[mezzie2]

If you're 'good' enough/identified a certain way as a kid, they'll bend over backwards to get you in things like that even if you're not well off. I wasn't from a well-off family, but test scores in the top 0.1% meant somehow there were scholarships to make camps and programs accessible once/if I expressed an interest. Whatever amount was required to make it affordable.

I'm a thoroughly useless adult, so it was a waste of money on their part, but it does happen. Or at least it used to.

[popularonion]

I got put into some “smart kid” activities in grade school, but as a poor kid with zero advice from parents, I really had no idea what to do with it.

No one told me that math is really 90% about writing proofs, all those homework problems I did were just the weed-out stuff, the academic equivalent of Leetcode.

So when I got put into some “real” academic math as a teen, I crashed and burned hard. I didn’t have a tutor and it never would have occurred to me to ask for one, so that was that.

When I was 18 years old in my first year of college, after my first semester grades came in, a guidance counselor set up a 1-on-1 with me to talk about the Rhodes Scholarship process and what my research interests were.

My response was: 1) what the heck is a Rhodes Scholarship and 2) how could I possibly have “research interests” as an 18 year old college freshman.

That was the final chapter of society considering me “gifted”, but it was just as well, I couldn’t imagine any greater success beyond getting a job and being able to afford my own apartment.

[mezzie2]

I'm curious how old you are?

Mostly because a lot of my personal interests/ability to self-develop was related to Internet access. (My parents made VERY QUESTIONABLE financial choices and opted to pay for Internet access instead of food or clothing so I might have been freezing and my clothes all had holes in them but I could go online to talk to other smart kids.)

Also because I remember me + my parents being sat down when I was in elementary school and having my options talked about. In middle school once I was proven to have programming and math aptitude during the dot com boom, educational experts came to us and discussed specific gifted learning options (including things like private schools, skipping grades, or even pulling me out of school altogether for private instruction). None of this was initiated by my parents - it was brought to us. This was in the 90s.

[in_cahoots]

This might be the first time in my life I’ve seen someone with a similar experience. As a big fish in a small pond, opportunities just present themself to you. Free summer camp that provides college credits? Going to national/state competitions just because? It’s all second nature once you’re ’that kid’. Even bullying goes away because everyone knows you have the ear of the teachers and administrators and/or wants your help on homework.

Of course you still hit the wall later. But I see all the reports of how terrible it is to be gifted and am so grateful that my experience was different.

[mezzie2]

You get away with so much, it's a terrible adjustment to be 'normal' after that. I still struggle frequently, and have to take a lot of steps not to come off as an arrogant prick. Luckily, I have a fair amount of charisma, and I used to be an attractive young woman, which conceal a lot of social sins, but it's still one hell of an adjustment.

If I'm honest, I never ran into an intellectual wall. I did choose a comparatively 'easier' path, but that was more because I had a wide breadth of interests and choosing something easier meant I'd have more time to indulge my various interests. I was still getting interviews for tenure track positions out of grad school and when I did try to work post-graduate school, my first position was at an Ivy where I was the only one on staff who didn't come from an Ivy League school. (I was too lazy/too absorbed in my own things to do what was required to go to one.)

I ended up disabled in my last semester of graduate school - the 'wall' in my case is my body being unable to accommodate the social/networking demands of an academic or high powered private research career rather than my running into a topic I felt was beyond me. Particularly combined with being on my own in a HCOL area as that lifestyle required: Doing all your life management on your own with no safety net along with running at that high of an intellectual level is near impossible when you have a severe disability. (I have MS.)

I've been 'stuck' intellectually once in my life, and it was the result of a medication we tried for symptom management, and I found the feeling horrifying, if I'm honest. It was the first time I'd run into a problem where I had to sit there and think and still couldn't come up with a way to proceed, versus running into a problem and just being too damn lazy to bother. (Being able to see what I would do to solve the problem is very different from being motiviated to do so.) Apparently, most people feel that way fairly often? It made me way more sympathetic to people who didn't like school or who don't like learning.