Have you ever resented your gifts/IQ for social reasons?

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I say this not because I don't enjoy my gifts but I hate not being able to find friends that I can relate to as far as my interests and skills. I am guilty of hiding it most of the time just to fit in.

I used to in school, since the popular girls were not the brightest, and would turn their backs on you if you started going on about physics... Also, no one liked a know-it-all.

But I've learned to just adapt-not everyone is interested in the same things as I am. I wouldn't want them to go on about things I wasn't interested in either. So I try to find a common ground.

Plus, I realised that the smartest people may not have book smarts. There are different kinds of intelligence, and we can all learn from each other.

I swear - every time I read posts like these I think about the X-Men. You know, they have powers which they hide to blend in. Some even resent the fact they have powers and so would gladly embrace a cure. I've gotta google that some time: are the X-Men a euphemism for autism?

Oh, um, on to your general question. I dumb myself down all the time. It's a common practice with me. I'm not being holier than thou. I used to read dictionaries like novels back in the day. I thought it was imperative to improve my vocabulary. I've never forgotten those words but I do stutter and stumble in the act of dumbing my diction for the masses. Aspies understand this trait well.

This "hiding" is not just because of ASDs. I know a fair number of people who are very clever/gifted or have obsessive interests, and they all feel that they have to hide things to fit it.
I always have as I find it hard to fit in with people: I can only have proper conversations with 2 people in my family and my only 2 proper friends. With others, I have to hide things as others have said they're bored of hearing me talk about languages/psychology/brains and other similar things.

All the time. I would gladly trade a few IQ points for better social skills... But the grass is always greener, I suppose!

Until I went back into academia and started pursuing my special interests yes...

Now I'm generally surrounded by people who I don't have to dumb down to and tend to ask if they don't understand.

I hated dumbing down when I was younger, now I've realised it's given me a skill to talk about things at different levels of complexity which is really handy.

I think I might have made better progress understanding my feelings if I hadn't been so damn brainy. And I hate that feeling when I can't be arsed with friends because I've got sucked into some solo technical challenge.

Yep.

Just this evening I was told a friend lost his windshield due to a storm blowing over, and all I cared about was getting away from my roommate because I didn't have the brain to talk to her at the time and I was also wanting to go back to my room to work on my current cross stitch pattern. I realized after about an hour* that I didn't even ask about him and his car when she told me about it. So much for trying to be social and have a heart.

* And I've learned that once the moment is passed, it really doesn't do much good to bring it up again. I may email my roommate tomorrow to see if she's heard any more news, just to show that I did hear her and I do care, but that's one of those "extra" things that I otherwise don't actually care to do even though I do care that he lost his windshield. Speaking of IQ, I'm smart enough to verbalize all of this, yet it still doesn't change how my feelings about the situation are. So yeah, really annoying to have to go against myself in order to "prove" that I care to someone else.

I don't think I'd have even thought it necessary to say much about the windshield, I'd have probably felt that he was a big boy and could easily get it fixed, so I'd have probably registered a slight echo of dismay and left it at that.

Yes it can be difficult to go back to fix such a problem. If I'm feeling really safe with somebody and they leave me lots of spaces to talk, without distracting me too miuch, if they're around me a lot, and if I feel I've made a serious mistake with them (in terms of their likley emotions), I might be able to bring up the past and reassure them. And of course if they come to me and open up the topic, fine. Otherwise I tend to feel that it's somehow inappropriate for me to dig up old matters. Whether or not it really is inappropriate, I don't know. I wouldn't have thought that anybody could think a person weird or threatening just for raising a past subject with a view to repairing any hurt feelings or misunderstandings. Could it be more down to a fear of re-opening a matter that has caused some anger or upset, in case that anger comes back and just causes more trouble?

I worry too much about what other people think of me sometimes. I let it get to me too often, which is why I felt regret for not showing more sympathy after the fact. I need to stop doing that to myself.

I think most of us worry too much about approval, until we're angry, then we worry too little about it.

No, but I do resent the fact that most people never question or think for themselves. I don't want to be normal. I just want to find some other people that are odd in the same ways that I am.

This

I resent that I am sometimes seen as someone I'm not. It doesn't matter to a few people (I'm not going to say it's everyone that is like this, because it's not) if I protest their accusations, tell them I didn't mean to say something the way that they took it, didn't have the intentions that they think I had, or dodn't have the thoughts that they think I have. For some people, all the protesting in the world doesn't jar them once they've decided that I have this intention or that intention. They've already decided that I'm a bad person, and any attempt to try to correct their view of me is seen as me coming up with excuses or justifying (in a negative way) what I said. Because they believe that I'm "smart enough - I should have known better," they assume that I AM smart enough and therefore I'm just trying to manipulate the system. There have been some areas where I have fallen short of understanding, and this is one of them. I do not regret that I have a high IQ, because as a result I'm learning and growing from this experience and soon I WILL know better. I've never come across this type of person before in my life (mostly because I was more of a hermit before), so it's a bit of an ironic circle that what they are using as an excuse to tell me I'm a horrible person will actually be used in my favor to learn about how to deal with their antics.

In a way, I was trying to manipulate them to an extent, because they were perceiving me incorrectly, and that was bothering me enough that I wanted to change their perceptions of me. Now, I'm learning how to ignore people like that. It's not really worth the time or effort to try and get people to change their false perceptions of me if they are stubborn asses and refuse to listen to reason when it's presented. Every time I attempt to reason with them they say it just proves what they were saying about me being an evil manipulative person to begin with. A lot of this is me learning to accept myself and not allow others like them to be able to steamroll right over me with their own perceptions. I was playing the video game Alice: The Madness Returns, and Alice and Caterpillar had two lines in their conversation that resonated so greatly I had to write them down and memorize them:

Alice: I know what's real.
Caterpillar: No. And you allow others to tell you what isn't real.

I'm mentioning this here, instead of creating another thread, is because I know it's my oddball behavior that got me into this mess. I've never really regretted my behaviors before, and these couple of people in my life have not only brought attention to it, but they have also assigned to my behaviors intentions and thoughts that aren't there and then used my own high IQ as a means of justifying their attacks. Luckily, I do have other friends that understand and are helping me to realize that this is one of those special cases where it's not me, but those few people who have issues. I resent them for making me feel so horrible and I question if they really are/were friends if they can see me in such light despite my protestations. I wonder how many of you have to deal with the same thing - people making you feel bad because of your interests and gifts. How much of that comes from how other makes us feel versus how we actually feel about ourselves inside?

Regarding all of my other gifts and traits and hobbies, I find people with whom I can share the real me. I've learned to tailor my speech so as not to overwhelm someone, and I've learned to not inundate them with my own hobbies, but give them times and chances to share their own with me even if I'm not truly interested in it personally. I may not be interested in their hobbies, but I'm interested in those people, so I let them speak and I learn something new about their hobbies even if I don't have a great interest in it. By finding the right people to hang out with, I don't regret my own hobbies, talents, IQ, or other social quirks.

No. I have bent my gifts toward learning how to fit in. People tend to be shocked at first when I tell them, which is rare, but later they can see the tendencies.