Having an extraordinary amount of intelligence in a world full of people who don't can be extremely challenging and distressing. I'd even go so far as to call it a disability. It's very hard to understand where people are coming from, it's hard to phrase things in a way that makes you relatable and understood. It complicates a lot of things if you haven't made a deliberate effort to practice fitting in.
It's especially difficult if you have people expecting you to succeed, to make astronomical amounts of money or get perfect grades, or whatever, while you don't feel motivated to achieve these sorts of things.
It was difficult for me being isolated intellectually, that there wasn't many I could talk to about Complicated Things. A grade school math teacher is not prepared for this sort of thing. At least today there's ways of getting in touch with actual experts in the field and digging deeper into topics that used to be completely off limits.
I've learned to zen out, that it's not imperative to be productive all the time, that not every "cycle" is wasted if not doing important stuff. A little meditation to calm the avalanche of mental activity can be profoundly helpful.
I'm not exceptionally bright but I have an excellent memory and an endless fascination with..well everything.
So I've read books on dozens of random topics, I've learnt to keep my mouth shut, people don't like that I know all that stuff they see it as threatening to their own self-worth.
My previous GF was a physio and mentioned she was writing a training course on compartment syndrome, she was astounded that I knew what that was and responded with "Why would you need to know about that you just program computers?" as though there was something intrinsically wrong with been interested in things, we broke up soon after because "We are too different in outlook" which was fine.
Current GF is a Hungarian (I mention this because she has commented several times that there is a fundamental cultural difference in how my culture (England) and hers approach education) with two degrees and working on her third in shipping, she has pretty much exactly the same outlook on life as me and her pile of books next to the bed is as varied as mine, She also knows way more about lots of things than me which is frigging awesome.
It's especially difficult if you have people expecting you to succeed, to make astronomical amounts of money or get perfect grades, or whatever, while you don't feel motivated to achieve these sorts of things.
It was difficult for me being isolated intellectually, that there wasn't many I could talk to about Complicated Things. A grade school math teacher is not prepared for this sort of thing. At least today there's ways of getting in touch with actual experts in the field and digging deeper into topics that used to be completely off limits.
I've learned to zen out, that it's not imperative to be productive all the time, that not every "cycle" is wasted if not doing important stuff. A little meditation to calm the avalanche of mental activity can be profoundly helpful.