Were you a gifted child?

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I had to reply to this.
I was thought of as gifted by my mother.
My Dad was narcissistic and the sort who needed me to fail as it was a threat to him, so he put me down and I handed my giftedness over to him on a plate.
School was a joke.
Sacked from jobs.
Exploited.
Re-located to a new life embittered, unhappy 50 odd year old drug addict.
I no longer blame my Dad or family, this post is a condensed version, I basically wasted the talents I had and grew up thinking I was a bimbo with nothing to offer oblivious to the gifts I had.

What does gifted child mean just more capable than other children? Or more capable than adults?

At age 6 I was attending English and art classes at an art gallery. The art instructor there loved my strange choice of detail, for the first freestyle painting I painted cracks of a smashed windshield I saw on a wreck just outside the art gallery, for example. Then when I got the home assignment to draw family members, I drew an anatomically accurate portrait of mom, as she was available to sit and pose for me. Most other kids drawings were more like stick figures.
The art instructor didn't know my mom, but she took English classes at the same art gallery in the adult group. One day the art instructor saw her in the hallway on her way to her class, he ran over to her and told her he has something to show her, one of the kid's drawings he has looks just like her. That drawing was selected from the group to be sent to an exhibit in Italy. Pretty sure they didn't know it was a drawing by an autistic child that focuses on individual facial features. They thought I was "gifted".

I was an awkward child, too.

I didn't mind awkward people; I couldn't really tell, anyway. I just liked people who liked me and were nice and didn't want to argue.

I wasn't "gifted" in any area besides reading. It actually used to piss off my middle school English teacher since I had the highest scores in the class on reading ability and could write pages of stuff in my creative writing essays, but I had horrible executive functioning. He picked on me because he thought I was lazy, but plot twist I just have ADHD and autism and needed extra help that no one gave me past the third/fourth grade. lol

Gifted people could be all "wrapped up" in themselves

(bad joke hee hee)

No, it turns out my parents were my biological parents, although I am sure there were days they would have liked to give me away...

I got into the gifted program in high school, which was funny, because in my schooling until then I struggled academically a lot. For high school I ended up going to a local magnet school where nearly everyone was at least in the gifted program, if not taking AP courses concurrent with the regular high school curriculum. I therefore never saw myself even as the smart kid, the hard worker, or the genius at school. Even at home, my older siblings were so much more high achieving than I was that it never even seemed possible to compare myself. We weren't even in the same league.

Instead of feeling pressure, I actually just felt adrift and kinda stupid and insecure about whether I belonged, no matter where I was.

As such, I couldn't really relate to the OP's article.

I grew up more or less in the sticks, so the idea of giftedness was unheard of. You were born into a farmer's community and expected to stay there. Why give someone assistance to get ahead, when there's nothing to reach? Still, my parents were prideful people and put us 3 sons in the same Montessori school (the only one in the area. It wasn't good.), because somewhere they had heard it was of "higher class". Since my education was only meant for them to look good, there was no point in putting me in a gifted program because just having "Montessori" stamped on my head was enough for them. Curiously enough, nobody else cared. At any rate, my parents way of raising me was to put me to cutting and packing wood, mowing grass, and cleaning the bathroom.

I wasn't gifted by any means.

How about a more fun interpretation of the title.

If I were gifted to my parents, they'd definitely ask for the receipt and take me back to the store for a refund.

If I was a gifted child, my parents would have jumped into a time machine, traveled back in time and thrown me into Bedlam.

I always resented the "gifted" label too. For me, it wasn't a gift, but a curse. It came with a slew of extra obligations and responsibilities, like getting perfect grades at all times "because I'm smart" , but not even one extra right or privilege. So I took matters into my own hands, and found my own: my parents' alcohol, and in middle school, no less. Come to think of it, if I weren't gifted, I wouldn't have had the smarts to find that.

Eh... hard to say. When I went through school, a lot of the 'gifted' programs were very crude things. I got into a couple based (presumably) on good grades, and did well (if not spectacularly) enough to be part of the wallpaper. From what I gathered - hampered somewhat by my lack of networking - they were marginally less boring than the regular academic streams. I don't think we ever got taught any additional subjects; presumably it was just faster or more in-depth.

In my personal life, I didn't have any particularly intellectual or academic hobbies, other than being hyperlexic. For a while, I was the neighborhood go-to kid for configuring or un-screwing anything electronic, but it's not like I had a soldering iron and a knowledge of circuits.

Other stuff? I dunno. I wrote memory-optimization configuration files for the family PC in the mid-80s so it was capable of running some of the games of the time. Wired up an extended parallel-port cable and rigged up a home network that ran through the ceiling. Nothing exactly groundbreaking.