r/Gifted

You meet a new person and feel an instant connection. It quickly becomes clear that this is a person you'd like to build a relationship with. As you talk, the conversation flows naturally from one topic to another. You discover that you share many common interests, making the connection feel even stronger.

As the conversation continues, it naturally turns to life goals and careers. Eventually, the subject of salary comes up, and your new friend asks how much money you make. If you're still in school, imagine the question is how much money your parents make.

How do you respond to the question, and why? If you claim you would answer truthfully, please share your salary.

How is this different from a question of your IQ score?

This question is inspired by https://www.reddit.com/r/Gifted/comments/1upb500/the_burden_of_having_an_iq_of_143/ , but there are many other threads on this subreddit lamenting how awkwardness ensues when they share their IQ score.

I always felt gifted, however my social circle always treated me.... differently....? (M18). I always thought people we're smart naturally, but alas it seems that's not the case. Now why did I write this venting intro you ask....? It's because of what happened today. Hear me out.

I was doing crosswords todays on the bus, as I always do, after attending my high school classes. Out of no where comes this beautiful Female. She ogled me in a weird, but promising way. There was tension as soon as I caught on. I stood up and simply said "Names (myname).". She looked at me again with a smirk and asked what I was doing. Long story short I had it in the bag.

Now, we are here. What happened and why am I writing? We somehow came to the IQ topic....

Ahhh IQ... It always hindered me. It's actually not fair. It is honestly exhausting living with an over analytical, high IQ mind because while you all enjoy simple movies, I am forced to sit there completely detached, instantly calculating every predictable plot metric and narrative arc within the first four minutes. I came to ask her and she said 103.... She was under me. I didn't show it, but she knew it. I told her my IQ and it became a deal breaker. She left.......

Why can't I be normal? Why can't I be like everyone else....?

Have any of you ever encountered something like this? I can't be the only one?

I am 52 years old. When I was 44, I went through a serious personal crisis that led me to seek out a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). At 47, I began having significant trouble concentrating, which led to an ADHD diagnosis.

I admit I struggled to accept the ADHD diagnosis for a long time. I started therapy—I’ve been seeing the same therapist since 2024—and that helped me come to terms with it somewhat. A few weeks ago, my therapist suggested I undergo a neuropsychological evaluation to check for the possibility of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) or giftedness.

I received the results a week ago, and I feel increasingly confused and lost. I’ve spent my entire life viewing myself as someone slightly above average in intelligence, but also very lazy, irresponsible, and prone to procrastination. I was always a shy guy and struggled to relate to others—even my best friends. I used to think these difficulties were simply personality flaws.

Now, the evaluation results have taken me by surprise and sent me into a loop of analysis, regret, and even anger. If I had to guess beforehand, I would have said my Full-Scale IQ was around 110—the 75th percentile or something similar. The actual result was a Full-Scale IQ of 146 (99.9th percentile), along with clear symptoms of ADHD and an avoidant personality.

This hasn't made me happy, satisfied, or proud. It doesn't feel like an achievement to me. But it has made me question so much about my life. In college, I had to take some courses four times before passing. I failed the university entrance exam twice before finally getting in. I don't feel like I’ve achieved any major dreams. I have no financial security, no sense of personal fulfillment, and I am not happy. I know dwelling on alternative past scenarios is pointless, but I can't help but wonder: if I—or my parents—had understood what ADHD was doing to me, could I have better utilized my intellectual capacity to achieve greater success? I never learned how to organize myself or manage my tasks; I ran my life almost entirely relying on my memory. I also wonder if my far-above-average intellect made it difficult for me to relate to others. I’ve spent my life "masking" my intelligence or memory. Countless times, I’ve pretended not to recall a specific detail about some obscure topic just to appear more "normal." I wonder if, had I been aware of this situation, I might have spent more of my life seeking out people more like me, rather than insisting on fitting into relationships where I had to hide who I really am. Today, I’m divorced, my friends have all but vanished, and I’m struggling to find new friends or a partner.

I honestly don’t know what my next step in life should be. I’m not even sure how I’m supposed to feel right now. It sounds absurd, I know, but what I’m feeling is almost like grief. Yet it’s different; when you’re grieving, you can talk about it, and people empathize. I don’t even know what to say now—it seems obvious that if I spoke about this to someone who isn't in the same boat, I’d come across as ridiculous, immature, arrogant, narcissistic, or something similar (I admit that, deep down, I’m already judging myself). I’m afraid of telling people I know something like, "I took an IQ test and scored in the 99.9th percentile," only to hear, "Big deal, I already knew that," or, "Wait, you should be celebrating, not grieving." I think writing this message—and imagining that this sub is a place where there’s at least some chance someone might understand—is an attempt to feel a little better.

Thanks for reading.

No seriously like I go online, I go outside, everyone is trying so hard to be gifted or act like they are , liiike it's okay that you are not and have to make some more effort especially nowadays when it's cool to get everything so effortlessly ,weeeelll this is life and unfortunately just a few percent of people are this way , and it's okay that we are not, like I literally know people who didn't study and failed because they were trying to be 'gifted' , even if you are you still have to make some effort , or they are working their ass off and come tell me oh I didn't do anything liiiike cmon it's shameful to work for something nowadays????? It's literally exhausting I see no people being passionate about anything because they're ashamed to try?
What's this wtttf?

Well, idk how do I organize my live because all lives don't have sense, we were born for nothing... Then, I need an ad hoc but... How I found it?

Already much years I think about it, and so far I haven't found anything, the existentialism opens up various paths for you but it doesn't give you the pillars to structure a path, doesn't give your ad hoc.

It's only rant... Idk how manege my live because I'm young still (17 yo) and apologies if I got the English wrong, it's not my native language

My husband and I have an 8 month old. He is crawling, cruising, and working on standing independently. He has 4 teeth with 2 more quickly coming in.

Very early on he learned coordination with a drumstick from.his toy drum set.. he seems to get bored with his toys quickly. He babbles up a storm and is now working on a K sound and an N or M sound.

If I hold 2 objects of different colors.. say a yellow boat and a blue boat and ask him to pick the yellow one he does so with 100% accuracy. (He is still a baby so sometimes he just knocks both out of my hand and continues playing lol). He also knows how to put things in a bucket. He can pull open drawers. He passed from hand to hand early around 6/7 months.

He loves his books, animals, different textures, and music.

Is there a potential he is gifted?

I was a johns hopkins burnout and I want to aid his learning without burning him out.

Would montessori school benefit him? (Like for elementary)

I was diagnosed PG in my early teens, and recently discovered that I have autism. I fully understand skill regression (it's like needing to remember to blink or tell yourself when to breathe) but when you could finally let go of the mask: what did you gain?

I feel mentally fresh. Young, curious but with the caution of a man who has survived hell. I touch something of interest to me and it is absorbed.

I cannot seem to understand certain boundaries anymore. I have to set mental timers to not burn people out with involuntary info-dumps.

The number of times a day I apologize with no knowledge of what I did wrong.

I'll start by explaining a bit about my background so my question will be more clear.

I'm 25m, and was an "accelerated" gifted kid. Left home for college at 14, started my master's at 18 and joined the workforce soon after and as a result I was never among people my age and didn't date until I was 23. I know I have a problem with having social interactions with people my age (due to promotions I'm in a position in which my peers are all around 35, married with kids).

Now for my question, where can I find intelligent women to date?

I tried dating apps and while I'm moderately successful in those I find that the thing most important to me in a partner is intelligence. The problem is that it seems to me that they aren't really on the apps.

I must emphasize, the intelligence preference is mine and it's personal. I know that people can have a healthy and happy relationship even with significant intelligence differences but I just find it difficult to connect to them (I mean romantically).

So that brings me back to my question, in a world where my environment is filled with people significantly older than me, where can I meet intelligent (and if nerdy even better) women?

Thanks to everyone in advance. I'm stumped and about to give up.

One is considered “gifted” when their IQ is >130 on a standardized test. Of course, we all realize that the only thing this ACTUALLY measures is how good the person is at taking IQ tests. But it does show a variation from the norm, because the vast majority of people aren’t that good at taking IQ tests. They simply don’t think that way. This is where you get into the idea that gifted individuals are neurodivergent. We actually ARE, by definition. We think in a divergent way from the norm. In the case of giftedness, we have advanced pattern recognition, skip thinking, the ability to figure things out very quickly. It can almost seem like ESP because we don’t always recognize all of the steps that are occurring between point A to its logical conclusion of point D, sometimes we just KNOW. It’s skip thinking. We don’t need to process each of the little steps, they are a given.

Non-gifted people have a way of almost skip-thinking too, it’s just different than ours. They will follow social scripts and just believe things without following the logic or questioning the logic. They don’t think as fast, so they fill in the blanks with information they believe they already know, just like we do. But the information they use to fill in those blanks might seem like nonsense to us. The reason it seems as if they can read each other’s minds and know things such as unwritten rules and social scripts is because they CAN. They think alike. Most people are going to be in the middle of that bell curve. I think this is why we can seem inscrutable to each other at times. It’s just thinking differently.

One example that really struck me when I was younger was a friend who felt embarrassed by wearing a dark color in spring. She explained that it was laundry day, and she didn’t have any light colored work shirts. This sounded like utter nonsense to me, I couldn’t understand why such a thing mattered. She told me that we wear light colors in spring. I asked why, and she couldn’t explain it, “it just makes sense.” Was it because dark colors absorb heat, so in the spring we want to reflect heat? Was it because flowers are bright? Something to do with mud? No, it was none of that. It was just something you do, everyone KNOWS that. Well, I didn’t know that. There are a million examples of these sorts of things that everyone just KNOWS which seem ridiculous to me, and meanwhile the things that I just know don’t make sense to them, either. It can be really frustrating sometimes. Some of the things people say are absolutely illogical, but they will all agree: it just makes sense to wear light colors in spring.

I recently realized I’m gifted, scored 99% on Binet test per Gate entry. I know I’m kinda smart, but what else defines gifted? What kind of neurodivergence? I think I have some strong masking/coping strategies, and some really bad ones (spacing out, frozen, no emotion, etc)

When I was a kid, I didn't really have a bad experience. I bet most people would even think it was normal. But the thing is I wasn't normal. When I grew older, I found out what I was. I was naturally intelligent with afinitty to spacial(riot word, space) things. I wasn't really book intelligent. I mean, memorization wasn't easy for me. But I absorb information, especially kinetic information, like a sponge.

Like, we were thaught long division when I was 8 or 9 years old. I'm 43 now, so 35 years later, I can still do long division. And I'm not connected to the academia.

A lot of times in High School gave me a sense of deja vu. Like I've been there before, or I've seen that before. Mostly because I have, when I was younger and I didn't know I was taking in information.

So, I'm not normal. My IQ scores would reinforce that. I also have ADHD. Maybe I developed it to cope as a kid with this things I could do that normal people can't.

My childhood trauma stems from people WANTING me to be normal. Like them. I get that. But I wasn't normal. And that made me feel unwanted. Only kept around because it's what is expected of them. Kept around out of obligation.

Nobody really tried, with me.

Maybe it was the intelligent thing to do. Or maybe it was the logical thing to do. A long time ago, I decided that I won't spread how I felt. To treat others like how I wanted to be treated. Then, when I got a kid, I promised that I won't treat her like I was treated, stifled because it was different. Then I got a neice, who sort of started showing that her mind was different from everyone else in her family. So I decided that I won't let others stiffle her to. That, with me, she will never feel like she had to hide her quirks and grow better than I did.

So, this thing I do, it's not performative. I still have a lot of learning to do when It comes to what I can do(I think, it's not like there's a manual)(I was stiffled for so long) so I help raise people up because that was what I hope was done to me. I am trying to raise people's critical thinking because a lot people seemed to have devolved into normallizing bad things. I have actively been trying not to make people feel alone in their difference.

Basically the title. In a hypothetical, if you had to guess someones intelligence, what questions would you be asking? What would you look out for? Any patterns of speech? Anything behaviourally? Answers can include anything, but im looking more for unique opinions and stuff thats niche. Also, you cant include stuff in IQ like their working memory or verbal IQ or whatever

Have you started having progressively less and less misconceptions about life as your grew up? I mean did you become mature faster than almost any other person from your social circle?

From a young age I behaved in socially acceptable way, I didn't have "explosive" teen years because I understood the social contract, I managed my emotions.

How emotional maturity and giftedness correlate with each other?

Also, I think it's annoying when in conversations people don't respect your awareness of relatively obvious things and automatically assume that you are ignorant of them. One girl, for example, once started explaining to me what exactly is an exhumation, because she thought I wouldn't know the definition of such a "complicated" word.

I have no idea how from the POV of a person with average cognitive capabilities a gifted individual should look and act. Teachers and a lot of other people in my life often doubted my competence, because I didn't fit into their image of "intellectual prowess".

Anyway, how average people perceive us?

All of the people around me are genetically talented at least in one thing: either music, dance, sports, bone density, painting, writing, acrobatics, high intelligence, spontaneous problem solving, memory, etc. But here I am without any genetic talent.

I know some of these talents can be developed through training, but I don't think they can be truly excelled at if the genetics aren't there.

I am 29 now. For the past 6 years, I have spent most of my days at home watching reels, scrolling through social media, and only coming out to watch movies, eat something, or attend functions. Other than that, most of the time I am at home doing the above things and working a mediocre remote job.

Is there anyone like me out there who doesn't have any talent? Or has anyone felt like this around the age of 29 and then found their talent later by any means? Because till the age of 23, I was not able to find any genetic talent of mine, and now I have started to believe that I don't have one.

Im not a freaking genius for somewhat teaching myself most of english at 8 years old and i dont want to be called genius and but apparently media always makes it so that we know everything were not like that all! We dont know everything were not savants in straight up everything were normal people just like you but with a gift whether it be music or art we just wanna be treated like normal people not like we know everything and can do every task on earth like a freaking mission im so tired of being called a genius im not here to brag i just wanna live a normal life like everyone else

Hello. Recently, we went through a difficult situation in my family: my 8-year-old daughter was bullied at school by a classmate she considered a friend. She was very mean to my daughter, and her sadness became quite deep. Out of concern, we took her to a neuropsychologist and were eventually recommended to have her tested. We discovered that my daughter is gifted, with an IQ of 142. This allowed her to skip a grade at school, and we took her out of the hostile environment she was in, which was a great decision, as she is much happier now. Since then, I also noticed that her performance improved significantly; once things balanced out, she shone even brighter.

Because I have three children and knew this could be a hereditary factor, I had the other two tested as well. The other two are also gifted, at essentially the same level. Eventually, my wife and I took the test too, and I discovered that I am as well, with an IQ of 140. Since then, I have been going through an existential crisis. I know this label won't solve my life's problems or change anything I'm going through right now, but I've decided to focus on helping my children navigate the intense emotions of this condition and help them make the most of their potential, however they choose to use it. I am 38 years old, and I would like to know if anyone else here has had to deal with a late discovery like this. Thank you!

My gifted/ADHD son just finished 6th grade at our highly rated local public school. He hates it. He says he’s bored and he already knows everything they’re teaching. I think he’s exaggerating but he did get 99-100’s all year in honors math and ELA (no gifted offerings, no honors options for social studies or science). He did complete the middle school math curriculum before the end of fifth grade so I asked his math teacher if it would be possible for him to skip a grade in math. She thought that was a good idea so she brought it up to admin but apparently they will “run out of math curriculum” before his senior year of high school and they are legally required to be enrolled in a math class at all times.
He has a 504 plan but he didn’t want to include any of the accommodations that were actually helpful in elementary school because he doesn’t want to be singled out. He is on a stimulant.
He’s a quiet/shy kid and it takes him a long time to feel comfortable and make friends but he’s got a FANTASTIC group of buddies he’s actually comfortable with and I don’t see a way to duplicate the social aspect homeschooling.
I don’t know what to do for him. We’ve told him there are parts of life that are boring and this is a good opportunity to learn how to deal with that. I’ve looked into online college course so that he can “clep” some credits but he won’t be old enough until halfway through the year. I just don’t want him to get burnt out with school so young and I worry about his mental health. I’ve encouraged him to read when he finishes assignments early which he does usually enjoy but he has access to “educational” games on his chrome book and he mostly manipulates the games into doing ridiculous things to show his friends (creates quiz games where every answer is correct and he can accumulate a lot of points for in game rewards, creates silly canva slide sets, etc…).
Any ideas or encouragement would be very appreciated!

I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI in my late 30s and I discovered I had an IQ of 145 in my early 40s. Prior to that, I spent my life not fitting in and feeling that I was either really stupid or somewhat intelligent.

I've spent the last few years reconstructing my self image and synthesising my strengths, experiences, and qualifications to maximise my earning potential and figure out where I fit.

However, since learning these things and starting medication for ADHD, I have also become acutely aware of the areas in which I am below average ie how inept I am at building relationships and how much I struggle articulating thoughts and ideas. The communication issue is most shocking because I used to be a good orator and conversationalist.

So, what are you below average at? And, how do you work around your weaknesses in your day to day life?

NB I am aware that medicating for ADHD can sometimes unmask previously well hidden autism traits, but I'm still digesting being 2e and I'm not ready to find out if I have a third e, just yet.

After good therapy I finally believe in myself and got diagnosed with giftedness. Now I just do a lot of things in the day which bring me joy learning languages politics drawing and especially social interactions but my doctor now says I have mania, I did online tests for mania and I am always negative… I also chill a lot and read poetry or just really listen to music and feel it. Opinions? I was kinda depressed beforehand and one of the main features of it was that I believed I was stupid. I sleep 6-8 hours per day and sometimes only 4 on bad days but then I lay around in bed in the afternoon and nap.

Could just be everything I've been through.

140+IQ, AuADHD early 20s.

Grew up in a dysfunctional household, bipolar mom that I later watched pass away in a hospital.

Found myself smoking cigarettes because it transports me to this 3rd person perspective where I'm not feeling the weight, but observing it.

I have my spots I prefer with liminal esque views.

Is this a gifted thing?