Were you a gifted child? How are you seen as adult?

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Yes, i had a gift for writing and i suppose i knew it. I would pick up thoughts and manipulate them
into words of trust, to captivate an audience, little did i know i was doing it on such a wider scale,
no wonder people thought my intense words and actions were filtered out at them.
Musically, i had triumphs but i didn't quite flourish as one would expect.The gift of sound i think
is for the untrained ear but mentally, you have to be on key, or you'll find the words and notes
arrange themselves in an entirely different way synchronically.
Anyway, i was always being praised on use of words and maths was always 100 out of 100,
haven't got a clue where the memory came from. Its both a blessing and a bit of a curse,but like
an eagle rising from the summit it swooped down and each time gave me courage to stand back
on my own two feet when things got a bit rough.
People respect those who havean eye for detail and a gift for words and words that fulfill wisdom
in a childs mind come back to light when the gift of percieving the truth comes back again.

When I was a child, most of my peers and many adults considered me gifted. I had (and I still have) an above-average ability to learn things, a few very creative ideas (art-related: I have no lateral thinking skills worth mentioning) and a very good memory. I learned to read and write at an early age (according to my parents, when I was 3, although I do not recall reading or writing before the age of 5), but I remember not caring about numbers, even though I could do basic operations easily. Until I was a teenager, there were people asking my mother if she ever considered enrolling me in a school for gifted children when I was younger. Personally, I never considered myself a gifted child: I simply liked acquiring information and spent most of the day reading encyclopedias because I was (and I still am) a social ret*d. Besides, IQ tests show that I am only two deviations above the norm, which is not enough to be a "genius" and fails to take my numerous shortcoming into account.

Anyway, nowadays, things became a little more complicated. My inability to fake "NT-ness", coupled with my more developed rational skills lead people to consider me a very intelligent man, but just as crazy as I am smart. Both at work and at school, people consider me a strange, but competent man. As a classmate once said, the weeks leading to the final exams are the only time in the year when the entire class wants to be my friend. At work, my superiors somehow put in their heads that they need to invest as much in me as they can, because they think that I will somehow return their investment (I think they intend to put me in leadership positions, even though I am not confident enough to do that). Even my fatigue and decreasing performance since I began university while still working did not seem to convince them otherwise.

However, since I have grown to become an unmotivated and apathetic man, with no coping mechanisms to deal with my problems and an increasing desire to leave civilization and live as a hermit (which I cannot do because my mother does not make enough money to live on her own), I just feel like they are overrating me. I agree that I had potential to become a successful person. Maybe I still have it. But I have mixed feelings about it. Sometimes I accept that I am different (I am not talking about intelligence: I am talking about neurodiversity) and I want to do something to prove that I can use it to achieve great things. At other times, I just want to isolate myself and live in the wilderness without any kind of contact with other people.

As a kid, I learned to read early, and kept doing it. Passing tests covered up my failure to communicate and I was adjudged bright.

Changing schools every few years (my dad's autistic too) covered up the gaps well enough to see me admitted to an Australian university by the time I was sixteen. That was as far as I got.

A lot later on, I picked up my first tertiary qualification the day before my fiftieth birthday...

My adult negative perspective on the life consequences of gifted labelling and resulting harmful exploitation and manipulation by teachers and their ambitions. Faculties Not Gifts, hopefully a title that sums up the critical message being given:

http://www.scottishautismnetwork.org.uk/FacultiesNotGifts.doc

At a personal level, writing this was part of the important struggle to discredit the memory of all that was believed about me at that time and not to be identified as gifted now. That has been my agenda with it throughout adult life. A good agenda, I propose, for all those folks here who feel they are not living up now to what their childhoods made them feel they were or should be.

I was regarded as gifted at school and was even allowed to stand next to my desk when I needed to, otherwise the bouncing knees would get on everyone's nerves, while underperforming children were sent out or punished in other ways. It's funny to think now that my oddities were tolerated because I was smart and because I was smart nobody wanted to think about whether I may have some sort of cognitive problem because that would have immediately made me stupid and crazy, which would not have been acceptable for my parents.

I am still considered gifted I think in some ways although I have massively underachieved in life mostly due to sociability issues. I tried managing people and it was horrible, I hate sitting in meetings, lose patience with everyone's ego issues and get into 'phases' where I just want to hide from the world for extended periods - the usual I guess

I think I was seen gifted as a child not because I was gifted but because my interests were not typical for a child/teen. At least not in the small town where I grew up.

I got excellent marks in history because I could suddenly quote Plutarch but I've always had very bad memory and it cost me huge effort not to mess up all the dates in the test.

I've always studied only the things I was obsessed with, could never make my brain hold any information outside the topic of interest. And, in addition to that, I never know when my obsession will cease, so I gave up many things BEFORE I could become really professional in them.
I used to hate myself for that, for being not able to learn systematically like normal people do; now, I'm just trying to relax and enjoy.

I'm 37 now but the thing is that I'm not feeling any older than 20 years ago; I can't say I'm more gifted or less gifted than I used to be; inside, it's exactly the same feeling, the same obsession etc., but since the uni was over I've had nowhere to show off.
At work, no one cares for what I know outside my functions.

Some close friends with whom I can talk about the things I love still think I'm talented; BUT I think it's just because I know a little more than them.
I'm sure that if someone really professional checked my knowledge they would find lots of gaps.

So I think it's no giftedness, it's just the obsession.

Last edited by FirstDay on 12 Oct 2013, 3:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

I was a little gifted as a child, still am, but my gifts are not very useful, and my disabilities outweigh my gifts.

This is an interesting subject, does your obsession make you gifted or not.

I was questioning my own giftedness during my studies and something one of my professors said gave me great comfort: " There's only one kind of talent and that is the talent of diligence and working hard. If you are doing what you love, that will come automatically."

That was of course music to my Aspie ears

I'm sure our obsessions make us talented in peoples eyes, not just because we know a lot about some subject but because they are impressed by our passion. It's a mystery to me how so many people have zero passion and interest for anything outside their mundane everyday life

So I definately would not call our obsessions "just obsessions". They are a gift and we are therefore "gifted"

90% agree with the idea that obsession is half talent.

The 10% are for some problems that might be not aspie specific but still can limit the giftedness.

There is this wide spread stereotype that AS people have savant memory; well, if that's right, then I'm not typical. I have very good memory for visual things, and very bad for names and numbers. This is quite a problem considering my obsession with certain periods in history. Recently, it's been Rome in I-II centuries A.D.
Now, imagine that I remember everything I have seen (ruins, frescoes, statues, coins, glassware, furniture, etc. - thousands of things) but I don't know for example in what year Nero died... I mean, I knew it yesterday, and now I will look up in Wiki and I will know it for a couple of hours and then forget it again like I did some 50 times before.
That feels so weird...
I'm not saying I can't learn such things at all; it just takes so much effort, much more than any average school kid would need.

As to visual memory, it has nothing to do with my interests; I also remember the litter I saw in the street today while walking my dog. Well, maybe looking at things can be an interest in itself, I don't know. As a photographer, I really think that everything in the world is worth seeing.

Then, there's another problem: whenever I try to produce a coherent text on any topic, I have awful stupor; it feels like my language is too primitive for my ideas, and I'm never satisfied with what I write. It's not so bad as my memory, just average stupidity But anyway, no signs of "giftedness" here.



I think they're just balanced. Passion is something that outweighs many things in life; sleeping 3 hours a day, forgetting to eat because of your work, wasting all your money on books, forgetting friends who can't share your interest, etc. - it's all really a bit weird.
They can somehow distribute their time and energy among the many things they care for. Family, job, health, being accepted by the society, shopping, politics, etc. Not that I envy them; I don't really think their lives are more comfortable. Too many things to worry about; I would go crazy.

Firstday, I think you are an good example of how we can be very talented in one thing and then suck at something else. That is a standard Aspergers symptom. Such a cool gift, to have a photographic memory. Maybe your brain is protecting itself from overloading and doesn't store other type of information so well because of that. I'm also visually "talented" and think mainly in pictures, I wonder if this is also the reason for my difficulties remembering certain things. What you said about being balanced vs. obsessed, that makes sense.

On the topic: I did very well at school, but have not exelled later in life that much. I read somewhere that girls can get worse after they hit puberty, something makes Aspergers features more strong. I remember starting to feel very tired and also depressed during the high school years. Would be interesting to learn more about that phase and why it happens.

Remembering everything in this regard starts to sound like the Jorge Borges short story, "Funes the Memorious". Read that once, and, yikes.

If I talk to a stranger on a topic for which I have one of my channeled obsessions, as it were, I will sound like I have both talent and a bit of a savant's memory. If not, then I sound either semi-normal or, more commonly, more than a bit tactiturn and offsetting.

FWIW, I was able to blow through high school, at least academically, but the gifted and talented description went away in college. If I was interested in whatever course topic was offered, I did well; if not, I was generally one of the class bottom feeders. Fortunately, I went in an era that had a bunch of courses where you pretty much got a "C" for just showing up and taking the exams. Something that the law schools used to call Undergrad Grade Inflation. Fortunately for me, I had an interest in engineering courses and busted hump there to graduate in reasonable shape.

Anyway, for my first job, which lasted over a decade, I sorta plodded along as a low to mid-level engineer and lived exactly as that.

Saw an ad for a engineer in another city, answered it, and within a year, I got into my work and started getting sent all over the friggin' place as a workaholic wizard. I'd put in a 10 hour day or so, then go out and take photos of all the construction that I could find of interest, then spend a late dinner and evening cataloging the pix that I got back from previous trips. I started to see engineering drawings in 3D and all manner of weird crap. Oh yeah, didn't go out on a date for five years, either.

I've done well professionally ever since, and am slightly little more balanced these days, but have to put on a continual song and dance to mask the parts that suck, i.e., the lack of a real social skill set. In my case, the obsession and focus giveth and taketh away, but because it wasn't too far off (or on) the spectrum, it's gotten viewed as talent over the years. It's more the luck of the draw, because if I had, for whatever reason, gotten into something of less commercial value, which could have very well happened, I would be in far worse financial shape.

Remembering everything in this regard starts to sound like Jorge Borges' short story, "Funes the Memorious". Read that once and, yikes. Wiki has a brief summary of it.

If I talk to a stranger on a topic for which I have one of my channeled obsessions, as it were, I will sound like I have both talent and a bit of a savant's memory. If not, then I sound either semi-normal or, more commonly, more than a bit tactiturn and offsetting.

FWIW, I was able to blow through high school, at least academically, but the gifted and talented description went away in college. If I was interested in whatever course topic was offered, I did well; if not, I was generally one of the class bottom feeders. Fortunately, I went in an era that had a bunch of courses where you pretty much got a "C" for just showing up and taking the exams. Something that the law schools used to call Undergrad Grade Inflation. Fortunately for me, I had an interest in engineering courses and busted hump there to graduate in reasonable shape.

Anyway, for my first job, which lasted over a decade, I sorta plodded along as a low to mid-level engineer and lived exactly as that.

Saw an ad for a engineer in another city, answered it, and within a year, I got into my work and started getting sent all over the friggin' place as a workaholic wizard. I'd put in a 10 hour day or so, then go out and take photos of all the construction that I could find of interest, then spend a late dinner and evening cataloging the pix that I got back from previous trips. I started to see engineering drawings in 3D and all manner of weird crap. Oh yeah, didn't go out on a date for five years, either.

I've done well professionally ever since, and am slightly little more balanced these days, but have to put on a continual song and dance to mask the parts that suck, i.e., the lack of a real social skill set. In my case, the obsession and focus giveth and taketh away, but because it wasn't too far off (or on) the spectrum, it's gotten viewed as talent over the years. It's more the luck of the draw, because if I had, for whatever reason, gotten into something of less commercial value, which could have very well happened, I would be in far worse financial shape.

So I've been the same person for the better part of six decades, but sometimes I've been talented and other times not.

Never heard about that ... If yes, I wonder what makes things worse: the physical maturation or the changing social roles?
Well, I'm female (at least, anatomically ) but my WORST time ever was between 5 and 8 or 9; since then, it's been only getting better (I mean in terms of learning to live with people and accept myself the way I am). As long as I know, it's the standard aspie scheme: having huge problems at elementary school and then slowly growing up to be a "slightly weird" adult. I was a little better at high school than at elementary, then a little better at the university than at high school, etc. No worsening during or after puberty.
There was definitely a lot of negativity when I started to realize what people expected from me as a "woman", and yes, it made me feel depressed. However, I think I escaped a lot of emotional problems because my parents never forced me into the traditional gender role; they didn't mind me being "different". Mother said: You don't have to be like everybody else. Thanks to her, I was growing up with this idea that being not-like-everybody-else is kind of cool, so there wasn't much inner pressure because of that; so all this sex/gender stuff didn't affect my IQ, learning, work, etc.
Which in no way means I didn't have other problems

I was labeled 'gifted & talented' as a child.
Special classes, bumped ahead a year in math (should have been two, and a year of school besides, but I spent 3rd grade math class learning BASIC on Apple IIe computers and they said I was too 'socially immature' to be skipped a grade), in HS I could pick my classes and never get kicked out of honors or AP classes for bad grades (other kids needed to maintain a B average or better or be sent to a lower level class), and I graduated a year early and scored so high on one portion of the state exam that the school called the testing company to make sure it wasn't an error.
Most of the kids in school thought I was a genius who got straight As.
The kids in my classes thought I was a genius slacker who didn't get enough sleep and got terrible grades, which was closer to the truth.

As an adult...

Well, people I meet are always telling me I'm smart, as if that's some sort of revelation.
I've been called a genius many times by many different people, and my last psychologist told me my IQ is probably somewhere in the 140s or 150s range (I was tested as a child, but never saw the results. The teachers and counselors who did, though, always sounded impressed/intimidated when they talked about it), so there might be something to that.

I never graduated college, I'm in my mid 30s and just (hopefully!) starting a career (anyone need a back end web developer?), I don't exactly get special treatment when it comes to getting work and getting paid what I'm worth, I'm pretty much invisible and unimportant, and I have yet to make enough to support myself.
I find it difficult to find other adults to have interesting conversations with and be friends with because of the fact that, generally speaking, I'm so much more intelligent than most of the ones I come in contact with.
This presents a problem on both fronts as people tend to feel intimidated or like I'm being pretentious, and I feel like they're not able to keep up and contribute.

So, there ya go.

It was in Aspergirl by Rudy Simone where I read about puberty affecting Aspergers:

"Periods... they throw our body chemistry into turmoil. Some Aspergirls don't really show strong autistic symptoms until puberty. Prior to this we may just seem gifted; but when puberty hits, it flips us on our heads and you can see our autistic underbelly."

So according to Simone the raging hormones can have this worsening effect on autistic behaviour. Don't see why that could not affect guys as well. Add the changing social roles and all the weird stuff you go through mentally/ emotionally and it's no wonder hitting puberty might be the turning point for worse for many gifted children. Wish I could find more info on the connection between body chemistry and Aspergers!

I thought it's easier for Aspies to shine in elementary school and then NTs gradually get to same level as you. That's what happened to me. In university the difficulties making deadlines and presenting my school work to audiences made my grades drop. In high school I was in top 5 in a class of about 150 people, in uni just an average student.

Well, what matters is I do well at work, even if it wears me out a lot. And my coworkers seem to think I'm terribly smart and good at what I do Maybe it's the pressure of having been a gifted child: unless you make it as some kind of star professionally, you will feel like you did not fulfill the high expectations, your own and your surrounding's.

I'm not sure if you mean that not doing well socially is also the reason you have not excelled professionally.

Might help you if you ask yourself if people feel respected and your equal in your company. Because that is how it should be, no matter how much more intelligent you are compared to them. Unless there's mutual respect between people very little good can come out of it. Put your intelligence into work and figure out how to make people feel good about themselves in your company. That takes skill. Pull that off and you will get far.

A piece of humble pie that works for me: every single human being we meet will know something about life that we don't.