My son is twice exceptional. Your story is one that I wanted to avoid for my son and it is why we homeschool. Our public school is a color in the lines, everyone must learn the same way kind of school. One of his diagnosed "learning disabilities" is dysgraphia, yet he has not made anything less than an A on all of his papers in a homeschool co-op class. He just needs to type and he needs help taking notes if taking pages of handwritten notes is required in the class.
My son always needed to know why, so much so that when he was younger and I saw a book titled "The Big Book of Tell Me Why" I knew I had to have it. But I think his most troublesome why question was "why do I have to do it this way when it is more difficult me and I can do it so much better my own way." I didn't know the answer and I still don't. I often lurked on teachers.net math boards and most of those teachers seemed to believe very strongly that kids must show their work, so I felt anxiety about not making my son do enough written math the "school way." Because of my anxiety about this, math was a struggle for both of us. My son could do it very well if left alone to do it his way, using a lot of mental math because of his handwriting difficulties. When he was tested by an educational psychologist the month he turned seven, when he should have just finished first grade, we were told he tested at a 4th grade level for math. He had learned it from playing math computer games and he only did mental math. He refused to use the paper the tester offered him and the tester told us he thought he could have kept going on the test if he just would have used the paper and pencil.
Since he was allowed to do math his way some of the time at home he gained confidence in his math ability even though he had a disability that affected the way he did math. He always got concepts easily and I felt that he was smarter than I was since I am not that good with mental math and I could never come up with an alternate way of solving a problem. I had to be taught. He was always good with word problems and usually got the right answer when his dad would ask him word problems. When I was in school I could color in the lines very well and do things the way the teachers wanted so I always made A's in math. I just didn't particularly like math and didn't take any math beyond college algebra. My husband was good enough in math in junior high that he participated in math competitions even though he was the youngest in the group, but quit when his mother died and his life turned upside down. He didn't go beyond college algebra either because it wasn't necessary for his management degree. I don't think my son will want to go beyond college algebra, but I might be wrong. I would love to find the perfect math mentor who could take the time to understand my son's weird ways of doing math and make him think that math is actually fun instead of just "useful" as my son describes it.
As my son got older, even though he didn't get OT, he could write out math problems a little more easily, but it still takes him twice as long to write them out as the average kid, and if he is allowed to use mental math as much as he can then he can do math faster than I can. We sometimes race each other and he is definitely faster when he is allowed to to things his way.
I am glad you are finding that you can learn well when you do it your own way and also gaining confidence in your abilities.
My son has a group of online friends, some in college, who didn't know that he was only 12. He wouldn't tell them his age and one day he asked them how old they thought he was. They guessed that he was between 14 and 19. One of them said he was too smart to be 12. He feels good about this. I don't think being labeled gifted, in his case verbally gifted, has damaged him at all.
