imtheannoyingfriend:

citrusbi:

gifted kid burnout things that no one seems to talk about:

• the raw panic of hearing about your potential, positive or negative
• a weird brand of imposter syndrome where you genuinely think you’ve fluked your way through every success and you’re gonna be Exposed as a Fraud
• never having learned how to study and having no idea where to start now that you need to
• reading college level books as a kid but being basically illiterate now
• dismissing your struggles as irrelevant because other people have it harder and i should be smart enough to handle this
• feeling like you’ve lost all control over your life (maybe manifesting into depression, anxiety and disordered eating in a grasp for control over something)
• being unable to decide on a career path because you could have had everything, only to watch those opportunities disappear as you fail to commit

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar