What does 'being highly gifted' mean to me? A fictionalized testimony.

"What does ‘being highly gifted’ mean to me - or maybe I prefer to say ‘for me’? Like others.... I first struggle with the terminology. Or rather...I have a freeze response, some part of me wants to deny this way of being - very different. It is culturally loaden, and I can see why, although I can also see why it can be really valuable to use these terms and differentiations. I can also approach it as a description of a phenomenon we find in nature. Of course, there is pain associated, an existential fear also. I mean...I always knew there was something very, let’s say odd about me and I – or some parts of me - always experienced living in a certain vacuum or void. On the one hand I was very fluid socially, emotionally flexible, on the other hand my mind seems to work in such an abstract matter, my emotions and feelings seem to be so complex and ongoing, that by the time I was eleven, twelve years old, and I made another leap in abstraction and dive into emotional intensity, I truly never experienced to resonate with the wave lengths of my age peers. Or adults for that matter. And maybe this is just another ‘literary thread’ of or perspective on my life experience, because honestly, I do not think my experience of social belonging was more intense before I entered early adolescence. I just knew I had to struggle my way through this and other dimensions of life, and from a certain perspective one could say I was lucky to be… I was lucky that some of my personas were quite socially adaptive.

The ways my mind works became clearer to me once I entered University and came into contact with very intense and complex thinkers, sometimes teachers. While other students seem to be disoriented and felt too challenged by the divergent, or holistic and equally analytical thinking styles of some creators, I felt a sense of relief and recognition that spurred an intense intellectual hunger. I often skipped lessons and just lay in my bed all day long with these books…That certainly was bibliography.

But the level of self-awareness about my gifted experience was nothing near it is now. My mind was still very occupied with understanding others, these sometimes strange other human beings, underneath lay dormant my need for belonging and on top of that a layer of self-rejection. There were many possibilities to develop myself creatively, academically… Possibilities to gain status. Something inside of me never wanted to give in fully to that socially adaptive persona and its need for recognition. I knew I had to keep on doing existential research, keep on exploring, and that one day, so to speak, a universal light, some long-distance light, would get in and reflect that the so-called crack is part of a personal and collective whole….

Slowly but surely, and sometimes suddenly, I came in contact with like-minded ‘differentees’… I learned about giftedness and often inhibited learning about levels of giftedness…More importantly, there was a lot of self-education around the human psyche, about my personal narrative, about relationships and emotional development and experience, a lot of cultural analysis also. I devoured books.

Everything in my (and, from what I know basically everyone’s) mind is a metaphor. Everything is connected, is connection, and my unconscious and conscious mind always seem to be busy finding out what the basic pattern is that is constantly popping up in the inner and outer environment. I can have a hard time concretizing what it is I ‘see’, sense, …. all sensory experiences are connected intensely, I often summarize threads of understanding in a very abstract or metaphorical sense, while the basis of what I am experiencing is intensely emotional, although in a subtle way. People may either feel mesmerized or deeply understood or find it very difficult to understand what I am saying. Things that seem so obvious to me appear to be very challenging for others to ‘see through’, to connect the most abstract with fine-grained emotional subtleties. My experience is…fractals are everywhere!

Step by step thinking can really be a challenge, or maybe I should just say impossible, at least when it comes to complex questions – and that to me seems to be very logical, ha ha. The hard thing is…. a lot of things are complex! Life is complex. Of course, we can learn to simplify, and that can be an expression of fluid and integrated understanding, and for me that comes along with a flow of metaphors and seemingly very far-reaching connections creating the opportunity to implement that understanding in very diverse environments, in a very quick and focused way. That is it, I simplify complexity by connecting odd dots, by absorbing the inner and outer on different and connected levels at the same time. I think, I weigh emotionally, I twist and turn my own and other’s input, and a new picture, a new sensory experience, a new movement emerges, and another one, and… ah…it is the pattern again! No information is taken ‘for granted’. I love it, I breathe it, its such a joy. And, sometimes, it can be quite lonely, as if I am speaking a language that nobody understands. But by now I get real joy out of this language, as I have had the luck to find the right environments for it to frequently flourish, and I know there is still a lot of potential to explore, a lot of ways I can learn to translate, to match, to connect, ways that may be beneficial to others, and keep my energy and flow going. Really, my embodied mind is always busy, even when I am not having any particular thoughts, on a very subtle sensory level I am processing a lot. It is nice, and I feel deeply happy that I can offer this intensity and complexity in a valuable manner. In essence, it feels like love, like life, is flowing through me and I feel deeply humbled by all the creative forms with which we as human beings, like other sentient beings, are able to express this ongoing process. We are life. Here, the idea of ‘levels’ dissolves, ‘self’ dissolves and I really feel this is the most authentic, most encompassing and sensitive experience of ‘being me’, ironically.”

Fictionalized testimony