GIFTED AND FUCKED: THE CURSE OF EARLY GENIUS

Being showered with praise at a young age sets you up for a fragile ego. You start to think life should come easy, that success is your birthright. Every spelling bee trophy and every teacher who calls you “brilliant” drives that nail a little deeper.

I was that kid, the one everyone said was destined for something big. My mom used to make me sit at the kitchen table and spell words straight out of the dictionary. By the time I hit fourth grade, I could outspell every kid in the district, which made me feel like a god and an alien at the same time. The crowd clapped, the teachers smiled, but there was always that quiet dread behind it. Nobody teaches you what to do after the applause.

Gifted kids don’t grow up to be gifted adults. They grow up to be anxious adults who think they’re failures because life stopped giving them gold stars. When the praise dries up, you go looking for something else to fill the hole, something that feels like winning.

For me, that something was chaos.

I got kicked out of school twice. Not for fighting or failing, but for trading a pill with a girl who threw it away and bragged about it. The school nurse dug it out of the trash like she was unearthing a crime scene. I never snitched, not even when it would have saved me. That was the first time I learned what integrity costs.

By then, I had already stopped caring about grades. Intelligence wasn’t a tool anymore; it was a burden. I could see through the hypocrisy, the performative morality, the way adults played dumb to survive their own lives. Once you see that clearly, you either go insane or find something to numb the edges.

I chose drugs.

The same mind that could memorize a dictionary page could also calculate how to get high, stay high, and keep everyone fooled. My brain turned inward, from a weapon to a prison. Every clever justification was just another bar on the cage.

And yet, through it all, I kept thinking I was special. That’s the real curse of being called gifted. You think your pain has meaning. You think you’re the protagonist in a cosmic tragedy when really, you’re just another person chasing a feeling that’s been gone since childhood.

I used to believe I was smarter than the world. Now I just try to be decent in it.

The real genius isn’t the kid who wins spelling bees or aces IQ tests. It’s the one who learns how to stay human when nobody’s watching. The one who figures out how to clean up their own mess without applause.

If you’re gifted, you already know. The trick isn’t staying brilliant.
It’s staying alive long enough to become kind.