butneverstoptrying:

Being a retired gifted kid

If you’re like me, you spent most of your life getting very, very good at school to the point that it became your whole identity, and you’re trying to cope with not having that anymore. It turns out devoting your life to one thing from an early age isn’t exactly conducive to being a functional adult.

You started school and you got praise and attention. They said “you’re good at this, but you heard “this is what you’re good at,” and then “this is what you’re good for.” You were good at putting together pieces, but not old enough to fully understand the picture you got at the end.

Maybe you’re about to graduate. Maybe you’ve already graduated. Maybe you’re a student who thinks this is how you’ll end up someday.

You feel guilty wanting sleep or relationships or “unproductive” hobbies, because they’re distractions from what “really” matters. You’re in your mid-twenties learning skills you neglected in your mid-teens because school was so much more important than all this weird emotional stuff.

You’re so used to being stressed that you seek it out because it’s familiar. You don’t know what to do with yourself when you have evenings and weekends free, so you don’t do anything, and then feel guilty for THAT. And you feel like a failure, because you see what you’re “supposed” to be like as an adult, and you’re so far away from it that you don’t know how to reach it. You succeeded, but by a completely different metric that doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe you can translate that success to your job but have a hard time with everything else. Maybe you have a hard time with things, period. Either way, nobody cares what your GPA was, no matter how much you sacrificed to get it.

Maybe it’d be good for us to talk about it and grow together. Make a discord server for retired gifted kids or something. We can encourage each other to have hobbies and go to bed at a decent hour and form normal human relationships. Old Friends Senior AP Student Sanctuary. I think a lot of us do it anyway.

It feels silly to think about this when there are so many “real” problems out there, but if someone devotes 20 years of their life to one thing and that thing ends, the void it leaves is a real problem.

Anything that stops you from living a happy and fulfilling life is a real problem.

We were equipped to get degrees, but weren’t really equipped to have a life after that. Now we have a lot of learning to do.

(I was one of the lucky ones whose parents didn’t actively encourage this train of thought, and I still ended up here. Seriously.)