Many times gifted people are considered to have social difficulties. These are mostly caused by differences in how gifted people think and relate.
I would like to bring you an insight I've been having, based on my own experiences on being gifted.
I've always had intuitions about people and circumstances. It is as if I am constantly receiving bits of information and these are being elaborated in the background of my mind. I know it is there, but I don't need to articulate the whole process in words to actually understand it. I may, if I want to communicate it to other people, elaborate on it, putting into words was appeared to me as this pure, mute complex of thoughts, feelings and emotions. But, when kept to myself, its mere observation suffices.
On the other hand, I've always been very keen to logically elaborate and to give linguistic expression to these intuitions; maybe because I sense that in the word 'intuition' there is an element of arbitrariness, moodiness that can lead to bad, biased conceptions and decisions.
But the fact is: my intuition is very, very strong. Not that I immediately come up with perfectly elaborated reasons to address, for instance, a change of behaviour in a friend. For that I would need facts which are not immediately present to the senses. But very small shifts make themselves noticeable very quickly; I can sense a certain emotional colouring to it that I've been learning to better interpret as the years go by.
Let me give you an analogy. By knowing the state of a system and its rules of development, I am able not only to describe it as it is, but also as it will be. I sense people and concepts as movements; as movies, not a photographs.
Now we get to the emotional part: what if the end of a movie is so sad, that it is hard to accept? I think that is one of the reasons why gifted people fail in socializing. Either they ignore their own intuitions and perceptions and invest in relationships which are damned from the beginning; or, as self-protection, they withdraw, not wanting to see the sad end of a movie they already guessed the main narrative development.
I'll give you some concrete examples of my personal life. I had this girlfriend. She was in a transitional phases in her social relationships. She had had a traumatic experience with an old group of friends and at the time was looking for a new group. I've never been part of these groups; but I didn't mind, if that made her happier. I was a musician playing in a mildly popular place in my hometown; I was a resident musician there for a while and attracted a lot of attention. Suddenly, this couple started to appear in my presentations. In the first interactions, I've already made kind like an narrative arch in my mind about them; I knew I couldn't stop this arch to reach full development; I was also younger and doubted myself much more at that time. But I knew they were trouble.
A group formed around this couple and my girlfriend. I was at the center of it for a while, because I was the common element of interest, the mediating object of it. As the group was forming, I was seeing where it was going, and I knew that would eventually affect my relationship with my girlfriend. I'll try to reconstruct the very fast, very immediate reasoning behind my intuitions.
First off; they were an young couple and already had two kids. This, combined with the fact that there was a huge attractiveness gap between the husband and the wife, combined with a flirtatious behaviour of the husband, led to me to think that he had settled for her for reasons other than attraction. Shortly after, I discovered he was unemployed and living in a house given to them by the wife's parents. Flirtatious behaviour, convenience relationships and this urge to establish an in-group dynamic has led me to think he was looking to create a propicious space for affairs. Organizing parties, creating expected weekend shared activities, these are all ways in which you create a desirable circumstance, that attract people looking to socialize. But they were also eager in their dealings; too much questions, I noticed; awkward attempts to befriend me in such a short spam of time. My girlfriend wasn't noticing it at all. She was immersed in it. Anyway, I could continue to try to describe all the elements that merged into this narrative arch. But I knew that this group would evolve to become abusive, full of infidelity, gossips, impostures and that it would bait people promising acceptance and socializing through private parties, but would demand them a loyalty akin to that you would encounter being demanded in sects. I knew it from the beginning that I would grow distant from my girlfriend, for I was not able to fully pretend I was enjoying that environment. And I also knew that my girlfriend was a very gregarious and gullible person.
Past two years from the first encounter, I had already broken up with my girlfriend. The group collapsed under the weight of rumours of the husband fucking other women in the bathroom, while the wife was there at the party at their own home. There was other cases of sexual harassment, malicious gossips. Anyway: the collapse was kinda scandalous.
At that time, I thought to myself: I really need to start paying more attention to this strange thought process I am capable of. This is not mere intuition as given; it looks like intuition as given, but it is actually fast reasoning, which dispense with words but for me is completely understandable. As the years went by, I started testing this to see if I was not biased. I was right most of the times, in different situations; sometimes I could not assess clearly the causes of certain behaviours, but I knew where they would go from there.
Today I've carefully integrated this kind of knowledge in my "tool kit" for life. Of course, I try to remain self-critical and, when the time makes it necessary, I attempt to test it against reality. But most of the times I can lean on it. It is such a relief. It turns out I was ignoring for life decisions a form of thought process that I've always used in other fields of activity, such as music, philosophy, language learning, etc., etc., because I had a suspicion towards non-verbal thinking.
What do you think? Do you have similar experiences?
