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

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I think sometimes we were told by adults that we were going to do something great with our lives and when we fail to live up to that expectation we feel like failures. I still think that my extended family (who are all quiet wealthy) are puzzled that I live a very humble life with my tiny apartment and my budgeting and my not being able to afford things that are not expensive from their point of view. i.e. one said to me, "why don't you get a laptop? They only cost a couple of hundred pounds now" yes and so does heating my house for 2 months in winter time. Heating or a laptop? let me ponder which is more important....

I feel like my family view me as a failure, but if I was less inteligent IQ wise then they would not have such high expectations.

I remember an assignment in middle school where I had to do a book report on any book of my choosing. I chose The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. The teacher rejected the report without even reading it because she automatically assumed that book was over my head, while her assistant was a fundamentalist Christian who took one look at the title and freaked out (obviously, he wasn't paying attention the news when the book was first released). I suppose if I read Green Eggs and Ham, they might have accepted that. Maybe I should have chose The Satanic Bible - that work is a lot dumber than Green Eggs and Ham, and it would have sufficed to prove that I was a rebel in my middle school years.

I remember there was one guidance counselor in my youth who saw sparks of intelligence in me and wanted to work with me to make my life in public school easier. But my mother then screamed at me and told me that if any of the staff at that school took me seriously, she would fight to make sure those people got fired. So I went back to taking my daily beatings at the hands of the bullies, knowing there was literally nothing I could do about it at that time. I got very low grades in middle and high school, because working on my grades was not my highest priority at that time. Surviving every day where I faced a nonstop onslaught of violence and humiliation was all that was on my mind during those years. I often had sensory meltdowns at school that frustrated the teachers and brought endless laughter from the other students at the public schools I went to. Nobody was interested in my intelligence at that time. Not even I was interested in my intelligence at that time. I was merely surviving.

I am grieving the marginalization I faced when I was a minor. However, I took a couple of different IQ tests at the request of my therapist, and both of them ended up giving me a result of over 140. I have the right to be my own master today. My parents believe that being beat into submission is the way that life should be lived. f**k that. I want to enjoy my time on this planet. I want to realize my full potential. I may not be able to develop decent social skills, and I cannot verbalize how I am feeling in any way that is worth a damn, but I am realizing that nobody is going to realize my skills unless I put them into practice daily. I am not going to be marginalized any longer. I am grieving the fact that I never had the chance to be an innocent child. But I am celebrating that I can be a productive adult. I am not surviving now. I am prospering. My family still thinks that I am intellectually inferior and that I have severe cognitive distortions. But I am now realizing how untrue that is. I am at a severe social disadvantage, I will acknowledge that. I cannot express myself using the spoken word at all. But I know I can find my place in the world. I can be successful. I am allowed to be happy. I am allowed to own and stand by every thought and opinion I have. I am allowed to be my own master today. I realized as an adult that the only person with only real power in my life who was continuing to marginalize me was myself. I am making an effort not to live like that today.

I was pretty bright as a child. I caught on to things fairly quickly and was proficient in writing but I could never wrap my brain around numbers. I also very much enjoyed colors, shapes and puzzles. I was always a bit ahead of everyone in school until about middle school. Then things seemed like they were going in reverse. I started to sort of "loose my smarts". My social skills regressed, I began a light and sound sensitivity, and I felt like it was harder everyday to try and function. Now as an adult I think I have an average IQ, my symptoms are still getting worse as time goes on and numbers are still a source of great evil. I can add and subtract fine. Funny as it may sound, I do the finances in my marriage but I will never to go college as I will never be able to pass the required math classes.

I was placed in the top 1 percentile of children academically. I had schools vying for me to attend however I i found the whole social situation incredibly draining and confusing. I always had to go on inter school competitions and found myself as a nervous mess at age 15. I ended up leaving school when i was 16 and working at the local docks. later on i completed many university papers so that i could i could find work elsewhere. I have recently returned to my home town and have met a lot of people that remember me and can not believe i have not done more with my life. when i was growing up Asperger's was not a common diagnosis and i like many many others fell through the cracks. I am grateful that there is a greater awareness of this now.

I guess what really annoys me the most is that people like us get labelled as heartless, selfish and self absorbed monsters - but in reality, only if you are a heartless, selfish and self absorbed monster do you actually get to 'make it' in this life.

I feel like I've done all right. I haven't won a Nobel, nor will I ever; I haven't received an Academy award, nor will I ever; there will be no commemorative plaque for me anywhere - yet I feel perfectly happy with all my achievements and I know that even though most of what I have done was to please myself, some beings also got a benefit along the way and that's just great.

I was never told this. I was told that I could do anything I wanted to do. And they were right. I have proven to myself over and over again that I can do whatever I set my heart to. One thing they didn't tell me was to be careful of what I wish for, but I figured it out along the way.

I was considered gifted by my elementary school teachers, who told my parents to skip me a few grades and get me into a special school. My parents chose to leave me in that school. But I finished out graduate school and have had a stable career. The only way in which I didn't live up to my potential was that I developed some serious health problems that halted my career progress. Doctors couldn't get it sorted, so I had to do that myself.

I'm no longer clear what "gifted" really means. The kids I see in "gifted" programs do not impress me in general (I recently tutored one as a favor to a friend), and several adults who do impress me were not seen as gifted as children.

So what is great? How do you recognize it? What about Van Gogh, whose work was ignored during his lifetime, and now is celebrated? Or, what might any of us do later in our lives?

Do whatever you can, and let the people of the future decide on its greatness?

I've created some amazing things, and people promptly ate them.

I was considered very bright - I taught myself to read at age 4. I stink at math, but I did very well in everything else. Plus I was always reading - history, philosophy....almost anything (hated most fiction).
I also did extremely well in junior college, and later in nursing school. I grasped the material quickly and was able to explain complicated concepts to others, including the math we had to learn.
As an adult, I'm still considered pretty intelligent. That's probably why I was hired in so many places; I would fall apart fairly quickly, though.

Im am having this similar awareness with my 12 year old AS son, and it takes me back to being around his age and being AS ( note I don't have it , I am AS, you can't catch it from me), Anyhow, I think he does really well at subjects where you have to remember and regurgitate the answers. Anything that requires comprehension and application- forget it…..copy and parrot off the answers and he does well…..understanding and application….well there is a different Gestalt there.


As an adult we are expected to apply our knowledge to life, jobs, careers relationships and we are equipped to copy well but not apply…..the academics call it a lack of executive functioning….thats useful if you know what it means…ever more useful if you understand it and can apply it……easier to remember the terminology and look smart…right?


And this is the point; we learn by copying and keep on doing it and are less able to apply what we copy to the appropriate situation as we get older…..when i was a child i did not consider myself gifted, my father used to throw the chess board at me when i was 9 because i used to beat him at chess…..I can see now how this would have made any chew playing adult angry but at the time i thought he was just really crap at chess…turns out he is AS too.


So 3 generations of AS and what have we learned?

not much really- we copy , we don't learn.

Well......I tested into the "gifted program" in elementary school, and was seen as bright because I learned to read at an early age, and was good at spelling and writing.

However, as an adult, I think some of the family tends to view me as mentally slow, partially because my younger sister told stories for years about how I had been diagnosed as functioning at the level of an eight year-old.

Ok that's a positive way to look at things. But the contrast between Van Gogh and me is that he actually managed to produce very striking art, even if people didn't understand it during his lifetime, he still managed to combine shapes and colors in a very pleasing and unique way.

Every so often I remember the look on the art teacher's face as she told me I was going to have a career in art. I remember my English teacher telling me that I was going to be a writer. Not sure if he meant novels or working for a newspaper or what. But I wonder what I would say if I met them now and what their reaction would be. Would they be disappointed?

On the other hand, I was bad at Maths and my Math teacher said I would end up working in an office. She was right.

I don't suppose it matters what they think as long as I'm happy. I don't work in a very structured environment now and i feel like I don't understand what I'm meant to be doing half the time. I think my boss hired me because he doesn't understand this part of the job and wanted someone he could leave to run it without his input. I must be doing ok though because since starting this thread I've been given a pay rise and I am working my way out of debt. So if successful means not being in debt I will be there sometime toward the middle of next year.

hurtloam, is that new avatar a portrait of you? I am in love with it!

which brings me to what I wanted to say

I'm really moved to curate an art exhibition of autistic art..paintings, sculptures, stories, whatever. I've never put on an art exhibition, but how hard can it be

would (any of) you want to participate?

It's not me and I didn't draw it, but I do have long hair and I like hats. i wanted something softer than Saga Noren, I'm feeling less grumpy at the moment.

I do impressinist landscapes in acrylic, but haven't painted anything for a couple of years. I find people difficult. However, if I did try to draw me it would look as little like me as this image does.

An art exhibition is a good goal to have. Not something I could manage myself, it would stress me out sooo much. It depends on your personality I think. If someone is the kind of person who like to organize and put on an event then it would probably be very exciting. It would send me into a nervous panic.

I was viewed as a very gifted child. Skipped grades, then they put me in the gifted classes and staggered my classes with older grades for my more advanced subjects. Tested very well for everything, yadda yadda. Then the bullying got physical and my grades went from acing everything to mediocre. I still aced my tests, but did almost none of my work and skipped classes.

As an adult, I'm viewed as intelligent by folks, but I'm a stay at home mom, so I regularly get the "you're wasting your potential" spiel. What people don't realize is that I want to spend time with and teach my daughter all day and really give her a strong foundation and nurturing environment to start in. That way, if she ends up with AS like me, she will always know that she is loved, supported, and wanted by us.

Anyways, I was seen as the "most likely to become an astronaut" kid in school, and now I'm viewed as the "wasted potential" adult who is completely happy with my position in life I think I'm fulfilling my potential, not wasting it.

I was seen as gifted. I nearly failed college due to social difficulties. I am now seen as "stupid" by my wife, who never hesitates to remind me of that. I am also "full of myself", since I DARE to commit the horrible sin of telling her how I have improved my workplace.

Of course, when her daughter tells her about the improvement's she's made at her workplace, it's something to be proud of. I, on the other hand, am not permitted to do anything potentially worthy of not nor am I to ever let anyone know I have done it.

Implement entirely new safety training and safety record-keeping system for three different departements--all at once? It's nothing. It just means I'm an egotist.
Do the first inventory the physics lab has had ever, or at least in 20 years? It just means I'm an egotist.
Being asked by the head of the National Spill School to look into getting a grant from Homeland Security? It just means I'm an egotist.

I was a child prodigy musician, and everyone expected to see me at Carnegie Hall one day. As an adult, I live with my parents, have no job, no friends, and have failed dramatically at functioning in the "real world". (That wasn't meant to sound whiny, I'm just stating the facts here! Haha)

It's been a very hard thing for me to come to terms with, because I felt like people had such high expectations of me, and I let them down. But I've learned to forgive myself for having problems and issues that I was born with, and aren't my fault. I tried my absolute hardest to live up to everyone's expectations, and that's all anyone can do!