Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Feels like an outsider

I can appreciate where you're coming from, Lori, but I'd like to offer a couple of things to think about as you consider the things your son has told you about not thinking he can live like he is until college:

Suicide is a major cause of death among teens, and 8 out of 10 teens who attempt suicide try in some way to ask for help. As parents, we cannot always discern the difference between our kid throwing something out into the universe to see if we'll help in time or our kid just going through a rough patch. It isn't worth the regret or grief if we're wrong. http://www.teendepression.org/related/teen-suicide-statistics/

And, second, I also suggest looking into the benefits of behavioral cognitive therapy to cope with the pain, chronic health issues, etc. I have two autoimmune diseases, one of which results in my living with chronic pain. Cognitive therapy is not about marinating in self-pity but about learning techniques that help us cope with things over which we have no control. Jon is right - chronic pain often leads to depression, and not addressing it makes dealing with the pain that much harder.

Just some thoughts to consider.

Add to this list of things my son is dealing with the fact that his mother gets worn out and stressed and his elderly grandfather, who lives next door, is not in good health. My dad has been living with a lot of pain but is finally able to have knee replacement surgery since he is no longer responsible for my mother's 24 hour a day care. He took care of her for 8 1/2 years until she died last September. His surgery is Monday so we will take time off from our homeschooling to be with him and help him when he comes home from the hospital.

We seem to be getting slammed with a lot of difficult, painful things in our family lately but we keep bouncing back. We never seem to have time to get used to a "new normal" before we get hit with something else to deal with. We constantly have to be flexible and change our routine. We prioritize every day and priorities change daily. It is hard but we are not depressed all the time. We take mental health days when we need them. We took a mental health day yesterday and drove to a college town. We went to a mall and walked around and had lunch and talked and laughed. Everything went great until we had to drive home back to reality, back to our boring old small town with road debris on the highway that fell out of the back of someone's pickup truck. I ran over some of it and worried that the metal object might have damaged something under my car. I can't afford any other expensive car repairs on my 13 year old car. My son listened to my meltdown about how I hate it here too. We will survive this.

My son uses his wonderful sense of humor to get through some of life's difficulties. He "gamifies" as much of his life as he can. He knows that he is playing this game of life at a higher difficulty level than a lot of people. He knows from things that he has read that there is a good chance that there will be better ways to manage pain in the future.

We celebrated the fact that after everything he has been through that he managed to do more math in February than he did before he started wearing the more painful brace. He did this even with our internet problems--it keeps disconnecting and is very slow and we never know when it will work. We didn't let that stop us. We drove to a McDonalds with wifi about ten miles away and he did his math there.

He started watching more sci fi shows on netflix and this takes his mind off things. He finished all the episodes of Heroes and is currently watching Firefly. He reads a lot of very interesting things every day and he still loves to learn. He loves political science. He says he would like to sit in on a college class where there was a lot of discussion but he doesn't want to do it in a brace because it makes it hard for him to sit for very long in most chairs. Sometimes he even finds it more comfortable to sit on his knees and he could not do that in a classroom. We can't even go to movies because of this problem. The brace is very disabling.

His disabilities do not stop him from learning. They never have. They affect his endurance and he can't work on endurance while in the brace because it limits movement. He says he notices the "catch 22s" in his life.

I notice that he is more cynical than I was at his age, but the things he notices are things that I can't really argue with, they are true. I think cynicism can go along with giftedness but I also know that it can go along with depression too. I am watching this closely.

We are not rich. We cannot afford all the therapy that people recommend. We have no choice but to live within our means.