People often say that ‘I put them to shame’ as at my age I do things younger people would not do. There is no rivalry, competitiveness, here. I observe things, experience things, bend, like a tree in the wind. A friend introduced a friend of hers to me, who said ‘I have heard so much about you, I was scared of meeting you’. I often feel like a freak. Life has shoved me in all directions, to deal with in any way I can, with whatever tools are available, the brain being pretty important. Other friends have said they wished they had done what I had done. So am I a freak?

I picked up a range of books vaguely under the heading ‘Anthropology’, one of which was ‘The Gifted Adult’ No way would I claim to be ‘gifted’. I do not have a high IQ, and would not be accepted by MENSA. The list below is ‘cognitive’:

1.     Capacity and taste for reasoning.

2.     ‘Spirit’ of immediate synthesising and understanding (Magic thinking).

3.     Thirst for learning.

4.     Attracted to difficulty and complexity in choice of problems to resolve.

5.     Independent spirit, tendency to teaching self.

6.     Wide vocabulary, pleasure in speaking, using words and expressions

7.     Quick understanding of new ideas.

8.     Excellent long-term memory.

9.     Quick uptake of mathematical and scientific concepts.

10.  Voracious taste for reading.

11.  Elaborating abstract thoughts.

12.  Capacity to work, intellectually, on many different disciplines.

Well, most of the book made more sense than others I have read, though they seem to have combed the dictionary for words of at least 5 syllables (I am talking of French, of course, notoriously verbose. If you pick up a book with the languages side by side the French is much longer). Most of the books seem to be written for their peers. I am persisting, so much new to me, but very difficult to get anything ‘meaningful’ out of them. One, by a very famous psychologist, wrote about his working class mother, and her entry into a care home, she had dementia. He criticised the treatment, and, in particular, the ‘dehumanisation’. No way he or his brothers wanted responsibility for Mum, nor could he suggest any alternative to where she ended up.

Back to the list, I am useless at science and maths, except for keeping accounts. If you read a lot you will acquire a wide vocabulary. A good/bad memory is very debatable, often comes down to retrieval, or ‘props’ like my albums and diaries. I think, from years of reading blogs and posts on Moodscope, many people have a lot of the ‘attributes’ listed above. Where do you fit in? 

The Gardener

A Moodscope member