Attention deficit disorder ? Feedback please

Post Reply New Topic

I see you as a prideful man.

I can be guilty of looking at individuals with prospecting thoughts of their potential and 'what they can be capable of' -- but I know better than that, and just dismiss such thoughts as just another fancying in my head.

Your cognitive profile is not the entirety of who you are, but it a part of your toolset in daily living, it is a part of how you navigate the world and how you make do with what you got.

As for your situation -- I see it no different than another gifted kid who fell into one of the common pitfalls of gifted kids' developmental dilemmas.


Ever meet another high IQ individual who is not a success story or an overachiever? I wonder if you had talk to these people yourself?

Not necessarily twice exceptional or yet another savant. But they may help, too.

Because, so far, the accounts I've seen online with those who got labeled gifted were more like burned out before their 30s or 20s and, the typical 'not living up to their fullest potential', being called the smart kid yet are considered themselves ex-gifted adults and they're full of twice exceptional or underdiagnosed autistic/ADHD.

Though I don't know if it's a generational and modern situational thing. The accounts I've seen are also relatively younger than around your age range...


It was a skill that I'm forced to developed in an attempt to track myself so I can predict myself as to when I can or cannot do something since I don't have professional support or meds.

Only to find that predicting myself is useless because it's always inconsistent and that I cannot adjust fast enough whether or not I can anticipate it.

On top of techniques and toolboxes outside autism that I'm hoping that it will work with my case -- and found that nothing did.
And kept seeing missing prerequisites or thresholds to a particular skill, technique or an access to learn or 'why it won't work'.

And, it was also due to the lack of interoceptive filter and hypersensitivity -- that I'm forced to describe and name them, having to experience a wide contrasts both named and unnamed.

But there were no similar accounts, no similar descriptions. I'm alone. I had to gather more and more data... See if anything that matches my situation...

And became some sort of weird habit of describing everything internal. Most of my posts are like that.

It's just something that was thrusted upon me, forced to experience to a point of wishing that I was alexithymic and countless search that not even google can answer yet I had to deduce and make do.


Only to find none still.


Now mine was solved by having enough consistent estrogen, no hormonal fluctuations in my body -- it made the psych parts easier.

If I did not had the sensitivity...
I wouldn't know if my emotions became weaker or if I became more filtered and regulated. It's the latter -- the emotions itself are still just as strong, I'm just no longer reactive to it.

Not to me, but it's worth noting that that is incredibly common for the gifted kids to have high self-esteem and low actual achievement. It's the Mensa stereotype of people getting into it based on tests and being basically failures in terms of achieving anything commensurate to the test scores. When I was a kid, they made the decisions about which students were gifted, and which ones weren't, at like age 7 or so. Grade 2 the gifted students would be shipped off to a gifted program and it was just about impossible for any of the kids that weren't already listed to catch up due to the enrichment activities. Unfortunately, we know that you can't reliably tell prior to about age 10 which students are and aren't going to be gifted in adulthood.

Fortunately, around here, they discontinued that program for reasons related to equity. I'm not sure that's the greatest justification as it should have been discontinued on the basis of it not working at all. I've met a fair number of the adults that went through that program and they aren't necessarily that smart. They are smart, but they're not necessarily genius level smart, and a bunch of other folks didn't get the support that the schools are supposed to get.

The more modern way of doing it is to mainstream as many of them as possible with extra enrichment added to the classes themselves and with multiple versions of the same class for when there are enough students to make it work while those students are in normal classes for any subject that they don't need the extra enrichment.

I apologise for misconstruing what you said.

I am diagnosed ADHD and Autism. I have an above average full scale IQ, some subtests 99.9 percentile, some below average. I experience both hyper-focus and hyper-active-focus. Sometimes daily living is hard.

I've not come across many overachievers in the high IQ community. I've come across more than a few underachievers. It took me ages to find a good explanation for the gulf between my achievements and my cognitive ability.The simple answer? EF>IQ when it comes to school age academic achievement.

I was advanced for my age in terms of cognitive ability, but younger than it when it came to emotions and being independent.
The latter hit me with a ton of bricks in trying to reconcile pleasing my parents with the acute awareness of not having those independent living skills necessary for being a college/university student. I've not come across anyone else who has had that experience.

Don't worry about it, it was a valid interpretation.

There are a few reasons for that. Part of it is that there are a couple ways of measuring intelligence. One is via tests like IQ tests and the other is via actual achievements. People who are genius musicians may or may not do well on IQ tests, but nobody is really going to argue with people like Bowie and Armstrong being geniuses as they're clearly up there with the best of the best.

Another issue is that a high IQ can lead to high self-esteem which can discourage the person from ever really trying as hard as they can in order to maintain the esteem. This is in contrast to having a high self-concept where you're still willing to take some risks.

There's also the whole issue that all the world is a nail when all you have is a hammer. A high enough IQ permits people to not do all the necessary work to be the best of the best. They can manage for a while, but eventually they'll hit a wall that requires some actual real work and they may not have what it takes to do the more mundane things that everybody else has to do.

Often times the highest achievers are in the near genius part of the IQ ranking rather than the actual genius part. Exceptions do exist, but they're exceptions.

I've read so many posts about people doing well until they reach college/uni. Then pure brain power isn't enough , and the bad habits they got away with come home to roost. I have no great achievements , not in the way that such things are usually judged. I do my best to be a good dad,granddad, and great granddad. I try and help others as best I can. That's primarily via things I find in my RSS feeds.

I've got a masters and there's roughly a doubling of the amount of work each time you get to the next level of degree. High School has a lot of fluff and if you pass every class you take, and take every class that you need for graduation, you have like an entire year that last year where you don't really need to take anything at all.

High school is as much about students maturing and learning to socialize as it is about actual education.

^ I'm probably the most unpopular student to have gone to my public school in the 460 years of its existence. I was treated like I was an ugly freak. I had no idea how to socialise well. That situation hasn't changed much over the years. I've periodically tried to socialise more, as it's regarded as part of the recovery process. All have been abject failures. I don't do well when it comes to F2F interaction.
Online I do better, but that's not saying much. It took me nearly 11 years to get about 56 FB friends(May 2009 to March 2020. In March 2020 I started getting involved with the FB high IQ community. I now have 363 FB friends . The vast majority being those from the high IQ community, who've sent me friendship requests.

I have 0 FB friends.

I bet your grand kids like you

They do and I love them,my chosen family, more than words can say.

TBH, I've never really cared about that sort of body part measuring contest. I tend to just post things that interest me and don't even really bother to care much about the reaction. At the end of the day these aren't actual friends and if those folks don't care for what I'm posting, then it's probably not much worth worrying anyways.

For whatever reason I get more upset over a lack of replies to forum posts I've made than posts on FB and X. It may be distorted thinking on my part, but the posts I'd most like replies to tend to be the ones that are virtually ignored. I do realise that a FB friend is, for the most part, very different from a friend IRL. Whether on forums or social media I've never posted to gather 'likes'. I've never been good at the online equivalent of chit chat.

I've found that I'm the opposite. I did very poorly in high school, failing years 8,9 and 12 and not graduating. I was told by a teacher not to bother with university because I'd certainly fail.

A few years later I enrolled at uni to do a Bachelor of Psychology, a four year degree. After all my times not finishing anything, I graduated in 2016. And I definitely do not have a high IQ.

---

About ADHD - ADD used to be its label but all of it is called ADHD now. While we inattentive types may not be physically hyperactive, it's a different situation inside our brains. Mine is constantly on the go until I fall asleep at night mentally exhausted.

That's a great achievement. I'll be totally honest and upfront here. There's no way I could do that, even if the non academic side of things was sorted. Not with the quite severe EF deficits I have. Something I've never had help and support for, and that may well have worsened with age.