Complaining about being bored was a popular pastime. So was sunbathing (this was the '70's), which made me want to chew my own hind leg off.
The concept of "mental age" as a way to understand gifted development is a myth. It's not "ahead" or "behind." It's qualitatively different.
VERY succinctly stated. This is precisely what I was getting at-- as a youngster, I thought that adulthood would fix the problem-- and it most emphatically did not. Because there's no way around the fact that as an outlier, my lifetime's worth of experience has been qualitatively different. Ergo, my entire consciousness is also somewhat different, being a product of that lifetime.
Identifying with slivers or facets of others without requiring more of them than that has really helped me. This is a skill that my (HG) spouse lacks, and he finds it perplexing that DD and I are so comfortable with-- well, pretty much anyone. If you can learn to use the extraordinary perspective to gain insight into others, and find a way to identify with pretty much ANY other human being (via perspective taking, which I'd argue is probably something that HG+ persons are uniquely situated to do, having so much mental capacity to THINK deeply and often from a young age), you
get the BEST that others have to offer-- because you can make others feel at ease and comfortable in their own skins.
There is something almost magical about it-- people BLOOM around it.
This is why I think that stereotypes about highly gifted people
probably owe more to high-profile 2e persons who have communication
problems or those with really severe over-excitabilities than they do to PG people without such difficulties. My guess is that many PG people fly under the radar among most of those who know them-- they probably have no idea. Few people who know my DD do. Few people who knew my dad knew just how bright he actually was, either.
That comes with its own challenges, of course-- one may take a long time to come to terms with the notion of sharing only fragments of one's self with others. We seem to have relatively few people who know the WHOLE person that we are. It can feel lonely even if you are popular and well-liked, because it all feels very false when the people who like you
barely KNOW YOU.
