The Unspoken Challenges for the Depressed Gifted
Gifted depression, recovery & integration: The phantom of your old self and your new normal.
It doesn’t get better. Before you read this, I just wanted to get this out of the way. If you are gifted and have depression, it will never get better. Not in the traditional way. Abandon that hope now because that’s the first thing I had to learn the hard way.
On the bright side, it can get easier with hard work. I’ll explain. Note: this is a personal experience piece, not a replacement for professional help.
The above is a very standard and generic bell curve chart for where the cutoff for gifted is. Know that this is highly inaccurate in the realm of giftedness. There are many brackets and types in the gifted realm that are seldom discussed or explained due to the extremely small sample size. Each case is usually customised and tailored to its needs by an entire community to support one gifted existence.
And this is precisely why therapy often fails the gifted when the community fails to support and recognise it first.
Life of the gifted is always extreme. You either thrive or try to survive. Many who do not get their intervention and support fail to make it to adulthood. Those who do, despite the odds, might turn out like me.
Let’s start with an analogy.
Say you were born with 10 fingers like everyone else. And you were great at using them from the start. However, as time passed, the more you used them, the more painful it became. Eventually, the only way to cope with this pain was to cut off one finger.
Cutting off that finger was a decision you did not make lightly. In some ways, it helped. You became slower to use your hands and matched everyone else’s pace. However, it did not completely remove the pain of removing that finger because the way you did things was still different compared to everyone else.
At this point, you look back at the time you had 10 fingers and wonder if this was the right decision. However, it’s far too late to turn back time. Part of you mourns giving up that finger and regrets it. You still remember what it is like to use all 10 fingers instead of 9. The phantom digit reminds you constantly, like a ghost whispering in your head. Compared to how you could have been quicker and more efficient with 10 fingers, the unnatural 9 fingers make you feel like a complete failure. Even if you can keep up with everyone else as they finally get better at using their hands, the constant slip-upsthat you never did while you had 10 fingers remind you that you’re not as good as you once were.
PAUSE.
This right here is the highlight of depression in gifted individuals internally that seldom appears externally. Most gifted individuals will not voluntarily admit struggle. Why would they? They’ve always done it well before. They’ve never learned how to need help.
So how do we cope? Introducing superior intellectualisation and high masking ability.
For a while, these masks work. We wear gloves to make it appear as if we still have all 10 fingers like everyone else, never showing the truth beneath. We refuse to take it off because it makes everything look perfect on the outside while the wound of the chopped finger festers. We ignore it. We pretend it doesn’t hurt because we can’t see it now. For a while, this feels like we’ve fixed it once more. That it would work out.
Because of the gloves, nobody around us notices that the pain has increased tenfold in the meantime. Nobody realises the wound had reopened and started bleeding again through the gloves. Nobody can see that we are getting an extremely dangerous fever from the infection beneath the gloves. We continue as if nothing happened because we are afraid that if anyone knew we only had 9 fingers, they would see us as a freak.
Here, common sense tells us to see a doctor. In this case, a therapist or someone who could help. And we do. However, each time we pull off the glove to reveal 9 fingers, we get called a freak. People scream. People don’t know what to do with it because they have never dealt with anyone with only 9 fingers. Those who try to help either misdiagnose the reason why we have 9 fingers, completely overlook it and prescribe headache medicine instead of stitching the wound or take advantage of the 9 fingers to abuse our already fragile hearts.
I’d like to point out that most therapists are not gifted and were not specialised to identify and manage complex gifted cases. Theoretically, they might know the signs of giftedness and the depression and other trauma complexities that accompany it. However, their limitation in understanding comes from being unable to experience the exact things we do. Oftentimes, following the clinical framework and DSM5 checklist results in a misdiagnosis. Not every therapist is adequately equipped to deal with a complex case that gifted clients often come with.
The idea of therapy should be early intervention. However, time flows very differently for the gifted. Apart from the high masking ability and intellectualisation to hold out on themselves, gifted individuals process the world in acceleration. What might take an average person a week to do, the gifted would have done in a few days or a few hours. The DSM5 guides often fail to account for the side effects of time dilation, emotional intensity and multiple syndrome complexity. Not all checkboxes will be met in a typical gifted case. Oftentimes, it is borderline or overlaps with another syndrome, resulting in misdiagnosis of the condition and severity. The above is one such guideline.
So what now? If therapy and support are not options, what can the gifted depressed do?
Here’s what my mentor taught me. He did not go through regular therapy with me. It does not work, and he was right. The only way a gifted individual can integrate, not heal, is to understand there is absolutely nothing wrong with them.
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If anything, I will be the person for you that my therapist has been for me. This is the most important thing you’d have to understand before anything else.
The world was never made for you. Nothing here will ever work out for you because it was made for the average and majority.
Got it yet?
Unfortunately, we cannot rewrite the past. Those 9 fingers you still have left? They’re going to work from now on. That 10th finger you cut off? You’re going to miss it for a long time, perhaps forever. However, the good news begins here.
It can get easier with practice. If there is one thing you’re already good at, that’s working harder than anyone else. You worked alone for the longest time, attempting to fix what was never a mistake. You’ve long since learned how to be disciplined and to keep at it for a very long time that would have broken others.
And you’re still here. That means integration is definitely within reach. The only thing hindering you from integration might be reaching for it first. Masking and hiding had become a habit. It’s time to drop it. Leaving it behind could be the hardest part of getting better.
Find courage! Mastering the art of having only 9 fingers is the same as mastering the art of masking and intellectualisation. It’s the same as how you first learned how to use all 10 fingers, just differently.
At the beginning, a good day will feel like only a dull throb and exhaustion. It’s the day you crash out for a 16-hour nap. On bad days, you start feeling the need to reach for those gloves and pretend that missing finger is still attached. And that’s ok. Some days it hurts more, some days less.
But over time, with discipline and courage, learning to exercise the remaining 9 fingers in ways that other people with 10 fingers don’t will give you the ability to adapt accordingly in a way that feels as natural as breathing. This could take many years, but it would never take as long as your lifetime of suffering alone before.
Here, I’m going to say this. You can go through this journey completely alone as I did. However, it would help a lot to have a friend who knew how to sit in darkness with you. It’s not about the climb. It’s about the company that matters. If you still have people who want to learn how to love you the way you need, teach them to be there for you. They don’t have to know how to help you. All they need to know is how to give good hugs and ask no questions.
If you are someone who has to do this alone, I am here. I might not reply to you, but this blog is a note left by my past self to anyone who might need this in the future. If you cannot trust anyone else around you, know that I’ve already done it and proven it is possible. Don’t believe in me, but trust the evidence I will now leave behind for you.
Stages of integration are never linear. In order to master the art of 9 fingers, you must live in 3 timelines: the past, present and future, simultaneously.
Rule #1: Never forget your past and who you are at your core.
Rule #2: Never lose sight of who you want to be, regardless of the noise that surrounds you circumstantially.
Rule #3: Never forget that everything happening now is temporary and absolutely meaningless to care about because time travels backwards for you. The world was never made for you. You have to create one of your own in the spaces between.
Some signs that you know this is getting better:
#1: You feel more pain but not fear.
#2: Your mind is logically sound and clear despite your feelings.
#3: You are able to process multiple versions of reality and their truth instead of picking one as your bias and not needing to decide on a single lane.
#4: You feel less need to do something or anything just to be busy.
#5: You don’t feel the need to explain, seek help or want to be understood by the majority or even those around you. You have found confidence in existing silently the way you are with all 9 fingers, never forgetting the 10th, but no longer mourning it.
The signs are not comprehensive. It’s only a guide. However, the general rule of thumb to know it’s working is to measure your internal time and placement in it.
If you’re moving faster than your internal time, you’re running from it. If you’re moving slower than your internal time, you’re drowning in it. If you’re moving at the same pace as your internal time, you’ve done it.
This isn’t therapy. If it isn’t much help, I apologise in advance. However, I know this is not something often said by someone who has been in the very trenches in the very same gifted position. Because mainstream gifted are painted as fortunately cursed. So how do unfortunately cursed gifted people exist?
Sadly, we do. And we’re still here, barely living.
One last thing before we part. The fact that you’re reading up until this point tells me you’re bound to succeed. Because those who have truly given up would never have tried. Curiosity is the thing that keeps people like you and me alive long enough to save ourselves.
