I think that one of the liabilities of growing up gifted is that much of the time when one is being corrected, such as when my DS11 was told, by his teacher, who he really loved, back when he was in 1st grade, that you couldn't use a fraction as the denominator of a fraction, the adult or bigger kid who is correcting you is actually wrong. This is backwards from the typical experience. And our l o n g memories, that allow us to hang on to the feeling that we are being mis-'corrected' until many years later, when he happened across the fact that a fraction can be a denominator in a Math book. So I think that gifted kids don't get as many developmental opportunities to see that, yes, they made a mistake, and yes, it's ok to be corrected because one's life will be better for it, and they have 'too many' experiences where someone was hot to correct them when they, in fact were right.
So I think that being gifted, in this time and place, is about never really knowing where you stand. You might feel superior when the teachers mis-correct you, and inferior when your classmates let you know that you 'talk funny' and have difficulty communicating because you are using words they don't know and refering to an idea of fun that they havn't developed yet. What you miss most is just being regular - unless your family can provide that - a work in progress like the rest of us.
BTW - I know I'm not speaking for ALL gifted adults and kids, just some of us. This doesn't have much to do with the nature of giftedness, more an inevitable outcome of how our current society is set up.
What I like about the article is that it guide the impulse of ODP (outer directed perfectionism) towards something useful, instead of just 'throwing out the baby with the bathwater.'
Maybe wisdom is finding a way to make something useful/beautiful out of all of our annoying traits?
((shrugs))
Grinity
