r/Gifted

i think it’s less normalized to be proud of this — people think it makes you pretentious and arrogant, telling you iq is not important and doesn’t matter at all, but it’s just like attractiveness or athletic ability.

like let me be proud of what i have. im so lucky! i wouldn’t trade my brain for anything! i love being able to understand things quickly, i love never having to study and getting that time to do what i want, i love being so passionate and dedicated to my hobbies, i love how it gives me unalienable confidence and trust in my abilities, i love how my future is so open and i can literally be anything i want to be, i’m capable of so much!!

it is sometimes lonely — yes i understand things in ways others cannot, even my own family, making it makes it hard to fit in and be consistently happy and optimistic, but i think it’s a decent price to pay for what i have! hooray!!

I was looking at a website that shows how different subreddits overlaps with each other. This subreddit overlaps with the aspiememes subreddit with a probability multipliers of 70. Meaning people in this subreddit are 70 times more likely to comment and post in the aspiememes subreddit than average redditors.

So I’m wondering how many of you are on the spectrum and what do you think the connections between giftedness and other types of neurodivergencies?

I want to whine here a bit and seek some encouragement. My 2e son who is 8 loves math a lot. He has been teaching himself math since he was 4. He is doing Prodigy and DuoLingo Math and Boddle for fun at home. So at school he has always been out of sync with the curriculum. When the class learned addition, he was learning multiplication. Now they are on subtraction but he is teaching himself division.

I have been asking if his math curriculum could be compacted or be sped up in some way to match his pace. But the IEP and classroom management and behavioral goals are mostly what the teacher wants to focus on. I get that. We work on that stuff at home too. That's important.

The school's gifted program seems to only be geared for horizontal enrichment though not vertical advancement. And that bums me out. Basically he and the other gifted kids are given extra hard math problems with added complexity to work on after they finish the regular work instead of being introduced to new material. ( not that any of this advanced work has ever made it's way home, so I have to take her word for it)

But I feel this age can handle speeding through material a lot easier than later when math becomes more complex. That this is the best time to accelerate.

I also feel that making progress on IEP goals is tied to the rate at which my child is developing and there is no magical cure for AuDHD. We're doing therapy, meds, and reinforcing strategies at home. But his emotional development amd executive functioning are a couple years behind and likely will continue to be behind until he reaches his early 20s. So for the school to require him to be caught up in executive functioning in order to compact his math curriculum to me is purposefully setting a goal that is out of his reach.

Moreover, his teacher is exhausted and discouraged as a family member is in serious condition in the hospital. I can't really talk to her about my child right now as she needs time to focus on her loved one. The timing right now is wrong. I'm going to wait a couple months before checking in again. But I have a feeling this is a closed door. She is not going to be any more open to listening to my requests. She already made up her mind and isn't open to suggestions.

How do I approach this? Do I try talking to the gifted program head at the school instead? They might circle the wagons and become more resistant if I go up the food chain. Do I accept this as a nonstarter and just focus on math at home? And try again next year?

*Edit. If I could somehow give my child a practice SOL test and show him passing for his gradelevel at the beginning of the year, do you think this would help convince them? I'm having trouble finding a complete set of SOLs though. My state seems to release partial practice segments but no full practice tests.

Something that has come up for me a lot recently that I only just realized was my tendency to assume everyone else had access to the skills I do. A lot of behaviors really baffled me. I never thought I was particularly intelligent, so I always assumed we were ALL operating from at least the same vantage point.

Now I’m realizing that other people don’t actually experience things this way, and their behavior that I always just thought was weird neurotypical behavior (I’m neurodivergent) is actually that other people can’t keep pace with me.

Which explains why other people are so wowed by the things I do… which to me are basically effortless.

Obviously this isn’t always true and there is advice and insight I don’t generate for myself… but it’s strange to realize my baseline insight is someone else’s peak moment.

Hello everyone, I've been enjoying this sub quite a lot since joining. I have read (and re-read) the rules. I have utmost respect for the team running this community. Big thanks to them, and to all of you. I want nothing more than to engage positively, productively, and respectfully.

Recently, in attempting to open a discussion, I seem to have encountered some terminology that is not permitted here (pertaining to helping people). I cannot seem to identify the exact issue, making it difficult to work around. I have talked about this with quite a few users here (privately), and they cannot make sense of it either.

What would you recommend? How can I navigate this respectfully?

Hi all, I have been diagnosed to be twice exceptional recently and have been undergoing a period of intense unmasking. During this process I discovered that the way that I have been living (intense cycles of anxiety-burnout to overcome my inertia and boredom) caused me to be completely unaware of the feelings of those around me (I also have some alexythymia) and just be completely incapable of reading the room in general.

Now that I am truly starting to understand social situations, living like how other adults do, the complexity of the human experience, I feel extremely exhausted and frankly a bit depressed. My family is still masked and are all at different stages of self-awareness and empathy towards others. A lot of my friends have not thought about life as deeply as I have, and talking to them is painful because they just don't see things deeply enough for me to feel a social connection. I just don't see a point to life anymore now that I realize a lot of the things that I used to believe in are propaganda / a pipe dream.

I find people (including myself) to be nasty, self-serving and unwilling to change unless forced to, and the lack of curiosity and kindness of adults really angers me.

Just putting this post here to see if anyone else finds the human experience shallow and unsatisfying and feels hopeless about the prospects of humanity