This skewed self-perception, that my worth was defined by academic performance, is not something that materialized overnight. But mediocrity crept up on them, until they feel like they have failed their past selves.Īnd that is exactly how I began to see myself. They’ve been straight-A students all their life, their personalities slotting perfectly into the spot at the top of the class. Plainly put, it refers to students who were placed in advanced-level classes early in their educational careers, only to discover that they can’t maintain the same degree of academic excellence as they get older. The Mayo Clinic defines burnout as “a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.” “Gifted kid burnout,” however, is an internet term coined by Gen Z in recent years. What I was suffering from, I later realized, was the textbook definition of gifted kid burnout. How had I gone from feeling relatively in-control to struggling so hard to stay afloat? I kept wondering if I was devolving into a worse version of myself. I wasn’t failing by any means, but being subpar over and over again was silently killing me. I perceived others as 10 steps ahead of me, and I was gasping for air trying to catch up. Work smarter, not harder, and I was working so, so hard, with nothing to show for it. Something that should have taken me an hour to memorize was taking me repeated attempts to grasp, and I couldn’t understand why my use of time had become so ineffective. If my brain had been a sponge for twelve years, it couldn’t absorb one more drop. It felt as though my mind was underwater, muffling any and all information I was being taught.
I began experiencing a mental block, if it can be called that. It was in my sophomore year of college, however, that everything came apart. I genuinely loved learning, but I also became addicted to the euphoria of academic validation. “Principal’s Honor Roll” wasn’t just on my transcript it was ingrained in my mind. The topics became increasingly challenging, and I encountered hurdles, but I was pushing myself hard enough to uphold an image of competency. To be fair, I kept setting the precedent, advancing year after year with the same A’s I had been earning since the beginning. It wasn’t something my parents and I really needed to discuss-we just knew I would enroll in courses with the highest level of difficulty.
I’ve been in public schools since second grade, and I always took the hardest classes offered. Shiny things rust, and-like so many former “gifted kids”-that’s what happened to me.
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