alphagodith:

leenazenyo:

dangerously-human:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

wearywater:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

gifted student™ brains are about as functional as horses when you get right down to it 

which sounds like a shit post but consider: horses? hypothetically MADE for running. look at this magnificent muscle beasts. look at those legs. they must be so good at running, right? wrong. horses are fragile as fuck. horses break their gotdamn legs so so easily, and if they break their legs you just have to fucking shoot them. if they run, the thing they are MADE FOR, too fast their lungs will start bleeding. I just googled horses to see if I was missing anything and apparently if they lie down for a day their organs start collapsing or something so they can’t rest from their One Horse Purpose even when they’re hurt. they’re made to do one thing but they can only do it under Very Specific Conditions and if a single thing changes they just die.

 which, you know. gifted students™ get applauded for being naturally smart when we’re five or whatever and then develop a terrible inflated sense of self that makes us highly averse to anything we’re not naturally good at, because it challenges our fragile childbrain egos and if we wait too long we’ll develop mental fences around entire subjects and skillsets (mine are math and studying) because we think we’re Bad at them, when in reality we just need to practice but are frustrated by that because it’s harder than being ~naturally talented~ was. we get applauded for doing One Thing but the second we run into slightly different things that our brains don’t comprehend as readily? it’s a Bad Time. I still have so much anxiety over things I don’t feel Naturally Talented at that I’ve been sitting here writing this post for like 10 minutes rather than read the feedback on my religion paper. I got a 100% on it, but I’m still That Scared of anything other than straight heaps of praise because that’s what my childbrain was acclimated to. just send me to the glue factory already. 

I…..I needed to hear this

that’s intriguing because this is not a particularly happy or uplifting post but I hope that whatever you got out of it was positive and that it could be a good thing for you

Sometimes it’s incredibly freeing to hear that other people are familiar with a feeling. No falsely spun cheery “positivity” needed.

As a gifted child this is so important. Grasping failure as a kid was not easy because I was praised for doing this or that. I was good at all these things, supposedly better than the rest of my peers so why is it that I suddenly wasn’t getting these new things? I didn’t understand why I was so bad at Math so I labeled it as this horrible thing I’d just never understand.

Practice on my own part just made me frustrated because things never ‘clicked’. So I continued to distance myself from that particular subject which just furthered my struggles when I was older. Same thing happened in a few other classes specifically rather than the entire subject.

Either way, that fragile sense of I’m either “really good” or “really bad” at something continued into adulthood and it’s a complicated place to be. So I enjoy drawing and generally I’m “good” at it, but if I can’t get something to work, artblock happens and I feel like I’m “really bad” and tend to just… not do one of my favorite things. At all.

i’m still trying to teach myself it’s okay to have to spend time practicing and fucking up to learn new things. it’s hard sometimes. i was never praised for trying to do something i didn’t naturally know how to do, i was ridiculed for mistakes that anyone would make, and so i have grown to be terrified of anything i’m not immediately great at, which is EXTREMELY limiting.