Being parent to another 13yo, I mean-- I am amazed sometimes at the relevant information that she can overlook/omit in relating interpersonal interactions. Some of this is adolescent thinking, I'm afraid.
Agreed. I think some of it is also HG+ thinking.
Being intelligent means that I can remember a lot of stuff from my childhood and analyze it as an adult. Over the years, I've thought about why I might have rubbed kids or teachers the wrong way as a kid.
When I was very young (K-3rd grade or so), a lot of the other kids would accuse me of "thinking I was so big." This expression means that I thought I was looking down on everyone else or thought I was better than them. I had no idea why anyone would accuse me of that, because it wasn't true.
Many years later, I realized that it was my vocabulary, probably combined with school being so easy for me. I used words like "ambidextrous" casually when I was six. What others saw as "big words" were just part of my everyday speech. I had
no clue then that the other kids didn't understand those words, or that they probably didn't understand me a lot of the time. Looking back on it, they may have thought that I was trying to show off or make them feel inadequate (which I probably did, without knowing it).
Additionally, HG+ people also don't really think like most others, and I suspect that my thought patterns and the associations I made when speaking didn't always resonate with other kids and some teachers. It is possible that stressed out teenagers or non-gifted teachers may react viscerally to a 15-year-old who read Dante's Inferno over the summer because she picked up a way cool edition with engravings by Gustave Dore' for 50 cents at the local book fair in July. It wasn't that I went around talking about this. It was that I mentioned it in class (something about harpies in the woods behind the school, IIRC).
Since then, I've had to learn to temper what I say and when I say it (unless I'm with another giftie). I don't want to make others feel inadequate or whatever.
