Are you autistic and gifted?

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I've always been very hesitant to use the term 'gifted',but others have used it about me. I can't say I have any great/outstanding skills or talents.I have definite comparative strengths and weaknesses. For the most part the psychiatric profession has been hypercritical towards me because I didn't live up to the expected,indeed demanded, good at x so also good at y. You can add 'bullying related trauma' to that which,apart from one abortive attempt early on, has made me totally avoidant re pursuing further education.

I used to be a lot more creative when younger than I am now. I'd say that's true for most people, including famous artistic people. Whether creative/gifted or not I've certainly failed to live up to any potential I may have had.

One of the main things that tipped me over into having an SMI was the 18 months of severe anxiety trying to balance not wanting to let down my parents down vs being acutely aware that I was far from able to cope with the non academic side of college/uni life.

I'd say that around 80% of my FB friends are from the high IQ communities there. They've been far less inclined to reject me as a person. Indeed it's my own gossamer thin self confidence/esteem/worth that has me thinking I'm not good enough, not any such words from any of them.

Last edited by firemonkey on 06 Dec 2022, 7:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

You nailed it!

I am extremely good at everything I do. I just never do anything I’m bad at.

That sums it up very well. I'm varying degrees of crap at 99.99% of things.

I have seen children’s books on Shakespeare before. I remember seeing them when my nephews were still young. They are typically read to the child as a nighttime story to get them interested in literature. Obviously some of the more violent stories have been changed a bit to fit the audience.

FYI - I was reading technical books on dangerous poisons and making explosives at the age of ten. That was about the time I was extracting simple plant poisons to use when called upon. I had so much fun learning that way. You never wanted to face my squirt gun if I was angry, as it was not packing just water. Back then, no one noticed what I was reading and/or tried to stop me from doing so. Such different times now.

Charlotte Brontë handcrafted this needlepoint sampler at the age of 6.
It's incredible because she was almost legally blind.

Emily made this at 9:



All six siblings were reading Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Goethe, and Byron by age 5.
They were writing their own poetry and plays by that age too.

Children can do much more than they're given credit for, these days.

It was normal for kids going to school to learn Latin even in the primary school grades----up to about the Second World War.

It's obvious, though, that the Bronte sisters were "gifted" in things poetic and literary---as well as in things like embroidery.

That's really good. I was just doing mundane, 3 year old, stuff like looking through the set of children's encyclopaedias my parents had just bought. It took me a little while to realise it was Walt Disney and not Disney Walt.

To even read a children's encyclopedia at three years of age is "advanced." Most three-year-olds wouldn't know how to position a book to read it. Some might even tear off the pages. And people wouldn't really look askance at them; they are only three, after all

Dang. I don't blame you for disliking that experience.

Math, I believe, is indispensable in economics----but I certainly wouldn't rely on it solely.

Encyclopedias were my jam when I was a kid. I loved the pictures, and how well they explained words that were new to me, one at a time. I didn't have to guess. I didn't have to use context clues. I suppose I started reading encyclopedias when I was 5 or 6, certainly not at age 3.

My mother had this idea that she was going to teach her kids to read when we were still toddlers. She had read up on it and had gotten her hands on what looked like this 200-page, poorly xeroxed, pictureless manuscript that we were supposed to learn from (this was the 80s). It was full of these dry exercises where we were supposed to trace some ellipses with our finders as we held out a vowel to sound-out words. For example:
ca...............t
ba...............t
ma..............t

hu..............g
du..............g
tu...............g

No stories, no fun, no joy. I hated the dang thing. My two older siblings apparently got it quickly and were reading by the time they were 3. Whenever mom would pull that book out though I'd try to run. At age 2 to 3, there is no real escape. I remember her being really mad with me about it, holding the book in front of me by force and trying to control her temper. It was clear that my behavior would dictate how many more exercises I would be made to do.

After all was said and done, I could read pretty well by the time I was 4. I wasn't great at it in pre-k 3, but I remember being quite bored in pre-k 4, wondering why we never read anything in school, including all of the words on alphabet signs strung around the room in sequence. The following year I was the best reader in my class in kindergarten. My mom still considered this slow.

Ironically, one thing my brain does a lot better than others' is that it holds onto very old memories well. My two sisters have no recollection of learning how to read or any other events that happened in their lives before about age 5. I used to think they were weird for that, but apparently, I am the weird one for having an abundance of memories from age 2 to 5, and some that may have been a bit earlier, though it is unclear, since I don't think I was terribly good at understanding time at that point.

I wouldn't have learned to read using that method, either. I used to get zeroes in "phonics."

Sorry you had to go through that drudgery. There are many ways for people to learn.

I learned to read solely by whole-word memory. I could read single word at about age 4, Dr. Seuss by 5. By the time I was in first grade, I was reading what are now called "chapter books." I was in a "special class" for kids with all sorts of disabilities. There were some deaf children, some intellectually-disabled children, some who had difficulty speaking, but were of at least "normal" intelligence. Luckily, the teacher was able to discern that I could read pretty well, and put me in a special cubicle so I wouldn't disrupt the class. This was pre-IEP, pre any sort of legislation dealing with inclusion. This was 1967-1968.

I think a lot of the concern about "gifted" kids getting ignored and wasting their potential is caused by our educational system which tends to assume that one size fits all. The problem isn't just that the occasional smartie gets overlooked, it's that the system only works well for the perfectly average pupil. Everybody else is more or less out of their depth or insulting their intelligence, depending on their individual grasp of the particular subject matter being taught, for most of the time they're in class. I tend to feel that way whenever I read anything. Most of it is a waste of time because it's either too far below my level of understanding or too far above it (plus a lot of the too-advanced stuff isn't explained in a way that's clear to me). They just don't write books with me in mind.

But I never felt bored in class when I was deemed gifted. I liked that it was easy for me to whizz through the work and get tons of praise for getting it right so quickly. They noticed that I was often waiting at the end for the others to catch up, and they gave me a book of advanced problems to stop me getting bored. I liked that too. I never needed much extra attention to deal with the "problem" of my talent. As luck would have it, there was one other "ultra-bright" pupil, so I had no need to feel alone. Not that I think it would have bothered me much if I'd been the only one. So I don't see the need to call the NAGC police. Just see the pupils as individuals and use a bit of common sense.

It was a very different story a few years later when I fell behind at secondary school. The teachers noticed, but their only intervention was to blame me for not keeping up, which just made it worse. I was so bored with sitting there achieving nothing that I took to clowning about and low-level sabotage because there was nothing else to do. It didn't help much of course, except that it probably improved my flair for schoolboy comedy and the subversion of authority.

According to my father I was a self taught reader.

I don't remember getting active instruction in reading, either.

My brother taught me to read my first book.

At school I loved learning phonics.
I liked all the rules, and the words like diphthong.