[DoreenMichele]

I was doing volunteer work with The TAG Project when they decided to add a list for highly, exceptionally and profoundly gifted. They called it TAGPDQ for pretty darn quick because no one actually wants to admit to looking for a support group for the upper echelons of giftedness.

It was hard to get conversation going there. I was the lead mod and I succeeded, but after I left, conversation petered out and it's rare for an email to show up on the list these days. (As far as I know, I'm still subscribed to that list.)

People have a super hard time talking about the sorts of problems you describe, but it's a really common story for highly gifted kids.

[madaxe_again]

It’s because the usual, and entirely understandable reaction to talking about this is “oh you think you’re better than me” hostility.

The easiest thing is to just be an island. There’s a reason that people like me are called “eccentric”, because too much time in your own company inevitably results in social drift.

[DoreenMichele]

I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. I was constantly held up by teachers as basically the person to hate at school.

They would act like they were good teachers because I knew so much and act like other kids were just lazy and should "be more like me and just study more" which wasn't at all fair or accurate.

In eighth grade, I was friends with a Hispanic boy. The class was given the chance to do a thing for extra credit and it involved decoding something. Not only did he speak English as a second language, he had no idea what the thing actually was.

I got in trouble for telling him it's a letter substitution puzzle. I didn't know because I was smart. I knew because my father did the Crypto quote in the newspaper every single morning and would drag everyone else into it when he couldn't do it easily.

It was an early lesson in how unfair the world is. He had no hope at all of getting the extra credit because he had too many things stacked against him.

Anyway, I had few friends at school and it was a toxic social environment. I gave up a National Merit Scholarship in part to escape the toxic BS and figure out who I was other than some toxic asshole as taught to me by the school system as a survival mechanism.

If you have no friends and everyone hates you, yes, you learn to Lord it over everyone that "at least I'm smarter than you" as the only defense mechanism you have.

I finally found a thing that explains that it's our strengths that limit us. I've had enough serious problems in life that I've gotten to escape the prison the school system actively built for me, but it wasn't at all easy.

[Viliam1234]

> It’s because the usual, and entirely understandable reaction to talking about this is “oh you think you’re better than me” hostility.

Yes. You try to describe how you got hurt, and people think that you are just bragging. (How exactly are you supposed to describe the social consequences of your higher intelligence without ever mentioning the fact?)

Then they look at some dysfunctional mechanism you developed as a result of your pain, and they conclude that you are a bad person and therefore you actually deserved it.

[gowld]

Calling people "string lamps" is not describing how you are hurt, it is bragging in the tackiest way.

[apotheon]

You appear to have the empathy of a moldy cheese sandwich.

[tudorw]

Islands can have bridges or tunnels if you're so inclined :)