confessions of a former fangirl

THE SCARF OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE { Team StarKid }

[luthwhore]

You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

[redbullseb]

no, YOU’RE looking at him respectfully. i’m objectifying him to filth we’re built different

[sandmandaddy69]

[aspergersissues]

It helped me to realize this.

[peanit]

t-shirt that says “i rely on pharmaceutical drugs to preform routine tasks”

[verdigrisvagabond]

Booty shorts that say “and then I don’t do them”

[222manythoughts]

Do you believe in second chances?

Yea I usually give about 5 or 6 before I realize I’m a fucking idiot

[radiqueer]

one fairly common experience of gifted children is wishing for pain. wishing you had some great big horrible thing in your past so that you can justify the pain you’re in, and so that you’ll deserve help. it’s exhausting and it fucks you up and to anyone out there who feels like they haven’t suffered enough to get help: you’re allowed to want help. you’re in enough pain. you deserve to feel better

[lilliluminous]

[sunnyfuneral]

Gifted kids be like let me describe something it’s very common with anyone with mental illness but I’m going to connect it to me being very smart when I was six years old haha it’s sad that I’m not constantly validated in the way I was when I was in elementary school . there’s no reason you couldn’t have just said person with a mental illness but you said gifted kids cuz you don’t feel special anymore

[star-anise]

Uh… no.

Your argument doesn’t even hold up. You think this is about former Gifted kids being sad now because they’re not being treated like they were in elementary school, which was presumably better.

But the post was, “It’s common for Gifted children to experience deep psychological pain in elementary school.” As in, a lot of Gifted kids didn’t experience being held up as an example and praised a bunch as actually, you know… positive.

It’s not like you do anything to earn having a high IQ, any more than you earn being tall or having good eyesight. It’s just something that happens to you as you grow up. Sure, you might be able to reach things on high shelves, but you also smack your head into doorways. And from personal experience? When a teacher points you out as the only person in your grade 2 class to score perfectly on a test, fucking nobody wants to play with you at recess after.

Often growing up Gifted is just like childhood with any other neurodivergence—having social and emotional issues the people around you need to be experts to even realize you’re having trouble, much less know how to help you. A four-year-old’s parents don’t usually have to watch for “I just realized that everyone I love will inevitably die and I can’t reliably self-soothe myself when we drive away from Grandma’s, so I have NO emotional coping tools for this” meltdowns.

Oh, except there’s one difference: A lot of adults think that being intellectually smart means you will never have social problems, emotional problems, learning disabilities, or mental illnesses. So adults will literally actually say, “They’re a smart kid, they’ll figure it out” when the problem is… every other six-year-old hating you and you don’t know what you did.

Hence… the really common experience of wishing for some “real” cause of pain, because finally people would recognize that you may he a seven year old that all the grownups think is just great, but you still have really big problems you don’t know how to deal with and you really need some fucking help.

[sunnyfuneral]

Lol. I have ADHD and i felt all that in elementary. Wow its almost like the school system is trash to everyone and you being gifted does not make you suffer anymore than anyone else.

[star-anise]

You… you do realize that the vast majority of children are neurotypical and mentally healthy, right? Like, neurodivergents of any sort are the minority of the population. Having ADHD, Giftedness, or any other brain weirdness is pretty unusual and most children go through their entire childhoods without ever once yearning for death.

Like Gifted kids do not seem to suffer more than kids with ADHD, Autism, depression, trauma, or whatever else. But all of those groups together definitely do suffer more than the majority of their peers.

[nonasuch]

Out of everyone I know as an adult who was labeled as Gifted as a kid, the vast majority, myself included, turned out to also be neurodivergent in some other way. tbh at this point I’m half-convinced that ‘gifted’ is a label that might as well mean ‘has a non-standard brain that, coincidentally, is optimized to do well on some standard measures of intelligence’

because it sure doesn’t seem to mean ‘baby genius who will do Great Things in adulthood’ no matter what the adults around us assumed or insisted

And one of our biggest sources of trauma was struggling due to our neurodivergence, while adults told us we were too smart to need their help.

[leeshajoy]

tbh at this point I’m half-convinced that ‘gifted’ is a label that might as well mean ‘has a non-standard brain that, coincidentally, is optimized to do well on some standard measures of intelligence’

THIS. FUCKING THIS.

Being “gifted” doesn’t actually mean you’re smarter. It just means you developed the “how to get good grades” part of your psyche a little earlier than your peers, and because that’s the part that the school system tests for, they assume that you’re better at everything, and don’t bother to help you out with the “socializing” and “emotional intelligence” parts of your development.

[produmpsterfire]

I was labeled gifted early on (like preschool age). I’ve also had suicidal ideations, severe depressive episodes, and hellish night terrors since before I entered the 1st grade. No one ever noticed. I got good grades and got really good at acting like I was okay, so no one ever glanced my way or asked me if I was okay or if I slept well. My older brother got lower grades and had a bit of anger. They all noticed it right away and got him help. I was assumed to be doing perfectly great, since my grades were all As and I did what I was told.

My mental illnesses were overlooked for 19 years because I was “gifted”. I ended up having a fall so low that I nearly killed myself (not the first time). I got myself help at my university’s psychologist a few days later. Still, no one noticed. Not my dad, not my friends, not my siblings, stepmom, professors, coworkers, no one. Why? Because I kept up my grades and kept performing well at work and just kept doing what I was supposed to.

I’ve had a real bad time the last 5 or so years (exceptionally bad even for my stabdards) and no one in my family or friends have picked up on it. I’m doing much better these last 5 or so months, but my family still doesnt know about my diagnoses. They dont know and dont look because I have a stable job as a teacher and just got my master’s degree in December with a 3.9 GPA.

Almost like being labeled gifted gets you ignored when it comes to nonacademic stuff.

[punchlinetothejoke-deactivated2]

I feel so attacked

[fierceawakening]

“tbh at this point I’m half-convinced that ‘gifted’ is a label that might as well mean ‘has a non-standard brain that, coincidentally, is optimized to do well on some standard measures of intelligence’” Same, just not with the “half.” Our brains are different. They just happen to be different in some ways people praise, so they look at the rest of the differences and go “oh they’ll just get over that. ‘Cos they’re SMART.” It… rarely works that way. Bullying is hurtful, and there are ways to bully people with fake, insincere, and/or conditional “praise.”

And emotional intelligence is very different from other forms of intelligence, and it’s generally NOT that kind of intelligence that IQ tests and intellectually rigorous programs you have to compete to get spots in are measuring.

[dr-dendritic-trees]

When I was tested as “gifted” at about 8 or 9 that is literally how it was explained to me. Several teachers specifically told me that being gifted doesn’t mean “smart kid” it means someone who learns in a different way and picks up skills in a different order. Now, as name for this “gifted” sucks 8 kinds of ass, but it is what it is.

The reason why a lot of gifted kids struggle in adulthood/higher education isn’t because of lack of head pats or whatever the shit, its because if you are a neurotypical kid along with math and reading and science and whatever, your education will probably teach you a set of soft skills, like breaking down projects, how to study, dealing with frustration and learning challenging skills, things like that. What ex-gifted kids are complaining about isn’t life not being easy, its having been denied the chance to learn those soft skills as a child like everyone else.

[weaselle]

I was “gifted” DID have painful childhood trauma, and as an adult have so many overlapping mental health issues that it is impossible to say whether or not I have just always been mentally ill.

And I would like to point out that it is way more important to support positive changes to how children are raised and taught than it is for any of us to argue with each other about which problems belongs to whom.

The overlap in all of these socially constructed diagnostic personality definitions is extensive, and the accuracy is questionable. Humans are bad at detailing the workings of the human mind, and none of us fit easily into the boxes that have been created to describe it. The important thing is that our current societal system is failing even the children that should theoretically be best suited to excel within it – which tells me that it must be failing all children in some way or another. Being upset at each other isn’t helpful.

Specifically a person should not see someone saying “I hurt terribly inside as a child and now feel damaged as an adult” and then be mean to them about it, tumblr user @sunnyfuneral. 

You say “Wow it’s almost like the school system is trash to everyone and you being gifted does not make you suffer anymore than anyone else” Yet absolutely no one has said they suffer more than you. That is very interesting.

That you would respond this way would seem to indicate that you are suffering greatly and people in your life are not treating you with the consideration that deserves. That is terrible. I see your pain. I recognize that your mental state, ADHD or depression or some combination, or whatever it may be, I can see that it has been hard for you. I see that you have suffered. Are suffering. I can empathize. Probably everyone on this post can empathize. I hope that you find help in dealing with that, in therapy, in medication, in opening up to people who love you, or just from somewhere inside you. I wish you balance and contentment, peace and happiness, may you find it sooner than later.

[kaijuno]

Lake Michigan

[notjustanygay]

Ocean*

[kaijuno]

I mean, Lake Michigan is big enough to be a sea. All the Great Lakes are, they’re not considered seas because they’re not all at sea level, they’re all freshwater, and they’re not directly connected to the ocean (they’re only connected through rivers and lochs)

Small lakes don’t have noticeable waves but because the Great Lakes are so big there’s enough room for the air to downdraft across it (which is also why in Michigan you get lake effect weather and so it can be a blizzard one day and 70° the next)

[grumpycakes]

My grandmother, who grew up in Puerto Rico, when seeing Lake Michigan for the first time with my grandfather exclaimed, “This is not a lake, it is a sea!”

[61below]

Lake Superior has tides. They’re not as dramatic as the actual ocean’s of course. But still. For every storm that kicks up 200ft spray and waves that crash over the tops of the lighthouses on the piers, there’s days when you can’t tell where the water meets the sky.

Lake Superior doesn’t have a monster, Lake Superior IS the monster.

[a-talking-potato]

lake superior (gichi-gami in ojibwe) has enough water in it cover both america’s in a foot of it. it contains 10% of the worlds fresh surface water! it’s 1333 ft deep!!! she’s Big

[mecasloth]

They say that she doesn’t give up her dead either. 

[wizened-beanie-baby-moved]

Man living nearby all the great lakes when I first saw what Most people consider a lake, I thought it was just a super big pond kinda thing

[fostertheory]

There’s a reason why they’re called “great” lakes.

[asingularcanadian]

Fun fact you could fit roughly 6.5 billion pulverized chickens into lake michigan

[writingfish]

That last one is oddly specific

[egberts]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[cungadero]

i mean this in the nicest way possible you guys but you NEED to take better care of yourselves online. getting severely anxious about mass quantities of horrible things you cant change every single day is normal considering the internet’s ability to educate on worldwide issues, it shows that you have empathy and that you truly do care. but relentless knowledge of constant suffering on this scale is NOT something humans are psychologically equipped to handle. it’s okay to shut off. it’s okay to just take a break and enjoy yourself for a while in your own localized space

[roach-works]

you really need to make friends who can talk about something other than politics. you need to have people you can just have fun talking to. you need to have a space you can just enjoy yourself in. humans aren’t meant to be constantly and unendingly surrounded by suffering and pain and work. we need rest and play. 

[combeferret]

mute!! things!!!! i know you’re gonna feel HELLA guilty for this but I swear to god it’s saved my mental health

whenever anything bad happens that i know is gonna be dominating social media, and that has no impact on my life otherwise, i immediately add it to my filter/mute list

absolutely i felt guilty as fuck for doing this but the weight it’s lifted from my mind is unreal

especially if you want to be socially or politically active you have to be able to pick and choose what to stay constantly engaging with, because we absolutely cannot handle being bombarded with absolutely everything

[whitepeopletwitter]

[weirdcultstuff]

Kinda wild how my parents have known me for longer than literally anybody else on the planet and they still haven’t unlocked the relationship levels that allow them access to information like what TV shows or music I enjoy, when some random guy at Walmart got there within ten minutes today

[strangegirlsclub-deactivated202]

man some of the seven deadly sins aren’t even that bad. sorry I’m angry n wanna fuck? Sorry I ate a lot? shut up

[frawgs]

the lobotomist after opening my head revealing my brain : this is beans inside

[pillowprincesslexa]

Europe is currently being burned alive and people still think climate change is a joke. It’s warmer in North Europe than in the middle eastern deserts.

Nearly all northern countries broke their decades old heat records this week.

[frogs-smoking-cigarettes]

Its only in the low hundreds in farenheit??? In America we get that for like a month or two straight every year??? Y'all need to deal is it really normally so cold over there that yall can live with a little heat???

[pillowprincesslexa]

If you’re gonna have an ignorant American attitude then please only stay on American posts. No one in North Europe has an AC in their houses. Stores, animal shelters, elderly houses, no one has AC. the houses are designed to keep the heat in. The people are not accustomed to the heat. A sudden climate shift like this is extremely dangerous to older people and babies specifically.

There are programs being run to inform elderly people what to do to not die in this heat. There was a heatwave in the Netherlands in 2010 in which approximately 500 more elderly people passed away than normally.

[adhoption]

One thing people don’t often appreciate is that the southern US states are along the same latitude as the Middle Eastern deserts, rather than northern Europe. We’re not competing with Texas, we’re competing with northern Canada. If Saskatoon can’t handle Mexican weather, London can’t handle Middle-Eastern weather. It’s not built for it at all.

[toebeens]

very helpful and informative graphic

[malikthaelite]

Pay attention. We can’t afford not to.