The Curse of the Gifted Child

I was a gifted child. In fourth and fifth grade, someone identified me as having high intelligence and as a result, I was invited to participate in a special set of classes. One of them was a science class (I don’t remember it a ton). The other was a creative writing class where we had a goal of writing stories to be bound and “published” in a collection at the end of the year.

I think I was a gifted child. I was also a cursed child. There is a connection between these two. I look back now and see that my neurodiversity (the word I’d use now) is the reason that I was gifted. My autism allowed me to pay close attention to certain special interests (books and words) that enabled me to be really good at writing stories, even at a young age. I produced some really surprisingly good manuscripts when I was a pre-teen and teen.

However, that giftedness also had a cost. It meant that I wasn’t paying attention to a bunch of the things that normal kids paid attention to, specifically social interaction. I was terrible at making friends (and often didn’t even want friends because they seemed to have stupid rules that made no sense to me). I enjoyed spending most of my time alone or with my books/special interest. I didn’t think that I was cursed. I didn’t see any of my deficits as deficits. Ironically, this is one of the symptoms of autism, that inability to see what I lacked because it was in a category of topics that I had no interest in and thought didn’t matter.

The older I got, the more gifted and cursed I became. I grew into a teen who was very, very academically gifted. I tested extremely highly in standardized tests. I got very good grades in school. I got all the scholarships. I wrote all the prize-winning essays.

And I was even worse when it came to social skills than was apparent as a child (I was actually trying to improve these skills, but still lacked many of the ways to see what was going on socially, so often tried to compensate in ridiculously obvious and painfully inadequate ways). I was a Wunderkind when it came to German Literature. I was a PhD student at Princeton at age 19 and had to explain why I couldn’t go to gatherings at a bar because I didn’t have ID that would allow me in (though they thought it was because I was a Mormon).

I look back on my gifted self with a kind of humor and compassion. It’s not that the teachers were wrong. I don’t wish that they’d spent those classes with me teaching me social skills because I would have rejected them entirely. But I suspect many of us gifted kids have turned out to also be cursed kids because that’s just the way life works. I also remember thinking at the time that my life would be a lot easier if I was less gifted and had more friends. I wasn’t wrong about that, either. It’s just that even though I saw this reality, I wasn’t able to make more friends and I wasn’t even able to care about making more friends. I just liked my books and my invented stories.

Sometimes I hear people use the phrase “twice-gifted” now when talking about kids who are neurodiverse. It’s a nice way of looking at the reality, but I still feel cursed and like many gifted kids, it can sometimes be very depressing to see as an adult that those who filled us with this sense that we were the “best and brightest” were as blinded by our intelligence as we were. People who are gifted aren’t necessarily the ones who change the world. We may want to, and we may imagine a world that is changed, but we also often lack the social skills necessary to transfer that vision to others and to live in the real world where social capital matters more than test scores.