It’s Me!!??

Realizing You’re a Gifted Adult: A Journey in Six Parts

(This piece originally appeared as an article for the Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented. It is written for all of the parents who realized their own giftedness after their children were identified as gifted)

It’s Me: The Moment

My son was identified as gifted by his school. He was having sensory issues, and they couldn’t teach him anything. He kept acing every test without trying. He was disrupting the class, too, but anyway, we had him evaluated, and it turns out he’s got a GAI score of 146. So my husband and I started reading whatever we could find about giftedness. I was reading about Bore-Out one night when it hit me. My eyes didn’t blink for a full minute… “It’s me. That’s me.”

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When our daughter started reading Black Beauty before her second birthday, my wife and I knew we had a real situation on our hands. We were up late, deep into the rabbit hole of gifted parenting, when I looked up. My wife had tears in her eyes. “It’s me,” she said. I started crying. “It’s me, too.”

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We’d taken our adolescent child everywhere, and their alphabet soup of diagnoses never quite captured what we were seeing. We knew that we were missing something. My mother stumbled across a book on gifted children, and she insisted we read it. A profound quiet settled over me as I read. It was me in those pages. It was me.

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You were digging around to learn how to help your gifted child become as happy and as healthy as they could be. You read the books and listened to the podcasts. You attended the trainings and joined the organizations. You were on a mission to optimize all that intensity of theirs into a fulfilling life. You just want your children to live in their fullest expression.

Being seen. Being met. Being heard. Being understood. Not having to camouflage. Not internalizing all of the misperceptions the neuronormative world threw at them. Not feeling like an alien. Not experiencing gifted trauma. Not being cornered into an academic identity of perfectionism and unmet ‘potential’. Finding self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-advocacy, and self-realization.

You’re on a journey as a parent to gifted children, and then suddenly it’s not the parenting journey you thought it was going to be. It’s a surprise re-examination of your own life as a gifted person. You’re not only parenting gifted children, you’re piloting a gifted consciousness yourself. It’s a profound moment of change. You’re gifted.

Coming into the realization of your giftedness is the beginning of a different sort of journey. It’s an invitation into deep self-examination and honest reckoning with your own experiences. And, given your propensity to intensity and complexity, it’s enough to explode your old self-concept and send you into a transformational process. At the end of it, you’ll be the same person you always were, and you’ll be forever changed.

Herein, I hope to reflect some of your journeys and to offer perspective on how you can approach your own gifted development. If you come at this reality with the same attention, humor, and passion you did for gifted parenting, then your life will be bigger and better. You will also, as a result of your courage and patience, become a better parent and ally to your gifted child.

Your Apple, Your Tree – The Awakening

While you would have identified with dozens of gifted characteristics, you likely did what so many gifted people do – “I’m not “Gifted gifted”. I’m not some prize-winning scientist or super genius or anything.” …The comparison game. …The internalized neuronormativity of the dominant culture that operates within two standard deviations from the norm. …The suppression of some of your intensities over time. …The camouflage and masks that we forget we’re wearing.

“Wait – This CAN’T be me!” Your shock of recognition may recoil into deep analysis and resurgence of old patterns of denying your depth and sensitivity. Those old patterns you developed to adapt to a world that rejected your full expression rear up, intent on protecting you again, but it’s too late. You won’t be able to unsee the ways that your own life is mirrored in the way your child experiences the world.

When you read the testing report or did that research into your child, you remembered. You recognized yourself. The feeling of being too much and never enough has always been with you. Your relationships have often been characterized by loneliness. Your work has been unfulfilling or episodic, and your multipotentiality has been confined to hobbies and spectatorship. The automatic thoughts of reviewing your own life experience may have flooded your mind. With those thoughts came powerful feelings of relief, grief, anger, fear, shame, and, above all, a full-body “A-Ha!” and/or “Oh, hell!”

Rage to Learn – The Deep Dive

Where you’d been learning about your children and how to parent them, you are now devouring information about gifted adults. You are learning from a new angle. The six dimensions of giftedness – “Intellectual, Emotional, Creative, Sensual, Physical, and Existential” – are all under the microscope of your self-assessment.

You are irrepressibly curious and analytical, even though you’re accused of overthinking. You recognize patterns with ease, even though people complain that you overcomplicate things.

Your emotional experience is deep and complex, and you have a lifetime of experiences that led to people saying you were overreacting or being ‘too much’. Your penetrating empathy has drawn innumerable confidants, even as it has taken its toll on you.

You possess a creative imagination that looked like daydreaming in school and now concocts fabulous ways of seeing the world, even when people tell you to stop being weird. You’ve relegated that imagination to the back seat of your personality.

Your sensory sensitivities are finely tuned enough to know when the barometric pressure is dropping. Even though people keep telling you you’re ‘too sensitive’, you experience intense distress when the light is too bright, the temperature too cold, the noise too grating. You are moved to tears by art and music, and you mold your home environment toward your personal sense of beauty and/or order.

Your visual-spatial reasoning and raw physicality is lauded when you pack the car for a trip or hit a baseball or have the flashiest dance moves at the PTO, and you’ve been harrumphed when you offered novel solutions to logistical problems.

And that way you have of turning every decision into a deep examination of values has been described as annoying. “It’s not that deep,” you’ve heard over and over. Yet your existential sensibility has you seeing and seeking meaning in all things all the time.

Now you recognize that your “too muchness” isn’t about something being “wrong” with you, it’s about you being gifted. Now you can see how giftedness has flowed through your lineage from mothers and fathers who never identified themselves as gifted neurodivergents. You may call on your family members to confirm or describe how you were as a younger person. You may disclose that you suspect your own giftedness to the people closest to you.

And you may stumble into other exceptionalities, other neurodivergences, that are a part of who you are. Once we’re out here on the skinny right-hand side of the curve, diagnostic criteria get muddy. Those criteria and diagnoses were normed on the normal, and as you tune your perception to neurodivergence, you may come to see lots more going on. Characteristics of what they call ADHD. Characteristics of what they call autism. Dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, aphantasia, synesthesia, and more may register on your newly developing perspective.

Uncle Jimmy’s obsession with stamps and bonsai. Grandma June’s endless string of short-lived hobbies. Your mother’s astonishing talent in the garden and her encyclopedic knowledge. Aunt Rose’s odd proclamations of pudding tasting like the color blue or bluegrass music sounding like the smell of rotting grapes. You start looking around your family history, and you start to see the patterns of gifted neurodivergences emerge.

Making Meaning and Feeling Feelings – The Reorientation

Once you’ve accepted your giftedness, your self-concept will need to be reorganized and amended. “It’s me” and all the surprise that came with it has given way to daily recognition of how your intensities show up and how you’ve camouflaged them. The reality of the ways you experience dismissals, rejections, disconnection, and being unseen is all now squarely in your conscious awareness. And with that awareness comes a wash of emotion.

It’s a time of deep grief for many, and it’s when having a community of people on the same journey can be life-saving. You’ll come to see more of how you’ve contorted and hidden your essential self in your efforts to feel accepted. The whole feelings wheel is likely to come tumbling forth. This is when you’ll be grateful to have a gifted-specific therapist and/or a community of gifted people who’ve already charted these waters and know how to hold space for you while you feel.

Awareness grows rapidly during this period. As you bring your gifted characteristics out of the shadows and into your conscious mind, that “Who is my gifted self?” reorganization happens in waves. Daily journaling reveals thoughts about thoughts about thoughts. Ongoing connection with trusted people allows you to learn safety in more of your gifted expressions. Even as your nervous system warns you not to give up your old defenses, your conscious mind demands growth into more of who you are. It’s a ride, y’all. It’s when restarting a meditation practice and a creative practice will offer you spaces outside of relentless thinking and feeling into other ways of knowing.

It’s not all tsunamis and gutpunches! The joy of exploring and letting yourself come out to be more of who you are has its own magnificent moments of realizing that there’s so much more to life than you’d been allowing yourself to experience. Celebrating your reawakened abilities and growing confidence is, for many, a profoundly happy, profoundly spiritual time. You’re not caught up in judging yourself by the old rules any more. Old shame is being left in the past. You’re lighter and more alive.

Alongside all the feeling comes a rewriting of your old story and your future possiblities. You get to utilize your newfound agency to consider your gifted characteristics, your gifted needs and desire, and how you’ll choose to be. What does it mean that you’re gifted, too? It means that you get to live more authentically and with that authenticity, the likelihood of meaningful intimacy grows.

Generating Courage to Explore – The Voyage Into Experimentation

Along this path you’ve been treading, the Neurodiversity Paradigm has emerged as the most practical response to a neuromajority that sees your differences and intensities as problems to solve. Their demand for conformity begs a response that centers your wholeness while adjusting in various environments.

“The neurodiversity paradigm is a specific perspective on neurodiversity – a perspective or approach that boils down to these fundamental principles:

1.) Neurodiversity is a natural and valuable form of human diversity.

2.) The idea that there is one “normal” or “healthy” type of brain or mind, or one “right” style of neurocognitive functioning, is a culturally constructed fiction, no more valid (and no more conducive to a healthy society or to the overall well-being of humanity) than the idea that there is one “normal” or “right” ethnicity, gender, or culture.

3.) The social dynamics that manifest in regard to neurodiversity are similar to the social dynamics that manifest in regard to other forms of human diversity (e.g., diversity of ethnicity, gender, or culture). These dynamics include the dynamics of social power inequalities, and also the dynamics by which diversity, when embraced, acts as a source of creative potential.”

The neurodiversity movement has its roots in Autism rights, and it has become a driving force for neuro-outliers of all stripes. Just as we prize and celebrate biodiversity, we can come to understand neurodiversity as a rich tapestry that allows us to recognize the uniqueness of every neurotype without being beholden to the Pathology Paradigm’s measure of health and success.

“The pathology paradigm ultimately boils down to just two fundamental assumptions:

There is one “right,” “normal,” or “healthy” way for human brains and human minds to be configured and to function (or one relatively narrow “normal” range into which the configuration and functioning of human brains and minds ought to fall).

If your neurological configuration and functioning (and, as a result, your ways of thinking and behaving) diverge substantially from the dominant standard of “normal,” then there is Something Wrong With You.”

You may continue to strategically, consciously camouflage when the moment calls for it. And you may instead experiment with standing in your neurodivergence and taking up space as the person you are. Not over anyone or under them, but on equal footing as equal entities in our community of humanity. This is where you get to embark into experimentation.

The Pathology Paradigm is intertwined with systems of oppression that have deep ancestral and childhood roots for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people, and shifting into the Neurodiversity Paradigm has different safety considerations for those whose honest expression is seen as defiant of the dominant, colonial culture. We have the opportunity through the acknowledgement of neurodiversity to also acknowledge and name ancestral and societal trauma. Gifted spaces are no less steeped in historical, systemic centering of white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, English speaking, citizenship bias than the rest of our contemporary culture, and it’s critical that we take these realities into account as we navigate our unmasking.

Disclosing your neurodivergence(s) either by using the label (“gifted”) or the characteristics/traits you possess (e.g. “intense”, “complex”, “fast learner”, “systems thinker”). You might ‘frontload’ your relationships and interactions with information about your giftedness (e.g. “I’m a fast learner and fast forgetter”, “I’m not big on eye contact”, “I have sensory stuff, so I like to keep my sunglasses on”, “I am a big feeler”). You might let your trusted people know that you’re experimenting with greater authenticity and transparency and that you’ll appreciate their patience and support.

It’s exciting, dropping old shame-based behaviors that we created in order to feel safe when we were younger. These experiments will light your nervous system up, so your ongoing attention to self-care is a wonderful way to pave the way. Your path to being seen may require lots of little steps, low stakes experiments followed by periods of reflection and tending to yourself. As you find ways to live more authentically, you’ll find that there is more freedom and autonomy. Maybe you’ll re-engage academia, start a business, host more gatherings, lean further into gifted-friendly spaces, indulge your creative drives, take that Improv class… the possibilities are myriad.

Experimentation works best when you’re experimenting with new ways of talking to yourself, too. More compassion. More patience. Less reliance on others’ ideas of how best to live. You’re dropping the camouflage, and there will be some mistakes. It’s a good thing that perfectionism is one of the shame-based things we get to practice leaving behind.

You see where this is all going by now. So let’s go there.

Full Circle – Gifted Adult in Alliance With Their Gifted Child

Back at the beginning of this article, you saw those goals you had for your child…

And now here we are. Now you’re not only helping your child navigate the world, you’re navigating it with them. You’re modeling how to be on the journey. You’re doing it imperfectly, just like they will, and you’re doing it as an ally and partner. This is where the juiciest living is.

Where are you in your process? There’s no wrong time to begin, and there’s no expectation of moving through it quickly or easily. We’re soft-bellied mammals learning how to be in our fullest expression while appreciating all of the wonders of living. We’re simply homo sapiens sapiens – our thoughts, feelings, imaginations, sensuality, physicality, and existential sensibilities have more layers than we can fathom. As we develop, there’s always more to learn and discover. There’s always more growth and understanding available. I wish you an abundance of clarity, community, and love on your journey. – Gordon Smith

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BIO

Gordon Smith is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, Coach, and Creative Instructor for gifted adolescents and adults. He’s been practicing counseling for 25 years, coaching for nine years, creative instruction for four years, and being Gordon for 54 years. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina and feels deeply grateful for his community. Over the years, Gordon has explored his multipotentiality through being an elected official on Asheville’s City Council, organizing the Big Asheville Science Salon to spotlight area researchers, publishing poetry, teaching Improv, moss gardening, traveling, and much more. Gordon’s practice is located entirely online, and you can find him at https://giftedandgrowing.org/.