Gifted Kid Burnout F*cked Me Up!

Gifted Kid Burnout F*cked Me Up!

I have fifteen dollars in my bank account, have almost maxed out my credit card, nap more hours cumulatively than I sleep at night, read less than I ever fathomed I would, and find myself exceedingly burned out. Maybe it's because I was bright as a child or I spent my nineteenth year of life writing 5,000 words a day and reading dozens of books (75, last year). Either way I burned, then burned out.

Bingo, anyone? 

C'est la vie. If I had a dollar for every time someone questioned why I turned out this way, I'd be rich enough that I wouldn't have to attend college anymore. How did learning lose its luster? Why is it that I hate everything I used to love? Why has TikTok taken over my limited attention span? What the hell is wrong with me?

The answer is a lot of things, but that's not what this is about. 

Oftentimes, phrases like "gifted kid burnout" are overused and overly self-diagnosed. We laugh it off like smoking weed or being into certain hobbies is the extent it goes. It gets thrown around in casual conversation, much to my chagrin. To me, lightly using this term annoys me about as much as when people say, "I'm a little bipolar sometimes, how silly!" It's qUiRkY to make light of what I struggle with daily, but I digress.

So really, how deep does burnout go? For me, it all started when I was eight years old and sitting in my class. They handed out IQ tests to each of the children, looking for who could do puzzles the best to determine who the smart kids were. As a kid, I was told (to my face!!!) that only smart kids got to go to "special classes" and despite the fact I was eligible to skip 2 grades and later scored a decent 135 on the IQ test, I wasn't deemed one of the smart kids. From that moment on, I decided I had to OUT-perform everyone else I knew. 

I held the record in state tests before I hit puberty. I studied in the 4th grade, curated a perfect spelling ability that later flew out the window in my older years, and masked my minor speech impediment for years. Six years of debate went by and academic achievements fueled me. I killed my confidence in honors classes, devoted five hours a night to math homework, checked out every SAT prep book under the sun, and planned for the endgame of college. I graduated with a 4.17, got a 31 with near-perfect scores in the English sections of my ACT, and all of it mattered for nothing. After a stunt in community college thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, I became tired.

There's some serious damage that comes with being patted on the head and told you're not like other kids constantly. Outside of the egomaniac tendencies it instills, there's a rude awakening that comes when the smartest kid in every room finds themselves surrounded by geniuses. Once I figured out that there was always going to be someone better than me at something, I started to compete only with myself. Be a better me, learn because knowledge was the endgame, not some arbitrary numbers. Unfortunately, that only carried me one semester. The burnout set in, and among other less-than-savory events, I found myself nearly flunking out of college the very first semester I had as a full-time freshman. 

Talk about a change of events! With the critical damage to my expectations, I had to adjust. To insert a shameless self-promotion, refer to my post "It's Okay To Change Your Mind!" for the specifics of my journey. 

Unfortunately, the struggles didn't stop when I got to a new college. It was hard to motivate myself to study for a linguistics quiz every week, much less one graded with absolutely no mercy. I procrastinated everything, and for someone who never put anything off during my academic career, the change was jarring. Writing on a schedule with thousands of words due for my creative writing degree was even harder, making me wonder why I ever imagined it would be a good idea to pursue this type of study. I later learned this type of struggle had a name — (former) gifted kid burnout. 

Gifted kid burnout - (noun.) the result of long-term stress. It is often characterized by physical exhaustion, mental fatigue, and emotional detachment. It can be brought on by juggling too many roles, having little control, or few to no breaks. When children who were once considered the "gifted" or "smart" kids in class grow up to underperform academically and (likely) socially. 

It's probably a gateway into all kinds of concentration related issues, but the second I experienced this plague of burnout, I knew I wanted to stay far away from it if I could. After working myself into the ground for a decade, I began to question why I was doing it, and the second I asked "why" was the second I decided it wasn't worth anything to bother with arbitrary achievements. In the vein of the five stages of grief, I became plagued by each of the stages until I found a deep depression hole and climbed in.

Over the winter holidays, I flirted with dropping out. Quitting!

Here's actual footage of a friend talking me out of dropping out of school!

Finding the desire to write again was hard enough, let alone finding the motivation to do anything else for my academic career. Eventually, though, after some rounds of chess and a few tears, I remembered why I wanted to do this in the first place. I mean, I'm not Beth Harmon (The Queen's Gambit) suffering the weight of genius, but I have an endgame I desire, so I've been on the recovery from a serious struggle. 

Admittedly I'm not sure why I bothered to write this post. Maybe it's for the prospect of having a room full of people coo, "Ugh! Same!" Maybe it's because the negative energy needs to go somewhere. Whatever the reason, I find myself here.

Sonderly,

Jo

P.S. I got a speeding ticket today, so I'm in a shit mood and didn't really remember where I was going with the rest of this post. Hope that it still hits.