This resonates a lot with me. I've said before that all the success I've achieved has been in spite of the "gifted" label, not because of it. Unlike the author

This resonates a lot with me. I've said before that all the success I've achieved has been in spite of the "gifted" label, not because of it. Unlike the author, I was lucky enough to experience failure before college, so I didn't enter it thinking I was "special." So many of my peers (as well as my older sister), didn't know how to deal with not being "the best" or having competition from others. But that doesn't mean I overly excelled in college -- in fact, I didn't really care. I had a pretty typical quarter life crisis timed with the great-recession and didn't go to grad school or law school, and was in kind of a listless "what am I doing with my life" place for a few years. My relatives DID comment "it's a shame what happened to filmgirl" -- but in my case, it was absolutely said with judgment (and not a small amount of schadenfreude -- because both my sister and I grew up "beautiful," "talented," and "brilliant" (and in her case, she was also very popular) and then wound up not taking over the world, while my relatives kids became doctors, etc.) and family friends would whisper about all my wasted potential. For a time, I felt that way too -- and then I got over myself, realized (again), I'm not fucking special and that just because I was given a label that created bullshit expectations on my future, didn't mean I was going to freak out because things didn't go according to plan. Ironically, within a few years of that quarter-life crisis, I was on TV all the time, I was interviewing high profile people, and doing well for myself in my chosen field. And now I'm in a different field and I work at a large company in a high profile role and make a very good living. On paper, it certainly looks like I've lived up to my potential -- even though the story of how I got there is a lot different. Which, to me, sort of underscores what bullshit so much of all of this really is. The schools, the test scores, the labels, they don't matter. They can help, sure -- but having them ins't a guarantee for "success" and not having them doesn't mean you'll never go on to do anything. For what it's worth, my parents never pressured me and didn't care when I was a fuck-up. They loved and supported me anyway. But I still felt like a failure and a fuckup for not living up to my potential because of the external pressures put on me as a child.