sometimes i think "gifted" is the euphemism we used for "has ADHD" and literally everything, EVERYTHING the "gifted" kids got was literally the worst possible thing you could do to someone with ADHD
they gave me options i didn't know how to choose from, open-ended tasks, told or implied i was self-sufficient and constantly reinforced the idea that if i wasn't doing something it was because i chose not to
everyone lied to me. they told me i could do things i couldn't do. they told me i was special, i wasn't special. "gifted"? when like 50 fucking percent of my peers were just like me? i was just a particular way that a lot of people are
i learned things ahead of the curve only because the books they gave me for some topics were deadly boring and dry and I couldn't stick with them. the stuff that clicked with me had nothing to do with the content, i suspect. just better books.
i found out later in life that i fucking love history, and would have loved it when i was a kid if i'd been given interesting books written by passionate people. instead i got dry shovelware garbage.
i had my childhood robbed from me by adults who were alternately scared of me and confused by me, and with how many people have ADHD it's ridiculous to even call it anything but neurotypical. i was normal. school just only had room for one normal, and it wasn't mine.
i am trying desperately to claw back my adulthood, which until recently has been equally stolen by the same group of assholes who didn't care that tons and tons and tons of kids were falling behind in exactly the same ways, who didn't care to do any correlation and solve it
what i needed was for someone to explain to me what was going on. that's all i needed. i needed someone to tell me "there are a lot of kids who feel the way you do and see the world the way you do" instead of "you're special :)"
i needed to not feel alone, to not feel watched, and sometimes i find myself thinking that the hellscape of angry nerds online is all the gifted kids who were told they were special and then couldn't perform because it turns out none of us are the geniuses we were told we were.
modern structured schooling demands you be a generalist, just as good in absorbing and internalizing literature as math and science. well, a lot of people aren't like that. they just aren't. they do better with some things than others.
that was me, and my hyperfocusing peers who are, i reiterate, i swear to fucking god, fifty percent of humans. Almost every other person I have met in my life had CLEAR signs of ADHD and most of them have no idea and are coping extremely poorly as a result.
i call this NT because I don't think it's meaningful to call it a mental illness. this is just *how some humans are*, and in past centuries there were more options to play to your particular strengths.
school told me i could perform to 150% of human capacity, and it was never true. i'm perfectly normal. my IQ is normal. the speed at which i learn things is normal. i just learn more about fewer things.
the entire "gifted" experience summed up
the latter 20th century was a continuous rolling nightmare of new attempts to adapt schools to the vast chasms of difference in human brains. i have learned about so many approaches to changing how learning works that did vastly more harm than good.
i feel like in the end they all suffered from one crucial problem, the refusal to actually try to meet anyone on an individual level. in the end everyone gets put on a conveyor belt and fed into a machine - maybe one of several machines, but a machine nonetheless. It doesn't work
nobody at my school knew how to deal with me. my parents also didn't know how to deal with me. Someone needed to study people like me and then develop specific schooling that didn't even *intend* to achieve the same results as the "normal" schools.
I was never going to exit high school with the solid across-the-board general knowledge and skills that people without ADHD apparently consistently acquire. I don't believe that would have been possible no matter what accomodations I received.
They should not have forced me. They should have said - look, here is a future that seems like it might fit you. You could be good at doing highly structured things like this, and this, and this. Does this appeal to you? If so, we'll lean into those aspects and not fight too hard
They could have made me a top performer in things related to language or involving the visual and logical relationships between things. I was great at geometry, just not algebra. Nobody cared.
as noted in previous posts, what gave me confidence in recent years was learning to say "I'm bad at that. I'm good at this. I will take this, someone else take that." because people, often as not, just accept it
like, this depends on who you're dealing with. some people are just shits about it, and whatever, you can't escape the misery with them. but a lot of people will just go "oh, okay, well you knock that one out of the park then and we'll get someone else to do the other part"
