Gifted Adults

[Rahere]

One class of ND is often misdiagnosed as Aspergers by therapists lacking the insight to realise that communications issues can be at their end. In my case, they had difficulty understanding a huge study which had led me into the roots of the Renaissance, This had been peer-reviewed by top academics, so once I found the crack, I worked it open, disproving the diagnosis.
Working from ideas on Birkbeck College's The Weekend University lecture series, I considered High Sensuitivity, which gave me mensuration, corroborating the thesis I'm some kind of genius. The Renaissance study relied extensively on the thinking of a Yale Professor who promptly decamped to head their new Genius School, allowing me to use the thesis simultaneously as the centre of his peer review and as a demonstration I qualify. Moving to the Gifted Adults subreddit revealed a synonym with Everyday Genius, differentiated on the one hand from celebrity genius, an overgrown ego, and childhood giftedness, the precocious prodigy who has not yet developed full extraordinary hyperskills.
I'm therefore starting this as an Interest Group, allowing it to focus any wider interest away from the ubiquitous ASD/ADHD.

 

[b3xvw]

Hi Rahere
I didn't understand the points you were making. I hope this feedback is helpful, and not heard as criticism.

 

[Rahere]

Not points, so much as setting out a stall for a small but very important subgroup of the neurodiverse.
There are two kinds of genius, celebrity and everyday. The authors I prize for their clarity of thinking in these developing domains are Professor Craig Thomas, who heads Yale's Genius School, and published a prospectus of the traits he has observed in his subjects, in The Hidden Habits of Genius, which includes celebrity in his criteria, and Doctor Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, whose The Gifted Adult, discussing the esoteric traits forming those gifts, identifies everyday genius as a synonym.
I do not intend discussing the celebrity group, as I have worries the noise involved masks banality. Dr Jacobsen's text discusses the hyper-skills most humans lack, creating a clear dichotomy between Clever and Gifted. Gifted implies a Giver, in this sense, unlike the American educational program of that name, which focuses on the precocious prodigy.
I belong to the Gifted. I can generally deliver once I know my objective. Finding what matters in the infinite sea of future possibility is as much beyond me as it is any human. As an example, in early 2015 I studied a very specific question, and held my answers on file for a couple of months until a specialist in the question was approached by a consortium of foreign Nations, asking the exact question. Not roughly, but word for word. My daughter had started work with him that morning, and so was present when the question was asked. At 0200 I heard about it, at 0830 I was answering the senior member of the governing family, by 0930 we had the deal which has placed the UK at the head of the pack now the US has imploded. Within a week the country's top man in the field had approached me, not knowing what was going on, but available for the new project, and so it was up and running. We hadn't met in forty years!
That happened while a panel of senior Harley Street psychiatrists were investigating my mentation, as I'd made a significant contribution to the work which won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. What's on my security record's words, seeing it live's proof, and they weren't the only ones. My career in Defence Diplomacy placed me in Spook Central, the Savile Club, and half the Cabinet were watching, including Rory Stewart, whose career started on the ground I'd prepared completing Gandhj's unfinshed business. Boris saw this as a challenge to his ambition, and in the best Jeffrey Archer style dispatched anyone competent to everlasting perdition.
All well and good until he achieved his goal, becoming Prime Minister, and discovered the job was beyond him. The first hard evidence was Guy Verhofstadt's film of life inside Barnier's Brexit negotiating team. He was never there, and in the end, we crashed out without an agreement, under Article 50 provisions. Then COVID reared it's ugly head, a subject close to my heart as I'd been left running the European crisis desk solo when SARS broke out. Fortunately my Secretary's uncle was General Administrator of the French Hospital in Hanoi, so I was getting frontline live information what was working or not. Thankfully mutated into a mild form and rapidly died out: less happily the Chinese did zilch on the source vector in Wuhan, and we had a return match. They still have zero respect for safety standards.

Boris finally imploded at Christmas 2019. leaving his aides holding the fort, as their testimony to the Covid Enquiry 31.3.2023 explains. Cummings in particular hit the headlines calling for all weirdos and misfits (his blog 2.1.2020, which included a comment confirming my surmise nobody in psychiatry actually has the faintest clue what's going on. I was in any case deeply disordered thanks to Boris' abuse reawakening my childhood trauma, something I've now drained, leaving me with the memories it was protecting me from. I'm at long last coming out of the woods on the medical ramifications.

And that's my purpose asking if anyone else has hyper-ability. I'm only one among hundreds, maybe thousands, destroyed by an egalitarian education system which sees intelligence as a psychiatric issue to be eliminated. I only survived by being just ahead of the wave of social pathologisation in the advent of ASD/ADHD diagnosis in the 1970s onwards. It's a classic case of Management Consultancy, only telling us what we already know. Now don't get me wrong, for most, the diagnosis helps, but not all. I'm trying to find other views from people with unusual abilities', to improve the statistical reliability of the freaking weird and leave the place better than I found it..

 

[Loubie]

Hi Rahere

Just going to share this for info not because I'm blowing smoke up my own backside What I'm about to share isn't really relevant to who I am now, and you'll see why when I explain, as I can partly relate to this group, partly not. Also I masked heavily my intelligence most of my life as well, because I was often ostracised or bullied for it. And as a social-being that was a very lonely place to be. I feel like hiding myself in that way also contributed to my mental decline, because I simply wasn't using what I had since around 16-18 years old. I did have a decent career in finance after I rebuilt things, but ultimately that made me very ill long term as was too much for me too. Now I haven't worked for 6 years and struggle to look after myself on a basic level day to day.

I was in the Gifted group as a youngster/teen. Sadly brain fog and autistic burnout started for me after trauma/loss around the time of leaving secondary school, and got increasingly worse ever since to the point my brain feels pretty useless now. It turns out now that I've likely been in low level autistic burnout with fibromyalgia/ME/CFS since then and didn't know, until the brain fog, pain and fatigue got increasingly crippling the last few years.

I also was told I didn't have the "discipline" to follow through and utilise it as much as I "should have done" (apparently, but actually turns out that was down to exec function issues re undiagnosed adhd and energy conservation, I didn't even realise I was doing subconsciously, appearing like laziness because I just had nothing left to give in terms of "doing").

Hence even now my parents tell me I'm a disappointment, referring to the fact I dropped out of 6th form as couldn't cope/didn't have any support or knowledge about my conditions, but was my school's Oxbridge candidate.

I won awards for my GCSE results without studying for my exams that I got 100% in for example, my coursework was based on PHD level theory that hadn't even been taught yet, for no other reason than I felt like it, it was unnecessary but got me 100% marks and some shiny trophies Other things were creative for me as well as academic like winning the poetry competitions without really trying, and being able to teach myself any instrument I fancied (clarinet, guitar, flute, violin, trombone, piano).

There were loads of other examples I could give but I just don't have the processing capacity to remember, nor the energy to write or read much due to pretty severe cognitive overload. I have to admit I couldn't read all your message because they are long and my brain gets tired after reading a couple of paragraphs. More so if those paragraphs feel complex and/or abstract. It's like my brain has the blue circle of doom like my laptop with hardly any processing resources left.

Oh just remembered I took computers apart and put them back together and taught myself to code when I was 8. And when I was 6, I knew the square root of 65,536 was 256. Again for no reason than I loved knowing things and seeking/identifying patterns etc

Sadly a lot of what I knew and could do has disintegrated from my brain over the years.

Oh how different my life could have been if I had known what I needed and had that in place!

Thanks for setting up this thread.
L

Ps. I also no longer read through/tweak my messages multiple times, and I mostly leave my typos, grammatical and punctuation errors in, because that takes up energy I'd like to save for more important things. I just hope others can translate