How To Recover From Being A Gifted Child
Confession time: I had some serious writers block when trying to think of a topic for this blog post. So much so that I wished I was in year 6 again.
Year 6 Olivia had it sorted. Top of her class, always was, probably always would be. She had a head full of ideas that were going to take her all the way to the top. She’d be devastated to know that I left school with barely passing grades and depression. So where did it all go wrong? In my case, there was nobody to blame but myself. My parents were adamant not to be ‘pushy’ and pressure me into being perfect. But that didn’t stop me from putting pressure on myself, I simply always had to do well in school. From this came a fear of failure that became debilitating when it came time to write my personal statement for university and apprenticeship applications. I sat in front of my laptop and got myself so flustered that I made myself physically sick. So I didn’t apply. Because if I didn’t apply, I couldn’t get rejected.
Am I the only one? Of course not. What I was experiencing was something called ‘Existential Depression’, something almost everybody goes through to some extent in their lifetime. It is born from discovering something that makes you question what you previously knew to be certain. What I knew was that I was smart, and what I discovered was that I was good at some things but had the capacity to be bad at most other things. The effects of the pressures put on ‘gifted children’ are lasting into adulthood. The National Association for Gifted Children, identifies "heightened awareness, anxiety, perfectionism, and stress”. Research conducted by Liberty has found that 20% of people who drop out of secondary school were previously gifted children, due to suffering from stress-induced trauma in their formative years. The amount of stress the children took on when taking the 11+ selection exam was painful to watch in the BBC mini-documentary “Grammar Schools: Who will get in?” and I found myself genuinely worried about the mental wellbeing of those who failed.
So how do you recover? How do you stop beating yourself up for every little slip up and let go of that perfectionist streak? Now, I’m not a doctor, but let me offer some advice.
Don’t see things through the lens of achievement, but through passion. Don’t look for a medal as the end product of your hard work, look for a sense of fulfilment and happiness when creating it.
Look forward, not back. Never mind what you used to be good at, think about what you are good at now and what you want to be good at in the future.
In the words of Will Smith: Fail Forward. When I first heard this I thought ‘But I don’t want to fail at all’. Failure isn’t the opposite of success, it’s a part of it. Look at your failure and learn from it. If you refuse to accept your mistakes, you are doomed to repeat it.
Education can be found outside of academia. I always thought I was just ‘book smart’. I now know that my greatest skill is my charisma, which can’t be graded. There is a life outside of school where you will learn skills that cannot be quantified.
Whether the pressure put on you is external or internal, communicate with those around you. Tell them that you are feeling overwhelmed. Keeping it all to yourself will only lead to your stress building. Sometimes you need somebody to tell you that you’re being silly to make you realise that your fears are irrational.
Cry! Tears are the expulsion of stress hormones. If you’re feeling like you need to cry, it’s because you need to let all that energy out.
I know now that nothing went wrong. I was meant to get the grades that I got otherwise I’d never realise that the classroom wasn’t the right environment for me, the workplace was. Once I let go of my fear of failure, I became more productive than ever. In the times that I went for something that could have ended in failure, it has ended in some valuable opportunities. As a result, I have so much more experience in the field I want to go in to than I would have, had I gone to university, and have the foresight to know that when I leap, I might fall, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't leap again.
Words by Olivia Traverso for No1Blog