Eleanor Kirk on the Curse of The Gifted Child

Eleanor Kirk
4 days ago
2 min read

Eleanor Kirk, author of Very Impressive for Your Age, tells us why being a gifted child is a curse.

Very Impressive For Your Age by Eleanor Kirk

I was a gifted child. Every artwork I did? Inspired. Every story I wrote? Genius. My homework was pure brilliance. My second grade violin pieces worthy of a standing ovation. My prodigious future rolled out ahead of me like a red carpet, bathed in the light of a million possibilities. The youngest ever Prime Minister. A world-famous musician, or writer, or artist—or hell, why not all three? A Nobel Prize winner, obviously. An Oscar winner, at some point. Probably an EGOT, to be honest. It doesn’t happen for everyone. But then again, not everyone is me.

That’s not to say that there weren’t obstacles along the way; crises of faith, trying to bring me down. I wasn’t selected for the school dance ensemble once. I came last in athletics. Sometimes I did maths wrong. But still, my self-belief never wavered. Dance is subjective. I had a sore foot. Maths is dumb. You can explain away every failure when you’re deluded enough.

If you search ‘formerly gifted child’ on TikTok or Reddit, you’ll yield hundreds of thousands of responses: personal accounts of people, usually now in their twenties or thirties, who survived a childhood of thinking they were superhuman. The irony of how many people seem to think—or to have thought, at some point—that they are one in a million is stupefying. It simply can’t be true. It’s like Syndrome, the villain from The Incredibles, so famously says when he’s throwing Mr Incredible around in his magic bubble: "if everybody’s super, that means no one is."

Some people have the wherewithal to realise this early on. They’re the real winners: they get to sit back, relax, and enjoy the freedom of no expectations, coasting along the river of mediocrity rather than struggling against the current. Other people spend their whole lives convinced that they’re special, and never give up trying to prove it. I think the worst is landing somewhere in the middle: hustling, to some extent, convincing yourself you’re getting somewhere, and then realising one day, halfway through your twenties, that you’re actually still where you started, only older now. You used to live in a cocoon of believing you were the only person in the world, and now you’ve discovered, too late, there are actually millions of others (billions, in fact), and nothing you do will ever be exceptional. Only one person can be the best. The rest of us are just there.

If you’re waiting for the ‘but’ at the end of this piece—the part where I get all misty-eyed and inspirational about how every drop in the ocean matters and has its own meaning, et cetera—don’t hold your breath. It’s all just water. I’m not special, and neither are you. But that’s okay, because neither are your enemies. We are good at some things and bad at others, and then we die. Unless you’re Mozart, or Greta Thunberg, I reckon the sooner you (and I) accept that, the better.