The exercises are important. I know what he's talking about. There is a mechanism he touches on a few different ways but doesn't mention as what I think is the

The exercises are important. I know what he's talking about. There is a mechanism he touches on a few different ways but doesn't mention as what I think is the source of this existential depression. The depression is often caused, as he says, by the loss of something that causes a collapse of an identity, and the solution involves those exercises of establishing yourself with multiple ideas of who you are so that the loss of one thing does not bring the whole thing down. "Giftedness," itself can be a bit of a curse, because it is a definition of self that originates externally, which you cannot influence or control. It gets you early in childhood, and can be very difficult to unwind. Your giftedness becomes a kind of trap or double bind, where you believe something about yourself but cannot realize or actualize it because the only way to validate it is when other people recognize it. You have to be virtuotic in your talents, your insights must be incisive, your knowledge must be exceptional, and when you feel it isn't (because nobody's always is) the horror creeps in. This is the feeling of lost idenity. It leads to other polarized antipatterns like perfectionism or flakiness, attention seeking, anxiety behaviors and other coping mechanisms. It's not unique to the so-called gifted at all, but their experience is a model for how the same externally rooted identity causes people to suffer. It's so old that Stoicism , particularly Epictetus, and Buddhism even addressed this idea of attachment to the extenral directly in the pre-psychological language of their times. Today, we might say it was related to a tendency toward forming codependent relationships where one's identity is only validated by it being reflected by someone, and when we lose the person who propped up that idea of self, we disintegrate, as described in the article. Identifying as gifted creates a psychological dependency on seeing that identity being reflected, and an almost infinite need for a source of actualization of that identity. Managing and extracting personal value from a gifted identity is its own challenge. It's as though people said you were such a clever child you deserved two problems. Personally, I practice being crappy at things. I take lessons in skills and I've been able to fail enough and develop a physical competence that is orthogonal enough to any idea of giftedness that over years I have built a non-gifted accepted self. Education should do it, but even that's not always useful or sufficient. To expunge that dependent identity, I practice physical things where words and language are meaningless. This is not to just say, "get some exercise, walk it off," (even if that's a necessary condition) it's that the depression hole is caused by waiting for external actuation of your giftedness that never appears and not having the tools to stimulate that part of your identity that isn't even yours, it's just something you were assigned.