What I was suffering from, I later realized, was the textbook definition of gifted kid burnout. How had I gone from feeling relatively in-control to struggling so hard to stay afloat? I kept wondering if I was devolving into a worse version of myself. I wasn’t failing by any means, but being subpar over and over again was silently killing me. I perceived others as 10 steps ahead of me, and I was gasping for air trying to catch up. Work smarter, not harder, and I was working so, so hard, with nothing to show for it. Something that should have taken me an hour to memorize was taking me repeated attempts to grasp, and I couldn’t understand why my use of time had become so ineffective. If my brain had been a sponge for twelve years, it couldn’t absorb one more drop. ![]() It felt as though my mind was underwater, muffling any and all information I was being taught. I began experiencing a mental block, if it can be called that. It was in my sophomore year of college, however, that everything came apart. I genuinely loved learning, but I also became addicted to the euphoria of academic validation. “Principal’s Honor Roll” wasn’t just on my transcript it was ingrained in my mind. The topics became increasingly challenging, and I encountered hurdles, but I was pushing myself hard enough to uphold an image of competency. ![]() To be fair, I kept setting the precedent, advancing year after year with the same A’s I had been earning since the beginning. It wasn’t something my parents and I really needed to discuss-we just knew I would enroll in courses with the highest level of difficulty. I’ve been in public schools since second grade, and I always took the hardest classes offered. Shiny things rust, and-like so many former “gifted kids”-that’s what happened to me.
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