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!
It definitely resonates with me!!! A lot of what you said is new to me, as I never thought of it quite that way. I didn't mention my home life, which was probably worse for me than school.
If ever I tell someone, "Oh yes, my mom was mentally and physically abusive, I was bullied terribly in school, then I got cancer as a teenager..."
(Oh, and someone mentioned here about group tests. I took one and didn't pay attention the whole time because I had appendicitis.
My appendix burst a day or so after that. By the time I got out of the hospital, my mom made them retest me alone, and the gifted class had already been chosen and was full. That's why my mom seems to think they didn't really want to have to hire another teacher and open a second class for me. Maybe I was never meant to be in it.)
I like to think the universe or God or whatever gave me all this adversity for some reason. I just don't know why...
Well, anyway, I think my life story sounds ridiculous and that I sound like I'd be a basket case (or just lying) and I already did my very helpful year of counseling right after I got married (because I want to stop the "cycle of abuse" NOW and not put that on my family.)
But there was no safe haven for me to just be me, anywhere. Ever since I met and married DH, I feel like I am some other person - the real me- living some enchanted pretend happy life.
I've reflected on it before, and it feels like a switch flipped and I got thrown into an alternate reality where nothing that I remember happening to
me really happened, and all that really exists is me in my new happy life with someone who loves me for who I am and actually allows me to be me.
My mom has also mellowed out as she has aged, and I have been cancer-free for 10 years and have a beautiful healthy baby girl (they said I might not have children), so it could be like my life before didn't really happen. I sometimes have a hard time accepting that my happiness could actually be a pretty permanent thing. It sounds very PTSD-like, actually.
"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."and this^
I would really love to find out how a traumatic childhood affects things.
"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)"This is also a really interesting theory, because my parents describe me as such an insatiably curious young child, but I eventually zoned out completely in school (while getting A's, up until my parents divorced when I was 12.)
I was
heavily into fiction books. They were my escape and they really got me through so much, I think. (That, and my dream to become a singer, which no one really supported until my dad did when I was 20.)
I definitely had no energy or support to do much else. I actually met DH right when I took an amazing community college class that awakened my love of learning again. For the past few years, I've been simply devouring information. I research everything and I write and create like I never did before.
I am a little sad that it took me so long, though, and a tiny part of me feels like I didn't fulfill my potential.
I was reading Outliers the other day, and he talked about a pg guy who came from a dysfunctional family, and he was showing how even a pg person could end up never becoming anything or fulfilling his potential if he didn't have the right sort of support system.
The guy he cited didn't have the skills to succeed in a college environment and was doing his own graduate level research that would likely never be taken seriously because he never got his degree. I'm obviously not pg, but that book (if at all accurate), really makes a case for how circumstances shape whether or not you succeed in some amazing way.
Hmm, I feel like I sound really pathetic in this thread, but I am pretty happy now, even if my posts talk about transient loneliness. I am just still trying to find my place in life and figure out how to make what I do with it meaningful.
