Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. They've given me still more to mull over. I also just saw Grinity's mention of "outer directed perfectionism" in another post and know that that's a big piece of the puzzle for me. Ultimately, I probably just expect too much of jobs and my supervisors (current boss has recently let me know that I'm too "conscientious"), which leaves me unfulfilled and frustrated. Guess I need to learn to ratchet things down a notch and find more satisfaction outside of work. I also realized recently how much inner-directed perfectionism has hampered my career. All of my dream jobs require foreign language skills, and although I minored in a second language and got straight A's, I could never seem to get through that part of learning a second language where you just have to open your mouth and say what you can, knowing that you're making mistakes and probably sound like a three year old. I didn't want to speak until I was fluent, so consequently, I never became fluent.
Anyway, this is more than enough about me, but as a parting thought, I just want to say that I am now convinced of the importance of alerting your child to the social and emotional characteristics of giftedness (good AND bad) as soon as you think they can handle it. I was identified as gifted in 1st grade (school wanted to skip me to 3rd--mom said no), but I never learned that that had any implications beyond getting straight As. It was only recently that I realized it seems to explain much of my personality, why I've made many of the decisions I have, and things like why I'm so miserable at work. It's a little overwhelming to have stumbled upon all of this as an adult, when bad habits are already firmly entrenched and bad decisions have been made. Although I'm glad to be figuring things out at long last, I'm also going to do whatever I can to make sure my perfectionst son "owns" the full range of his gifted characteristics much earlier.
