Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion A plea from a gifted adult.

I feel a bit ashamed of showing my face on this forum again, and I'm badly reluctant to say anything about this anyway, but it needs to be said else I'm going to have nobody to say it to and it's not going to be exposed to the light of day.

So I am profoundly gifted (I have a document from a state university indicating that my IQ is estimated, based on test results from I think one of the Stanford-Binets and the Wechsler scale, to be 'well above 180', whatever that means - minimum of 180, of course, but I don't think 'well' has an operational definition in psychometrics, now does it) and a biology major at university. Great student, doing well academically, and generally well-off on most things. (I'm female, if you want some guide on pronouns - last thread I was in people thought I was male for some reason, probably the absurd cultural notion of There Are No Women On The Intertubes. Just letting you know that's not the case.)

I am almost completely bereft of anything resembling an adequate social life, and I'm perfectly comfortable with a relatively small social life (I'm a biiiiiig introvert) - but I'm close to having nobody.

My best friend, and indeed the only person I know on my wavelength who I have any sort of substantial contact with, lives across the ocean, and I can't even visit him for two and a half years since my folks, skittish people that they are, won't let me visit him until I've finished undergrad - which is reasonable to a point because he lives in Eastern Europe, albeit one of its most modern cities, but for goodness's sake I've known people my age who've been to South Africa and Thailand, and quite on their own (i.e. not under the aegis of a study-abroad program or something else), and it gets really quite lonely sometimes around here.

It's hard to find people on my wavelength anyway (it's a cliched phrase, but it's the best way I can really put it).

Combine this with constantly being assailed with people who come to the same conclusions I do a long time after I come to them partially because they're not as smart, people who base their opinions of the world on things that are patently untrue (for example, alternative medicine practitioners - it irks me something fierce when people consume or, especially, sell things that have no empirical, rigorous scientific proof behind them and yet purport to have an effect on the body that they don't - these things kill people), people who have nasty prejudices on the basis of sex or race or sexual orientation or anything else that has no effect on the content of one's character and the extent of one's intelligence - it's ridiculous, and I've about reached the end of my ability to put up with it to the extent where there have been times the past few days where I've had some fairly dark thoughts. (Don't worry, I'm a benign sort of curmudgeon.)

Sometimes I wonder if humanity's speciating - some people seem to be anything BUT human.

The Asperger's community (which I am not a part of, by the way) has a fairly good saying to describe my situation in a way - feeling like an 'anthropologist on Mars', except in this case, I fully grasp what's going on socially but find it not only illogical many times but also quite repugnant and refuse to take part in it. I'm not an outcast - in fact, I'm pretty well-respected by my classmates and am often sought out for help - but I don't respect them back (oh, sure, I treat them civilly, but I deride them in private) because I find them slow and also somewhat biased. I've had to hold myself back from berating lab partners when they screwed up an experiment, sometimes to ridiculous ends (e.g. in the second semester of organic chemistry, one is ordinarily expected to know how to use a separatory funnel and what it is. This is BASIC stuff, if you have taken organic chemistry; I don't expect a person to know what a separatory funnel is if you haven't taken organic chemistry. These people were in the SECOND SEMESTER of organic chemistry and they didn't know what a separatory funnel was), and am massively grateful that I'm able to do lab work on my own when I've got it (I get much better results).

And then there's the fact that Dad's slowly killing himself with tobacco, Mom isn't handling it very well at all, and I appear to be the sanest human being in the family. This is tangential, however, and just extra stress.

I don't know any other group of people that's even going to have an idea what I'm talking about and I'm moderately desperate to be heard and understood to at least an adequate extent by ANYONE, which is why I'm posting this long, not-totally-organized rant/plea here.