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

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

I was regarded as a gifted child. I was especially good at art and english. I was a bit slow with math.

As an adult I feel mediocre. Why did I excel as a child, but am inept as a adult?

I was encouraged into an artistic sort of career. I am not good at it. I find it hard to come up with marketing ideas. I read so much information on subjects that should help me in my career, but still I am useless. The average joe thinks I'm clever, but that's just because I'm doing a job they didn't train to do. Conversely I couldn't do their job as I wasn't trained to do it. My profession doesn't make me more clever. Compared to my peers I am failing.

I've looked back and realised that alot of my artistic skill as a child was copied. I drew from photographs, I copied my favourite cartoons etc.

Now I have to be creative I am finding it difficult. Amazingly I'm still employed.

What are your experiences of how your talents have changed as you grew up?

I don't think I was labeled as gifted persay, but I was really good at certain things. Math being one of them. I was so good in Math, I got a 98.6% on my High School Proficiency Exam. The proficiency exams are exams my school district required every student to take to prove they could graduate despite all the classes and coursework they had attended. No one else tied with me. I was the highest scorer that year in the county school district. I aced my Calculus final where the Valedictorian and the Salutatorian did not.

I also got a 97% overall on the ASVAB when trying to get into the military. The test administrator and recruiter kind of looked at me funny when they found out the results and questioned if I was making the right choice to try and join the military. I was the highest scorer both had seen during the time they were assigned to do their jobs. I didn't appear military material for being to smart.

So I was pretty smart, at least with math. Key word is was. Now I'm math stupid. Math I found out is something you have to keep up with or else you lose it. I've only used algebra once for someone else since I graduated college six years ago. For myself I use it every so often, but it's very low level math or some very basic geometry.

I find it hard if not impossible ot be creative on demand. I'm very creative, but the creativity is tied to either a completely useless to survive skill/ability, or I don't have the wherewithal to capitalize on it to survive. I write, do abstract and fractal art, make jewelry, and pyrograph. All of which are limited because I have no day to day use for it, I don't know how to sell to others, or I don't know how to finish it into a final product.

I wasn't a gifted child and as an adult I am seen by others as a child.

I think my mom is the only person I recall calling me gifted, but I did graduate valedictorian from H.S. and magna cum laude in a few college degrees including engineering. Outside of academics, I have a very difficult time. I was fired from a few jobs after college but didn't really understand why (certainly wasn't my punctuality, and I don't think it was my work product). By the way, I was only diagnosed two years ago which suddenly helped me understand how I could feel so stupid at social gatherings but smart when taking courses or analyzing projects.

During middle and high school, I loved music and painting and was considered creative, and I ended up earning a piano major and secondary music education major. After finding that I REALLY didn't enjoy teaching, I went back to school for engineering.

For the first time, I'm doing very well at work after I found a small nitche a few years ago that makes complete sense to me but doesn't to my coworkers or management. I'm still called weird and annoying, but I finally have a boss that's good at letting me focus on projects that fit my interests/strengths which has earned me quite a bit of positive recognition in the firm. Outside of this environment, I think I would be anxious, confused, and unproductive because I tend to hyper-focus on interests and easily get overwhelmed with simple things like household chores, paying bills, and grocery shopping.

I still love painting and music, but I only use them as hobbies. Looking back, I don't think I was ever particularily artistically creative--just really good at painting realistic pictures from photos and learing the patterns in music and combining variations of those patterns on the piano.

I was labeled and tracked as gifted as a child.

I am viewed as a quirky nobody as an adult.

throughout my school years, i was labeled in big letters as "a gifted, daydreaming slacker." these days, i think most people would label me as "a middle-aged mom," lol....no more, no less.

By IQ, I was gifted but because I was in foster care, group home, psychiatric hospitals and residential centers, it was missed. MY adoptive parents selected me based on that trait (I assume among others). As an adult, I'm probably about as far along in life as a 20 year old and I'm 36. I'm 45k in debt, have no degrees but lots of credits, and have a low-paying job (well to everyone else, it keeps me fed lol).

wonder what went wrong........

I think I was a bit lucky to be doing ok, and it really helped that I got married to an organized person during college. We divorced after a decade, and I suddenly found out then that I was poorly prepared to take care of myself--much worse than I imagined. The excessive perfectionism that makes me feel like giving up on most things and the hyper-focus that gets me "stuck" on topics or bits of information for several hours sometimes--they definitely make it harder to compete with others for the comfortable spots in life.

This^

The bar was lower as a kid/student/teen (when I was labeled as academically"gifted")-
but as an adult, the standards are higher & I fail to meet those standards.
It's the difference between being a big fish in a small pond (back then, in childhood)
and being a small fish in a big pond (here & now, as a "grown up").

btw, i wasn't trying to infer that i'm normal -- i'm FAR from it. in fact, i'm on SSD due to my ASD. yet, i'm able to *pass* as normal to neighbors and the general public...partly, because i'm a very good actress.

yet, i think the biggest reason i'm able to fly under the radar is due to my circumstances: if you're *female* -- and *married* or *living independently* and have *children*, no one ever even THINKS about why you don't have a job...hell, i could spend all damn day, every day, relaxing on my front porch, and people wouldn't bat an eye (during the summer, that is. lol).

yet, if my 19yr old ASD *son* ever ends up in the same situation i'm in, he'll never have that same luxury. i worry about his future every day.

Last edited by Shizzle on 01 Aug 2013, 2:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Amazing, your story is almost just like mine. My drawing as a child was the same as yours. I copied out of the Sunday comics and encyclopedias. I drew horses and dogs. I later moved on to people. I only got into abstract art when I was over 30years old. Before that, I thought it was all trash, even impressionism, but now I get it.

I wouldn't have been good at a commercial artist. The idea of having to get into the brain of someone else and bring to fruition a concept in their head is too nebulous to me. I can only create what I want to, when I want to.

I was good at most subjects with the exception of geography and history. I did great at earth science but not so well at biology/chemistry. I was in gifted science program but I think things fell apart for me around puberty when an eating disorder, depression and my own limits prevented me from succeeding.

What saved me was someone who believed in me and became my mentor. I published a book of poetry which was exceedingly difficult.

As to music, I learned in grade school starting age 9. I got very good with school group lessons and no private lessons. I thought I could become a soloist but didn't realize how farfetched that idea was. When I switched to the high school orchestra the teacher put me in with the second violin section and I was so angry that I quit, despite all the hard work I had put in. Years later I picked up the violin again and now play in a volunteer orchestra.

Last edited by mikassyna on 01 Aug 2013, 9:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

Music is another area I was told I was good at in school because I could memorise where to put my fingers basically. I have no rhythm. i used to write songs. The lyrics are interesting and different in each song, but the chords and strumming are always the same.

What doesn't help is when I read a few articles on design and try and adopt a new style to keep up with the current trends and my boss, the salesman, comes in and sees a weird new thing he's not familiar with and tells me it's sh!t. The joys.

What you said about music, same here. I was a great copier. I copied from sitting next to a girl who started when she was age 3. So, I was able to do what she did. I could sight read music notes, but I was not good at interpretation if reading from scratch. I had to be taught how to bow every note. I still get confused when I am in orchestra and the time signatures change, it completely throws me off. When we pencil in the bowings and then the section leader changes the bowings in the middle of the piece during rehearsal, I get disoriented. In school, learned that all pick-up notes start on an upbow and all new measures start on a downbow, so now when the section leader puts in a bowings contrary to those rules, I get frazzled. Forget about the idea of playing certain flat notes a little flatter or sharp notes a little sharper (versus normally flat or sharp) depending where the note lands, that is just too complicated a set of rules for me!

I used to write song lyrics, as I always enjoyed poetry, but not musical scores.

I was gifted but troubled. I had an attitude problem. No one could reach me. I'd spend the school year staring out the window, then ace all the tests. I had a lot of chaos at home. Parents divorce, moving to different schools, blows to the head, etc. Between K and senior year I attended 11 different schools in the same county. We just weren't a stable family.

As an adult college drop out, I'm a certified welder. Though I haven't been able to stay hired on for longer than 2 years because of the way that I am.

I am headed for a melt down. I need to be retained. Perhaps I could be an artist. I have great ability with art.

My life is spinning out of control and it seems like no one can help me. I am certain that things well get better, but not before it gets a little worse.

It sounds to me that your problem is not one of lacking excellence at art, but difficulty in understanding commerce. Marketing is not art its more a way of trying to get into peoples heads so that you can sell them something. those of us with ASD are not really all that well suited to that kind of thing

Had you chosen to be an illustrator and let someone else do the ideas, you might not have such a low opinion of yourself now!

I was very gifted as a child, especially at art. At the age of eight I could already sculpt a good likeness of a human head. Unfortunately my father saw art as being too sissy for boys so I was vigorously dissuaded from pursuing art as a career. Later on I rebelled and went to art college, and went on to have a successful career as a professional sculptor. Nowadays I prefer to teach art to private students, I find the pressure of commercial art too stressful for me. I probably didn't achieve all that I potentially could have done, but I don't think of myself as a failure either.

And I don't consider myself less talented as an adult, if anything I think I've matured into a better artist.

Please don't let you current disillusionment with your perceived lack of ability get to you. I suspect it is more lack of self confidence than lack of talent (something I've often been guilty of in the past)

My memory tricks and quirky language usage, plus my odd special interest in a couple of French operas got me mistaken for a linguistically gifted child. Also, I think I had some testing done when I was about 6, and I was put in special accelerated classes for everything but math. Now about half the people who know me think I'm an idiot and the other half thinks I'm a genius. I don't know.