By Elisa Penha
I was diagnosed as gifted when I was seven.
Diagnosed. That’s the wording they used—like I was ill. My second-grade teacher had pulled me aside into a small office in the hallway next to the school library, sat me down across from her desk, and made me answer strange riddles and play a timed game of Cubix. I did not know I was being evaluated, but some weeks later, I received my first brown envelope of many. I had an IEP now—an Individual Educational Plan—for giftedness. My teachers were meant to accommodate me by assigning me extra work in order to keep me stimulated, as I was easily bored by the regular work being done by all my peers. I read at a tenth-grade level by the time I was eight. By the time I was nine, I could read 208 words in French aloud, in accordance with the reading tests my teacher in grades four and five administered to his classes monthly.
I was a star. My friends called me a “human dictionary,” and I sat at the top of all my classes with impossibly inflated grades even without studying. On two separate occasions, I was invited to transfer schools into a gifted program. The first time was in the third grade, and the second time in the sixth. In both instances, I rejected the offer. I told my parents it was because I did not want to leave my friends, but the truth was that I did not want to go anywhere where I couldn’t be the best. If I was in an all-gifted program, then I would no longer be special. I would no longer be the human dictionary. The smart one. I couldn’t lose that—it was all I had.
When I arrived at my academically rigorous ‘ninety-won’t-do’ high school, the culture shock was deafening. All of a sudden, everybody around me was a gifted kid who had been diagnosed in the second grade. I could no longer get by without studying, but since I had never learned how to in the first place, my grades dropped at lightning speeds. I was drowning, and I could not seem to pick myself back up. I wasn’t smart anymore, so I was nothing. I did not have a backup personality.
And, well: boo-fucking-hoo. Everybody has heard this story now; it’s tired, old, and desperately searching for an audience. The poor little gifted kid burnout who thrived for so long off the sweet saccharine of academic validation and is now getting slapped in the face while needing to learn to live without it. The ex-gold star student who now hasn’t picked up a book in months. Everybody knows that giftedness was only ever the thinly veiled attempts of the public education system to disguise undiagnosed ADHD and autism. They know the tragedy of the crushed Ivy league dreams of those who did not learn to study until it was too late. They know how we were only ever praised for our minds and now struggle to find senses of selves when the only thing we ever based ourselves off has now withered away. Everybody knows about us. And nobody fucking cares.
I’ve decided, recently, that I’m done hiding behind the pitiful label of an ex-gifted kid. I’ve decided I’m tired of it, because it was not my supposed giftedness or lack thereof that prompted my academic downfall. It was me. I never learned to study, I stopped paying attention in math class the moment it got slightly beyond the scope of something I understood in the blink of an eye, and I stopped reading. And it’s about time I stopped shuffling off the blame to everybody else except for myself. It’s about time I stopped blaming the teachers who procured my diagnosis in the first place. It was probably warranted, and they didn’t force me to abandon ship and stop trying in the ninth grade. I’m here to take accountability. Maybe I’m not burning out. Maybe I’m just lazy.
Okay, so, that isn’t the entire truth, and perhaps it’s more pessimistic than I’m willing to go for the sake of literary melodrama. Calling myself lazy isn’t exactly productive; it’s the same copout adults use to dismiss teenage depression or anxiety. I do not mean to say my burnout was not real—I really did panic upon the realization I’d lost the only identity I’d ever been bestowed, and the downward spiral of my grades would go on to affect the entirety of my almost-ending high school career. The accountable stance I intend on moving forward with does not involve the ousting of my experience with burnout or anybody else’s ex-gifted kid trauma, but rather one that enables me to stop wallowing in it so much. To stop sitting around and waiting for things to start going well for me again, get off my ass, accept that maybe I’ll never be as smart as I was when I was thirteen, and do my summatives instead of writing think pieces about my own life.
Some time ago, I had a rather enlightening conversation with one of my oldest friends. He’s known me since I was five, and he’s still around today. I confided in him: I told him that I was, for the majority of my life, under the impression that he was only friends with me because I allowed him to copy off my homework and because I wrote his essays for him. He told me that this was stupid. That he was my friend because he liked me, and liked being around me. I wondered about how many friends I’d accidentally pushed away post-burnout because I believed, almost egotistically, that they were all shallower than I was. That only I formed complex relationships, and everybody else only wanted me for my stellar brain, which I was now losing. My pretentiousness was a little obnoxious at best and possibly cruel at worst; a lame scapegoat to buy myself out of relationships. The underlying reality of it was that if I allowed good people into my life who would want to help me improve and actually got myself back on my feet, I would no longer have the comfortable excuse of being an ex-gifted kid to bury myself underneath whenever things get difficult again. Because the better I get, the more pathetic it is for me to laze around, ignoring my mountainous heaps of homework. Everybody has mountainous heaps of homework! And everybody gets stressed out about it! I wouldn’t be pitiable or different anymore: sweet and unassuming, breaking down in a digestible fashion. I would be like everybody else. And that was never good enough for me.
The emerging narrative of the ex-gifted kid has recently begun to take storm online, while hundreds of people come together to lament over their shared histories as former smart people and current lives as underachieving artists. However, as with most online discourse, I believe the focus is misplaced. I don’t think it was ever about the grades. I think it’s about the lack of agency. If you tell a child they’re one thing from the moment they can grasp what it means to have personality traits, then this child will never seek to cultivate their character in any other way. What you’re left with is a young adult that is nothing more than an underdeveloped shell of a person who needs to grasp fruitlessly at nostalgic straws for remnants of an identity that never really existed. Gifted kid burnout is the modern incarnation of the Disney Channel basketball star impishly fretting over what they should do post-graduation—they don’t really even like basketball, but they’ve never learned to like anything else! I’m not throwing away my dream, dad. I’m throwing away yours! Gifted kid burnouts latch onto their own misery because they don’t have anything else to give them personality, the same way they latched onto the giftedness itself while it was there: because they were never given the chance to discover anything else about themselves. And this dilemma is in no way relegated solely to the ex-gifted kids—we’re just the ones who have been able to capitalize on it. The ones who have somehow managed to turn not having a real personality into a personality in itself.
I know it’s not gifted kid burnout. It’s my desperation to validate my newfound startling lack of motivation to do well in school. Admitting I felt absolutely nothing when hitting submit on my university applications and that I cannot find it in me anymore to care about pulling grades above eighty is so, so much more difficult than accrediting everything to burnout—convincing everybody and myself that this isn’t what I’m actually like. I gave up everything for school—I’ve been thinking about university for longer than most children knew what the word itself meant. Every ounce of my well-being has, at some point and in some way, been sacrificed and put second in priority to school. Relinquishing the ex-gifted kid persona leads to the confrontation that all of my sufferings were in vain. That it never mattered because I don’t care anymore. And I’m not ready for that. I don’t know if or when I will be. The realization that perhaps I could have gone to the park with my friends more often in middle school and gotten closer to them the way they all did with each other, but without me. That I could have stayed past my allotted study break and watched a series finale I’d been looking forward to with my sister. I could have done so much more. I could have had childhood memories that weren’t spent typing away at extra credit homework in the caverns of my bedroom. The worst part is I wasn’t forced into this life by anybody. Sure, my parents were always adamant about my success in school, but it wasn’t like they ever prohibited me from having a life. I did that on my own. And I can’t even be sure it will have paid off.
I’m unsure where any of these admissions leave me. Yes, I think the story of gifted kid burnout is worn and aggravating to listen to, but god is it comfortable. I feel like I’m writing an unneeded, cash-grabbing sequel to the well-received first novel of my life. The story was already over! The story ended in the eighth grade and all of this is jumping the shark. Nobody needs to know what happened to the Chosen One after they were done being chosen; when the dust settled, and the battle was over and nobody needed them anymore. And nobody needs to know what happens to the middle-grade three-time honour roll winners after they were done being the smartest in the room, when the pencil shavings cascaded away, and nobody needed their test answers anymore. Well, that is, nobody needs to know except for the middle-grade three-time honour roll winners themselves. I, for one, am going to move on. I’m going to be eighteen in six months, and personally, I’d find it embarrassing to continue calling myself an ex-gifted kid when I’m able to vote. As long as I continue to let the person I was when I was twelve dictate who I’m supposed to be now, I will never be satisfied, and so perhaps now is finally the time to discover who I am for myself instead of waiting around for somebody to tell me.
Maybe I’m not burning out. Maybe I just need to study for my exams.
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