The “Gifted Kid” to “Disabled Adult” Pipeline that Swallowed My Twenties
If you grew up being told that you could achieve anything yet you struggled to achieve anything at all, this article is for you. If you are into relatable personal stories, read the first part. If you are more into general reflections, you can skip directly to the second part.
“You Can Do Anything You Want in life, You Are So Smart”
I grew up in a dysfunctional family. “Home” did not really feel very homely. By age 6, I almost prided myself on being able to distinguish at a single glance between an alcohol and a heroin overdose, and I had witnessed what, in hindsight, can be described as a couple of murder attempts. Insults and neglect were daily routine. Apart from rare sparks of positivity, I mostly felt hated, unsafe, invisible and alone. My family was also not really part of the wider community. We weren’t invited to the neighbourhood barbecues. I knew we were different from the rest. But I also knew that I was different from them. Outside of home, I started having trouble making friends. I bullied and got very bullied. It was soon made clear to me that I wasn’t part of that world, either. I soon realized that I was alone on one side of a fence, and everyone else was on the other. “Neurdivergence” was not in my vocabulary. I was different, and it wasn’t good.
Simultaneously, I grew up being told by everyone that I was exceptionally smart. Being a “gifted kid” was an endless source of compliments — in fact, pretty much the only one. At age 1, I learnt books by heart and pretended to read them, much to the amusement of a crowd of stunned extended family. At age 2, I taught myself to write. Teachers were in awe and the academic side of school was excessively easy. I would constantly get impressed comments like I have never seen something like this in my life. My life would be so much better than the average, I got constantly told, because I was so smart. Things would be easy for me, I could become anything I wanted, and I would be successful.
“Being “smart” was the only positive feedback the world had really given to me about myself. Nothing about me as a person, but all about grades and party tricks. So I went all-in. It was my best bet out of all my struggles, I thought. No matter how hard the present was, no matter what difficulties I was facing with my peers or my family, my future was there, waiting for me, somewhere else.”
I clung for dear life to that promise of success. After all, the rest wasn’t going too well. No one told me that I was also different for other reasons. All I knew was that everyone I met seemed to simultaneously dislike me, yet adore my intelligence. My self-esteem was already broken by nursery, but my ego relied on the certainty of being exceptional. Being “smart” was the only positive feedback the world had really given to me about myself. Nothing about me as a person, but all about grades and party tricks. So I went all-in. It was my best bet out of all my struggles, I thought. No matter how hard the present was, no matter what difficulties I was facing with my peers or my family, my future was there, waiting for me, somewhere else. All I had to do was work hard, get great grades and focus on academia. Just keep doing what you are doing — people would tell me — and the rest will follow, you will see. Being “smart” became an unshakeable pillar of my identity, providing me with certainty about my worth in the face of confusion, unmet emotional needs, and the general sense of wrongness that permeated my life.
Fast forward to my late 20s, and the promises of an easy, successful life for my little gifted self spectacularly failed to realize. It took a chaotic decade of health issues, professional and social difficulties, intense hardship, and mental health troubles to come to terms with the fact that, well, I may have been a bit “gifted”, and that may have worked very well in school, but I am also very disabled, and that doesn’t help in general. “Giftedness” acted as a façade covering my disability struggles until my early twenties. From the outside, I was launched towards a life of success. I was getting straight As, but I was privately having meltdowns and crying myself to sleep. I was travelling the world, but I couldn’t find a direction in life. I was “building my CV” with this or that, but I was too exhausted to do the stairs (yes, I still travelled the world. It was exhausting). I hid my struggles from everyone. Because I was “smart”, people around me expected me to just know how to navigate life. Surely someone like me could figure it out? Surely there was nothing wrong with me, I just needed to believe in myself more?
Spoiler: believing in yourself is great, but it doesn’t fix your disabilities. So much for positive psychology. In my twenties, I learnt the hard way that being “smart” is not the most important thing for a good life. Perhaps I also needed…a few other skills, that I struggled with. Perhaps my health matters more than my achievements, and the “successful life” that was imagined for me by the world actually went against all my physical and mental needs. Perhaps I was always as smart as I was autistic. Perhaps it’s okay that I haven’t made outstanding achievements — my starting line was never what people around me thought it was. I actually consider myself lucky to still be on this earth, and I can only thank my privilege for having spared me the experiences of homelessness and destitution (you can be brilliant, even educated, and unable to work, and your landlord won’t accept payments in university papers).
“I felt that I had no choice but to push through, and try to make the best out of it. I felt like something essential was missing from the picture, and that I just had to keep going until I would find it. I was “smart”, I told myself, surely I could do it!”
After university, the fall from the stars was brutal. One day I was doing an internship in the top diplomatic cabinet of a UN agency, being praised for being able to read and summarize a whole book in an afternoon, the next I was cleaning private houses during COVID with an unused master’s degree in my pocket, and stealing food from the supermarkets to make it to the end of the month. The “twice-exceptional” life can defy any established narrative, I guess. I will never forget the guy who told me that “I was way too qualified” to clean his oven once he found out that I had a postgraduate degree. He was one of my kindest clients, he worked in finance, and he always offered me a coffee at the start of the shift (if a cleaner works for you, please do offer them coffee). As I casually mentioned my master’s degree, his brain just couldn’t compute my class contradiction — he literally jumped out of the sofa he was sitting on, and almost snatched the sponge out of my hands. (I cleaned the oven though, it was my job.) A few days later I met with my classmates from university. They were all talking excitedly about the jobs that they had landed in this or that sector, and I was the only one with a blue collar position post graduation. “Oh”, is all they said. Their reaction made me feel like I had turned into Kafka’s giant beetle. Once again, I was different.
My twenties were a mix of jobs for which, on paper, I was madly overqualified. But I needed something part-time, which already ruled out most of the job market. Being (undetected) autistic, I also struggled with being convincing enough in cover letters and job interviews, and I was not able to network — so, very few opportunities were left. And frankly, I was too exhausted to look for anything. Chronic fatigue is real, and I couldn’t even find energy to cook for myself. In spite of all of this, during this time, I actually had no idea that I was disabled. I knew I was unwell, but I didn’t dare to “claim” myself as disabled (“who am I to”), and I was far from thinking of myself as autistic. I thought I was just traumatized by my crazy childhood, having CPTSD and whatnot, and that just made me want to try even harder to heal from my family’s legacy. Truth is, I was not even able to think too much. I was constantly exhausted, heavily dissociated, and in survival mode. Whenever I asked for help, I just felt more let down. I had cut contact with my family, and I feared homelessness. I felt that I had no choice but to push through, and try to make the best out of it. I felt like something essential was missing from the picture, and that I just had to keep going until I would find it. I was “smart”, I told myself, surely I could do it!
The contradiction between the high expectations I had towards my post-university life, and the reality of my struggles created a constant ringing cognitive dissonance in my head. I couldn’t make sense of it, because my working model of reality was that I was a non-disabled (aka “normal”) person, gifted on top of it, and that did not correspond to my actual experience. Why was everything so hard for me, when it was supposed to be easier? Growing up with undiagnosed invisible disabilities feels like the whole world is a mirror that constantly reflects a distorted image of yourself. All the advice and feedback that you receive, all the systems you live in, all the norms society works by, reflect a different bodymind than yours. You know something is “off”, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. I did not have the puzzle pieces I needed to be able articulate my struggles and needs, or my actual worldview, values and priorities. I was a blank to myself.
“Growing up with undiagnosed invisible disabilities feels like the whole world is a mirror that constantly reflects a distorted image of yourself. All the advice and feedback that you receive, all the systems you live in, all the norms society works by, reflect a different bodymind than yours. You know something is “off”, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. I did not have the puzzle pieces I needed to be able articulate my struggles and needs, or my actual worldview, values and priorities. I was a blank to myself.”
So I more or less consciously chose the bulldozer strategy. I bulldozed over my needs as if I was made of steel, and I kept my feelings to myself. After all, whenever I pierced my wall of shame to try and open up about my issues, I just ended up feeling more misunderstood. The possibility of me feeling “well” simply didn’t cross my mind at the time. Like the proverbial fish who can’t see water, I couldn’t even see my own suffering, because it was my normal (and, well, also because I had an undiagnosed vision impairment). I got used to function under the most extreme conditions of exhaustion, visual disturbances, crushing shame for my “weirdness”, and suicidal thoughts, to say “I’m good” with the most convincing smile while I literally felt like I was about to die or crumble inside. It was that extreme, because this is what people with invisible disabilities are put through in this society.
To cut a long story short, one day I inevitably hit a wall. I realized that my difference is called autism, and perhaps my health issues are something more than “trauma responses”. Burnout forced me to stop and reconsider what I value in life. “If I can’t be a high achiever, who am I? Is there even anything good about me? Am I still ‘smart’?”
An Idea of “Intelligence” That Fails Everyone
There are many things, I believe, that are wrong with the Western traditional idea of “intelligence”, and they affect those who are labelled “gifted” and those who aren’t, alike. Measurements of IQ are mostly focused on intellectual, logical, or verbal abilities. That supposedly measures someone’s “intelligence”. This quantifiable intellectual intelligence is supposed to lead to achievement. Therefore, only a certain kind of intelligence is recognized, and only insofar as it is functional to the system. Being exceptional is seen as great and admirable, as long as it poses no challenge to the status quo, and no “burden” on society in terms of extra support needs. If you are “intelligent”, you are supposed to be self-sufficient, but not self-determining. Under capitalism, intelligence is hijacked by the laws of power and profit. “Smart” people are supposed to achieve.
As a spieces, humanity has indeed achieved incredible technological advancements. But it can be argued that while it requires amazing intelligence to build the technology necessary to visit Mars, it also requires simultaneous amazing stupidity to destroy the ecosystems of our own planet. If it’s easier to imagine moving life to Mars than to imagine the end of capitalism, it seems that something is wrong with our self-proclaimed most intelligent spieces on Earth... So the question is: what kind of things do we value in our current social system? Do we value emotional, spiritual, social, practical intelligence, as much as we value standardized IQ tests? Do we value the collective intelligence of an ecosystem? Most importantly, are we able to value health as much as achievement?
“Intelligence” is a concept that, historically, has a deep relationship with eugenics, with all its Eurocentric, burgeois, ableist, and racist roots. To dismantle this relationship is to dismantle the very idea of ranking the value of lives according to certain biological or social criteria, or the idea that some characteristics can make a human, more or less implicitly, superior or inferior to others. This puts into question a whole ontological paradigm (big words, sorry: it puts into question a whole logic by which we define the world and each other). Western capitalism is based on the “cogito ergo sum” ontology, which places thinking as the primary form of consciousness that determines existence. Being efficient, rational, optimizing, productive: that makes you valuable. That makes you a more deserving human. But this is not a paradigm of equality. Audre Lorde traced for us a map for an alternative to this logic, when she said: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free”.
“Autistic, neurodivergent, and disabled people, by our very existence, we are forced to confront the forces that tie the value of life to productivity and social conformity. We have to find ways to exist beyond the system we grow up in, often with little access to the sources of self-worth that neurotypicals/ able-bodied people can rely on.”
I think it is fair to say that our school system is definitely not designed to make you “feel” or be free. In school, your performance is rewarded or punished. Little attention is given to the development and wellbeing of the student as a whole person — their emotional, social, as well physical and intellectual developmental stage. Those who find it hard to focus or learn according to the rules of the mainstream education system, are penalized. Those who act out, tend to be punished more than understood. Those who question too much, are generally told to shut up and listen. However, those who are academic high achievers can also be penalized, because emphasis on academic success overshadows the rest of the student’s needs. Since the education system is designed for neurotypical children and it does not acknowledge the diversity of the human mind, neurodivergent students are left to suffer the constant confusion of being different, and cruelly expected to figure out that difference on their own.
Autistic, neurodivergent, and disabled people, by our very existence, we are forced to confront the forces that tie the value of life to productivity and social conformity. How many times have we, disabled people, heard the phrase, “if it (disability) happened to me, I would end my life”? We grow up immersed in a culture that defines our existence as a waste. If we want to survive, we cannot afford to believe in capitalism, and define ourselves according to that narrative. We have to find ways to exist beyond the system we grow up in, often with little access to the sources of self-worth that neurotypicals/ able-bodied people can rely on. For example, we may not be able to work, or achieve “life milestones” that are generally used to define someone’s worth in society. We may be rejected by our communities, or constantly treated with condescendence by “helping” professionals. Ultimately, we need to find value in something entirely different — starting from simply being alive.We need to build our own paradigms and subjectivities, our own worldview of what society would need to look like to make full space for our existence. We need to design our lives around our needs, because society won’t do that for us.
“both gifted and disabled people have a fundamental right to just be ordinary, and receive the support that they need as human beings, without having to “earn” that support by means of outstanding achievements and inspiring stories.”
Don’t get me wrong, disabled and neurodivergent people can and do thrive in this society. Our lives don’t have to be tragic for our disabilities to be real, and it’s great to be socially successful, if you can do it in an ethical way. But both gifted and disabled people also have a fundamental right to just be ordinary, and receive the support that they need as human beings, without having to “earn” that support by means of outstanding achievements and inspiring stories. This right is currently denied by a neoliberal paradigm of supposed “meritocracy”, which routinely cuts services that are essential to our wellbeing. A society built according to the maxim “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” would go much more in our favour.
I was never a “gifted kid”, and I am not “a loser” for not having achievements to show off. I refuse these subjectivities that society insists to place onto my life. I am simply a person with a lot of health needs, and a “spiky skill profile” that makes me a bit book-smart. My focus now is purely on my health, and growing as a person. Every day is a battle to survive, and to recover from the skill regression of burnout. As I discover more and more about autism and disability, I write to create the mirror that I lacked in my youth.
I am always happy to learn from other people’s experiences — feel free to leave a comment if you like.
