All the things I never told anyone THE FORMER GIFTED CHILD
I didn’t think I would open Word this quickly after I was done with my PhD thesis. I thought I was done with writing in this lifetime.
But the inspiration to jot down my thoughts came while I was watching some YouTube video on Gilmore Girls. Actually, it felt like someone sat me down and explained where my life went wrong in the form of a fictional character. I got to know through that video that I, like Rory herself, belong to the former gifted child category. You know, thriving in school because you are somewhat intelligent and you are around a small fraction of people with varying levels of intelligence, so you can thrive there with little to no effort. That thing gets to your head, and with enabling people around you, you really think you’re the next Einstein or something, and you need no effort to succeed in life.
It is due to this that the first-ever bad grade in my life took me out so much that I could not ever top my class again. At that age, I couldn’t fathom what exactly was wrong with me because not being a topper felt foreign to me and so wrong that I did not know that I should study harder and be consistent to get where I wanted to be. I did the exact opposite of what I should have done, and I just avoided studying altogether, always finding reasons not to and wasting my time watching TV shows and imagining myself in those characters because my life felt so boring, as if I’m not the main character in my life anymore.
I lied to my parents, friends, and teachers and faked being ill to avoid taking tests so that I could avoid looking at myself as a loser. I also discovered that I was extremely lazy at that time. In my teenage brain, faking an illness seemed like a better idea than actually studying hard for the test. I put myself through so much psychological stress that I actually developed an illness. I skipped school because I couldn’t relate to anyone. I just wanted to be left alone with my thoughts. I really, really didn’t want to study. I gave all the excuses under the sun to avoid tests and skip school.
I know I’m being repetitive. But this is such an important part of my life that no one actually knew. I just want to finally tell it to someone after, like, 12-odd years.
The reason I still remember everything so vividly is because I feel like some days I’m still stuck there mentally. My brain associates every inconvenience differently because of this situation. My entire adult life was more or less spent thinking about what-ifs, and I never really felt like I belonged anywhere. Life never really gave me a second chance after I colossally fucked up my life because I did not have the maturity to process my emotions and could not handle the criticism.
Everywhere I went after school, it felt like I was beneath my potential. I never fully participated in anything. It took me three whole years to think about my future, or rather, salvage what was left of my future. After that, I threw myself into a gruelling course that left me in tears every day. It felt like karma was being returned to me for all the hard work and tests I skipped in the form of this course. I myself accepted my fate, but that does not mean I never complained. In fact, I did something worse: I compared myself constantly with my friends, with whom I intentionally was not in touch, who are actually living my dream life (maybe, I don’t know). It wrecked me and my nervous system.
I ended up taking an even more gruelling and intense degree, which gave me a lifetime’s worth of trauma and took away six years of my twenties from me, leaving me broke and even more emotionally unstable. But that’s a story for another time.
Even after all these years, I never recovered from those two years of my life. My nervous system is forever changed. I think differently from my peers because they didn’t go through the things I put myself through. They didn’t know about the alternate future I envisioned for myself. The career path I have chosen for myself feels like some sort of settling down, and I am not really sure if this is what I’m put on Earth for.
I just got to know that I have been in survival mode for more than half my life. It forever rewired my brain. The thing I constantly chase is to be normal and blend into the herd, but I forgot that I have different life experiences and a damaged nervous system that struggles to see the positivity in myself and in situations and always thinks the worst of me, even though I have the degree that only 2% of women in the United States have.