Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?

I don’t have anything fashionable like ADHD or Autism or Dyslexia but I do have something you’ve never heard of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

Which doesn’t have an autism-industrial complex or addictive pill mill complex behind it which is why you’ve never heard of it.

I got numerous psych evals that always missed it, the first was before STPD (highly flawed, missing at least 1/3 of the phenomenon including the one that looks like ‘ADHD’) was added to the DSM. Maxxed all sub scales in the Weschler IQ test except for problem solving where I was just one SD over the mean (my brain shorting out caused that). I’m terrible at chess but got really good at math in college despite never being able to score better than 90% on a math quiz in high school. (got a PhD in theoretical physics). My verbal intelligence is too high to measure because I’ve maxxed every test I’ve tried. As a kid I would go to the YMCA every Saturday for gym and swim and then check out 10 books from the public library and more or less I do that today.

I’m an arch reductionist and don’t believe in any of it but I am great with crystal balls, dowsing rods and ouija boards. Knowing what I know now I should have been an onmyoji. Somehow I can’t form a ‘whole’ the way other people though but I can hold two contradictory systems inside myself simultaneously. I can be a bridge between two groups for a while but eventually it goes bad.

Got bullied as a kid, graduated from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did. No complaints about parents but they were working class and had no idea how to help me in professional life, couldn’t afford to get me more than one year in a private school. (Where the bullying stopped) Got a lot of great opportunities, blew many of them.

Been with the same woman for 30 years, had a child, had steady work except for the times I didn’t. My rank in terms of ‘living in a beautiful place’ is probably better than my karma rank on HN. My wealth is probably better than the median for my cohort but I haven’t ’made it big’.

I still do strange off putting things that drive some people away (always failed at trying to have an affair); I understand a lot know about the how and why but it is very hard to stop. When my condition is inflamed I have paranoid ideation towards physical objects (I was waving my arms around but it sure seemed I was attacked by the potted plant I knocked down) or family (why the hell is my wife standing where my pills are and why did she move right to the sink after I got them?)

There is very little clinical data on my condition, I’m a bit afraid I’ll get really mean and psychotic if I develop dementia.

I am sure some of you who think you have ADHD and/or autism have it too.

I scored 3.

Took me a while to actually try hard things, because I was afraid of failure.

It wasn't until my mid thirties I started really pushing myself, embracing the fact that failure was a part of life, and changing my trajectory in a dramatic way.

~7 years later, I've got a nice house (2M), 1M in the bank, 2 kids, loving wife, and a handful of close friends I see often.

It was a tough road getting here, but life is good.

I scored 6, I turned my life "around" in some sense and pursued software engineering at 22 years old, after just neglecting my own wellbeing for at the time feeling like ages. Now at 28 I'm a senior engineer in a international corporation, it's not a tech company, but still something that i can feel good about. relationships and hobbies are good, but the pressure from performing on all fronts is some times so much that i fall into dysfunction and despair. but i feel like im building better coping mechanisms all the time when paying attention

I never heard of the ACE score, I just took a quiz and I would score a 6. I am a failure since high school, never went to college and had a period of 12 years of scraping the bottom of the barrel but I got a tech support job through a friend after not touching a computer for 15 years and then retaught myself programming after not doing any since middle school. managed to leverage that into a job at a quant trading firm by luck. I am still a failure but I have used my ability to learn and absorb information to build a stable life. success is always just beyond arms reach but luckily success doesnt matter I am just happy to be alive able to keep learning and making things. and now I have LLMs to help me

How smart are you really if you're going to let society's idea of "gifted" hang over you?