Breaking Under the Crippling Weight of Who You're Supposed to Be

I was one of the “gifted kids”, my parents swear that when they took me home from the hospital, literally days after I was born I grabbed a rattle given to me by my dad and placed it on my chest. A feat a child only a couple of days old should not be capable of doing.

Apparently that week I was also able to pay attention to a book my dad read me, he swears that he saw my eyes go to the place he was reading and that my eyes moved to the next line when he was finished with the previous one. I would imagine he was pointing at it but still. There are countless other stories later like how I understood how batteries worked at 2 or three. As a child I would hear these stories constantly.

What I didn’t realize until very recently is that these stories and my apparently monumental intellect left very large shoes to fill but those shoes also happened to be mine?

I realized this when I heard a podcast recently from Andrew Huberman (A famous neuroscientist at Stanford) about growth mindset and to sum it up, he basically said that Science proves that encouraging children based only on their natural abilities is very detrimental to their overall success. It seems strait forward but in practice it seems less obvious. For instance telling someone they are smart or super talented would fit in that category. Why would that be such a bad thing?

well If you’ve been told that all your life it builds up an expectation of excellence. No one can perform at that level all the time. Inevitably that innate talent isn’t enough and what then? If you can’t reach the expectations set before you then you must not be as awesome as everyone thought you were. That expectation creates crippling anxiety. what if I fail? if you’re a gifted child then it might mean that you aren’t gifted and therefore aren’t special.

The darkest part of the life of a gifted kid is the inevitable lie that comes from multiple failures. “I must not be that great after all”. The negative thoughts create a reverse exponential curve that plummets off the edge of a cliff into a never ending abyss. Every failure reinforces the belief and ensures the next attempt will be even more likely to fail as well. each one compounds on the other until there is no self esteem left at all. “I’m a pathetic loser”,”I will never be any good at anything”.

What do you do as a result? nothing, the absolute bear minimum. If you take any risk at all you might be exposed as being flawed, that you might be a failure. It’s the crippling fear of every single gifted child. I have seen it play out in my life and in countless others. How often do you see the gifted kid go on to be as great as everyone thought they would be when they grow up? its practically a cliche. Especially among millennials who were constantly told that they can do anything they set their minds to.

Andrew Huberman’s suggestion was simple, focus not on the natural ability or skill of a child but on their effort. If a child is praised for their efforts rather than their innate ability or for their successes, they will be far more willing to take risks. There are little to no consequences for failure because their positive reinforcement is based on whether or not they show up and put in the hard work.

That’s certainly one reason why so many people who are far less intelligent and less fortunate so often are able to find such great success. They understand the value of hard work and persistence and learned at a young age to take risks.

To this day I still feel loved but I think many of us feel the shadow of disappointment over us. That Potential Timothy Smiley is always there and I feel I’m always being reminded of what could have been and what should be right now. Super Timothy would have made his first feature film by now and be on his way to bigger things, he would be in a serious relationship if not already married, he would have complete control of all his mental faculties, he would never have spent any time in his twenties lumbering about trying to figure stuff out because he always knew what needed to be done and just got to work making it happen. As a kid I felt like I wasn’t allowed not to understand a difficult concept because I was too smart to not get it. Too capable to not achieve a certain standard. I never want to wine about my very good circumstances but I also believe everyone has pain and just because someone else had it worse doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to acknowledge your own suffering. The lingering sense of disappointment has been over me my entire life and I had no idea how crucial of a role its played. To this day I downplay anything positive because regardless of what progress I make in my life, it will always fall short of the ideal that was set before me and I set before myself.

What I really want is validation, someone to tell me that I have done enough to justify my existence. Especially wanting people to actively choose to be around me rather than any obligation.

What I realize is that nobody is truly able to give me that validation, I may have desperately looked for certain words of affirmation but even if they were given to me I don’t think it would be enough. God has always given me those words though. Every day I hear multiple times that I am a good man. Over and over I hear it. The problem is that there’s something in me that just won’t accept it as true. The only person that can grant me the validation I need is myself, the only one who can grant me the right to exist is myself.

In our culture We hear a lot about self love and I don’t think a lot of it is good. It sounds a whole lot more like selfishness to me. However I have learned that loving yourself is essential. I heard at a young age from a wise man that tried very hard to disciple me that I can’t keep beating myself up. At that time I don’t think I really grasped what that meant. The reality is because of my upbringing, I have become my own worst enemy. The way I treat myself is like a coach disappointed at his high school basketball team because they don’t all have the skill of Michael Jordan. It’s ludicrous when you start looking at it. I’m very hopeful though because I’m learning to celebrate who I am right now and the little victories I have. undoing several decades of negative reinforcement is not easy but with time it can be healed.

I believe self hatred something most of us need to actively repent of. Its not something most would consider a sin but if we treated a child like we did ourselves, we would have no problem condemning ourselves of sin.

So I ask you Yahweh, please forgive me for the way I’ve treated myself. Its not right and completely unjustified to treat a child of God in this manor. Help me to see you in me. Heal my understanding of myself and my value. Bring me into alignment with your knowledge of who I am right now. Not who I could be but with who I am today.

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