Hello everyone, I'm new to this forum but I thought I might seek out some advice and also support!
So, for background, I was formally identified as gifted at 16 (though I was informally recognized earlier). I was at a youth day hospital, mainly for my anxiety and my bipolar disorder, and they had just gotten a psychologist on their team. So they decided they wanted to screen some patients for LDs and ADHD. I had already been diagnosed with ADHD so I'm assuming that's why I was among the chosen.
I was tested with the WAIS-IV. I don't have my actual scores, nobody at the hospital records office could find them nor could the school board and I'm still trying to find out who actually performed the test. Anyways, I do have my own solid recollection of her telling me her interpretation of my results. I was, according to her, highly gifted "but not profoundly gifted or gifted enough to be causing the kinds of problems I was having with my emotion regulation and attention", that my verbal and non verbal scores were extremely discrepant to the point that it indicated a problem in and of itself (my non verbal was average and my verbal was in the top 1%)
She told me according to my results I generally functioned cognitively about two years ahead of my chronological age, and was moderately to highly gifted, but that my specific "brand" of intelligence would be experienced as frustrating because I can think a lot faster than I can express. Her analogy was that I was running a top of the line, custom high speed computer on a standard best buy monitor. She then went on to describe traits she thought I would have, which I interpreted as autistic traits, my little sister has autism so I'm very familiar with them. I think now she was describing non verbal learning disorder, though she never used the actual word she just described traits like not understanding social cues and preferring to hear instruction verbally rather than in written form
I mostly kind of shrugged it all off at the time, I had bigger things I was dealing with and I honestly couldn't have cared less about school because I found it boring and pointless. In the spirit of complete honesty I kind of shrugged off the test while it was
happening and that makes me doubt the validity of some of it, I specifically remember zoning out and taking my time on the block designs.
Regardless, I'm now 23 and I've recovered a lot mental health wise and I'm going to university. I have accessibility services purely based on my mental health, but I found out I can get a full psycho ed assessment covered and I was beginning to wonder if it was worth it for me to get assessed again now that I'm entering a more stressful academic environment?
I feel like old patterns are repeating themselves already, I am so anxious and overwhelmed socially but my school work is not challenging. I'm overwhelmed by all the people around me and the new environment. I find lectures engaging at first but they quickly get repetitive and I get bored and want to leave because I feel the point has been made. I don't know how much of this relates to being gifted and how much is that I have ADHD and potentially NVLD or ASD.
The only real intervention offered to me in school was in the first grade when my teacher strongly suggested I accelerate two years (my mom denied the offer because they thought I might need additional support to catch me up in math which she couldn't afford) and putting me in split classes afterwards so I could do the next grade up in work informally. I did have dysgraphia but I outgrew it. I got a pencil grip in the second grade which made my writing legible and in the fifth grade I taught myself how to write "nicely" because I got sick of not writing in an aesthetically pleasing way.
I've never really been able to talk about being gifted because I've never really had people to be able to talk about it with. There was never any real social support and I don't know what is common for someone who is gifted and what isn't beyond what a google search can tell me.
I know this is a bit all over the place but I haven't really had a place to express all this before
