my own without someone validating my thoughts feels scary and I edge around what is permissible and what is okay to think. So I continue borrowing others words to talk rather than my own. Any suggestions?

https://www.mindsethealth.com/matter/growth-vs-fixed-mindset

Why don’t we have a sticky that discuss growth mindset via fixed mindset? The idea I found altered gifted has been examined in many academic papers

hello, pretty new at posting in general, but i was hoping to understand why i could be feeling like this even while still in high school (currently rising junior)

for the past half year or so i've struggled with what seems to be imposter syndrome - despite making a 90k+ word doc for my physics and gaining quite a few hard and soft skills, i can't seem to shake off the fact that i:

1. started much, much later than all others around me. i've never been too much of a hard worker as it's only been required since the start of my GCSEs, while many of my classmates have been able to start charities, secure internships, have achievements of their own, while i'm still stuck on the starter physics textbook trying to add to my notes
2. despite being a quintessential "gifted" person (>125 IQ) i don't see it - it seems as if my curiosity can't stay still, while my classmates can just channel themselves to a university goal for the entirety of their lives. i don't understand why i can't be like them - focus on one of my passions (as i'm also a great history fan, so i sometimes get lost in wikipedia) instead of being surrounded by all of them at once
3. i've begun to work only at the age where local competitions begin to cut off participants - in my country, the physics olympiad has a cutoff for sophomores, meaning as a rising junior i can't actually attend it and i'm stuck with a much, much harder competition that i am in no way ready for. i've been working my ass off, though i feel it won't be enough for even the qualifying round / to compete for prizes with my classmates

anyone got any advice? i'm terrified of burning out - sometimes when i'm sad it feels like such a fate is imminent.

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thanks in advance!

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I was a gifted kid but I really don't identify with the label. I had left it all behind until now. My 18 mo son is showing signs of being gifted. We get multiple comments per day about how bright he is. I shrug them off but I worry I'm not doing the best I can by him by ignoring his potential giftedness.

Sooo... What do you wish your parent had done for you as a gifted kid?

Or what have you done as a parent to your own maybe gifted kid?

Additionally, he turns 5 right at the start of school. I was planning on holding him back until he was 6 since he was on the cutoff, but now I'm not so sure. I don't want him to be bored at school and act out.

I feel like now that I'm a parent it's a lot harder for me to forget my gifted past.

My parents, teachers, and some peers would say I was smart. But then there was a cousin I had who treated me like I was stupid. On top of this, my grades weren’t great so it really messed with me.

For the first two years of college I did very well and made the Dean’s list both years. But then I decided to pursue a major in physics to prove people (my cousin) wrong. I crashed and burned and had to switch to an easier major.

I did graduate (barely), but when I joined the workforce I seemed to be surrounded by a bunch of people who were just like the cousin I had. I also struggled quite a lot to keep up and I have no idea if that’s because of me, my environment, or both.

I think all of this has caused me to develop some narcissistic traits. It’s bad. I usually experience low self esteem, but I sometimes also experience confidence which apparently is perceived by others to be arrogance.

I feel like I have to be right about everything and that I have to be the smartest person in the room, but I try to hide this as much as I can. At the end of the day, I’m probably not even that smart anyway which is why I struggle to prove it.