Growing up gifted

Stef asked me in another thread about being pushed academically when I
was very young and I gave a rather flippant answer. It deserves a
more serious response, I think. It's actually something I normally
avoid talking about, and there aren't many of those subjects. I
genuinely feel it's something that it's impossible to understand
properly unless you've experienced it yourself, and I'm not aware that
I've met many people like that.

Part of the problem, of course, is that unless you know someone very
well it's not the sort of information that they're likely to share
with you. I shared a house once with someone who'd been a musical
child prodigy, then been sent to study law at university, got into
drugs and dropped out. We got on very well although we're no longer
in touch. I've looked around to see if there are support groups for
such people, either "real-life" or online, and I haven't found any.
When one sees the amount of information available to parents of
"gifted" children it's a little surprising to discover the lack of
support in later life. (There are organizations like Mensa, but
that's a little different, I think.)

The closest I got was hearing a radio programme about ten years ago
where five former prodigies in various fields were interviewed in a
group - they ran the whole gamut of experience, with one still
extremely successful, one who dropped out and then got back into their
field again, one who got very depressed and was now in a low-level
menial job, and so on. It was quite a revelation.

For me, the experience of being very bright very young was quite
exhilarating. I was allowed to do all sorts of things that the other
children weren't - making up my own stories and reading them out to
the class, having my own maths textbooks, writing music and getting it
performed, and so on. I felt special and I was absolutely sure that I
wasn't going to grow up in the same way as the other children.

Then my mother decided to take me out of the state education system
and put me into a private school, and that was exciting too - I was a
year younger than the other children in my class, and I got to do
subjects like Latin that I hadn't experienced before. The boy who'd
previously been the brightest in the class got rather resentful of me
for a while, but generally I don't remember having too many problems.

At the age of twelve I won a scholarship to one of the most
prestigious independent schools in the country, which required weekly
boarding. In retrospect I don't think that was a great idea as I was
really too young to handle it. The school accelerated all the
brighter pupils by a year anyway, so by the time I took the first set
of public exams (normally taken at sixteen) I was two years ahead of
most of the population.

Although I did pretty well at that stage when I was studying a range
of subjects, I did less well at the following stage when I was
required to specialize. I chose two mathematics courses and two
modern languages, and found myself struggling with aspects of all of
them. I became very demoralized, stopped working properly, and felt I
had no one to turn to.

I took a year out but was still only seventeen when I started
university. I had pretty mediocre results through my entire period
there and ended up feeling a total failure. I took a job working for
the government, unconnected with what I'd studied, and after a few
weeks there started to feel suicidal. It had all been such a waste.

Fortunately I had a very supportive friend at the time who encouraged
me to go into postgraduate study. I never thought I'd be accepted at
first but managed to motivate myself enough to complete a Master's and
then get accepted onto a PhD programme. Once again the old feelings
of excitement about learning things started up - it was almost like
being a child once again.

Unfortunately, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction and I
started taking too much on. There was a very nasty incident at the
end of my first year as a PhD student which I think one or two people
here know about - I won't go into details but it was a result of
getting far too manic. I managed to complete the PhD but felt
thoroughly drained at the end of it and haven't done any serious
academic work since then. For the last fifteen years or so I'm
alternated between unemployment and a number of undemanding jobs.

So there you have it - it's just one person's experience, of course,
but as far as I'm concerned being an early achiever is definitely a
mixed blessing. My attitude now tends to be to accept it as a period
of my life that's over and try not to let it influence the way I am
now, but invariably it affects the way I regard myself at times.

Guy

.

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