We all know of the annoying "gifted children" who got deemed that because they could do their 3 times tables before everyone else, and how they were never trully gifted but rather just standard for another age bracket, but i think that leaving it at that would be undermining the mental effects of being "gifted". The whole point is that the damage is done when you sing a childs praise for something which really any child could do if given enough time, and you build them up to be some kind of super-genius. This is great for a few years, but the other kids can and will always catch up, and the "gifted" child will be so stuck in their own self-affirmation that they wont adapt and they wont keep up and eventually theyll be left behind and "burned out." In junior and secondary school, i never felt like i was smart, but people told me i was so i assumed that whatever i was doing must be working. I did not revise for my gcses, yet still passed them, thinking i must be some sort of genius. Then sixth form hit, and suddenly what i had been doing wasnt enough, i fell behind majorly, i began missing classes and by the end of it i left with the most dogwater grades i could have imagined, after entering with such high expectations and i really believed that i would go on to a good univerisity, but no. Right now im taking a gap year, but its more like a "holy fucking shit if i have to drag my ass out of bed at 6am to sit in a classroom for 3 hours while thinking that im actually a dumbass one more time im going to blow my brains out" year. Instead of identifying that there was something wrong with how i was going about my education and changing it, i developed some sort of depression (never got it diagnosed, i almost did but i missed the deadline for one of the quizzes the doctors sent me and i just never went back to tell them about it. oh sweet sweet irony) which resulted in it getting worse, and now im left with the knowledge that all those years thinking i was a genius were a lie, and that i will never have the change to be a prodigy again. sure, i can be good at things, but its lost the allure and "wow" of being 10 and teaching myself HTML to code my own website. Or maybe im just stagnating, maybe everything i do is actually impressive and ive just become to desensitised to it that i cant recongise when i do something well anymore.