The Balance of LD and Giftedness

Out of my head and into the blog. I have a few posts I want to write this free morning, but I know I may only have time for one more.

When I was first shown my IQ test breakdown from the Woodcock-Johnson I cried. It was validation to why I had struggled so much through school and through so much of my life. I was 25 years old and a semester away from either graduating or dropping out of college. Unfortunately, I took away more information about my weaknesses than my strengths. I discounted my strengths and took to heart my poor ability to memorize digit span or sentences, and my visual matching test was abysmal. I scored in the lower 25% on that visual matching test.  To me, it didn’t matter that I had scored in 99.9th percentile on Visual-Auditory Learning and  Analysis-Synthesis.  I had actually scored above the 90th percentile in 10 of 25 tests and below the 50th percentile in just 6.

My focus on why I was struggling I assumed had to fall within my areas of weakness. I felt that I was performing below average, so if I had some strengths, my weaknesses were REALLY dragging me down, so every time it was pointed out that I had scored high on something, I felt that there must be a corresponding weak area that must be so awful, that my performance suffered.

The term “gifted” may have been thrown in back then even, but I still had issues to grapple with in my mind. To me, gifted meant that you are really smart and not wrong.  I was wrong a lot of the time, therefore I must just be LD. If I had to confess to my learning disability ever, I use the strengths to counter balance as best I could, the negative connotations I was sure the other party would have of me being learning disabled. This ties into the idea of gifted individuals feeling like they are impostors more often (Imposter Syndrome).  I mentioned the Imposter Syndrome in Shame, and there are other places to read more about it:

Douglas Eby – http://blogs.psychcentral.com/creative-mind/2010/06/feeling-like-a-fraud/

Eric Maisel – http://talentdevelop.com/articles/SilencSelfCritic.html

http://www.impostorsyndrome.com/handbook.htm

Christine Fonseca – http://christinefonseca.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/the-imposter-in-us-part-1-the-why/

This actually leads right into another blog I want to write about Christine’s book review.  I am a slow reader.  I can read faster when I don’t care about the topic, but it’s still not fast reading.  Emotional Intensity has not been a quick read for me, and that’s a good thing. I’ll get through it as quickly as I comfortably can, but I had hoped to have a review ready to go really soon.