When I was a kid, academics was the one area I felt successful. Sure, I didn’t really seem to fit in with my peers, but (most of) the adults loved me. One teacher remarked she wished she could clone me (yes, I felt weird about it, too).
In middle school, I started to struggle with classes that weren’t as interesting to me. Math felt confusing and all it took was my history teacher publicly shaming me for raising my hand too much in class to permanently lose my interest in that subject. My parents got me a math tutor, and I managed to do well enough in my other subjects to offset the subjects that bored me.
I got accepted into college, and attended the following year, finishing my first semester with a 3.75 GPA. My sophomore year of college, something life-altering happened, and I had to drop out of school. I moved back home. I couldn’t function. I started working part-time, and taking some classes at the local community college.
It took me 11 years to earn my associates degree – a degree that is advertised as taking two years to complete. I finished my bachelors degree in two years, and my masters degree two years later. I attribute this later in life academic success to a number of things, including: being able to (mostly) take coursework in areas of interest, having the opportunity to not participate full-time in an academic setting, having a clear goal in mind of what I wanted to do and the steps it would take to achieve it.
Many clients I work with have experienced similar struggles. They are incredibly intelligent, and that aptitude for certain subjects has propelled them to skip grade levels, attend advanced high schools, and take early college classes. Most of these clients go undetected as students in need of additional support, leading areas of challenge such as emotion regulation and executive functioning to go unaddressed.
These students are often highly anxious and perfectionistic. The fact that they have a dynamic disability goes unnoticed. Because they have been told for so long about their “potential” and their “intelligence”, they interpret this difficulty as something inherent. They push themselves harder. And at a certain point, they burn out.
Some of these folks get diagnosed Autistic and/or ADHD as teenagers, while others don’t learn about their neurodivergence for another decade or three. Regardless of when they learn about their neurotype, the years of receiving internal and external messages about intelligence and potential result in a big bundle of shame.
These clients ask me the same thing: “Why can’t I do what everyone else is doing? What’s wrong with me?” Nothing is wrong with them – they are trying to keep up with the expectations of a neuronormative society without the accommodations and support they need to thrive. We need to stop telling people that success looks the same for everyone. Some students need time to recover from the demands of high school before resuming standardized education, while other students are better suited to learning in other environments.
With the right support, it is possible to turn from a former gifted kid to a no-longer burnt out adult.
