Hi Islandofapples,
I am perhaps towards the other end of pondering the questions you are now. Your experience sounds very similar to mine (even down to the Mensa home test) and I have felt for some time that giftedness has presented itself quite differently in me than in others. Now... let me just say that these are just my musings on things and I have no idea if there is any truth to them or not. Overall, I guess my theory is that giftedness might look quite different if you have had a traumatic childhood. I would love someone to do a study on it - I haven't been able to find one.
I too had a very traumatic childhood and difficult school experience. Someone who went through a similar experience to mine described their schooling as never really being present, which resonated with me - because you're too involved in just surviving. I was talking to a woman who runs a large children's welfare service in my state and she was saying there is more and more evidence suggesting that children who experience prolonged periods of trauma in childhood end up with their brains wired differently.
I have a dad who tested EG+, as did my daughter. My husband is smart, I'd say MG-HG. He can run rings around me mathematically, but doesn't see the connections between things that are obvious to me. I talk about it as being a difference between looking for answers and looking for understanding. He looks for answers, I look for understanding. I feel that it's the looking for answers that is typically viewed as giftedness, and that when the two are combined (looking for answers and understanding) you get what is typically considered HG+ (sorry this is a very simplistic explanation of what I mean and possibly makes no sense). I think in my case the looking for answers (which is kind of what education is I guess, and which I never had the brain space to engage with on any level until late high school) never really got developed. The looking for understanding, which to my mind helps you navigate difficult life situations, got over developed.
For a number of years after dd was born I would read about giftedness and find that so much of it fitted me, but my experience of interacting with other people who identify (legitimately) as gifted was that I was very different. I don't talk the same way, I don't think the same way. Yet even then I often find myself in the same situation as I do with my husband - seeing connections that they don't see (and they are often appreciative when I point them out, so it's not just that I'm connecting random and unrelated things!).
I think 'knowing' if you are matters more if you haven't identified as a smart person before you have your own gifted child, because it suddenly explains so much. I don't know that I'd test well on a real IQ test (the Mensa home one here is multiple choice and I'm a good test taker). But ultimately I gave up trying to determine if I was gifted by standard definitions or not and just accepted that my early experience has meant that I'll probably never really know how my thinking compares to others. My genetics would suggest that I am and I think in the important ways (intensity, curiosity, need for new knowledge, depth of understanding etc), I probably am. But in a slightly odd way. Hence the username
Sorry for the life story - I just thought I'd mention my experience in case it resonated with you!
