Why Being "Gifted" Totally Blows (Part Deux)

At [University], I quickly found that in this new, hard-core scholarly world, even my frantically renewed academic efforts meant little or nothing. Dozens of kids around me in each class could dance circles around me academically; they knew it, and I knew it. Though I wasn't remotely what someone would call stupid, for the first time in my life, I felt stupid.

During the first semester of my freshman year, one of my advisors thought it would be fun to put me in an advanced mathematics class. I failed that class with flying colors. I know now that I didn't have the foundation, or the discipline to put four hours of study per day into a subject that I couldn’t begin to understand, but it broke me all the same.

For me, that moment, the moment where I first realized that I could actually fail, was my emotional undoing. I had never come close to failing a class before, never done anything that was so academically irrevocable. Suddenly, I found myself wracked with fear every time I took a class that wasn't already included in my set of skills. I didn't see a challenge as learning something new and exciting, but as another chance for me to fail; another chance for me to be "less than."

This rationale would probably make no sense to the average person, especially if they've never found themselves being defined by a grade. But it made sense to me, because during my formative years, I wasn’t ever defined by anything else.

As I was experiencing the onset of academic self-loathing, I was also constantly on the prowl for other ways I could distinguish myself, ways I could feel proficient to offset my malfunction as a student. I also needed money. So, I started working thirty or more hours a week, in addition to my classes (and sometimes, instead of my classes). I was always a hard worker, and being good at my job got me the praise I felt I needed. I started to value myself by how much I could earn, and classed seemed more and more trivial, because I couldn’t perceive an immediate return on my efforts.

This was all well and good, until the exhaustion of a constant work-study struggle for survival set in.

And because I couldn't hate my job (because it fed me, naturally) I started to hate school. I blamed it for making me feel like my best wasn't good enough. I blamed school for trying to fit me into a mold that I felt I would never fit into.