"My mind is like a castle, with an infinite number of rooms, and I’m like a young child, sliding over the marble floors, outrunning my siblings, to touch and open every door, to colonise every room."
Testimony from an anonymous gifted adult:
“My brain is always on steroids. I can’t stop thinking -even in bed my musings go deep into the night, imagining possible futures, overthinking my life, going over conversations with my friends, craft novels I know will never be written. My mind is never silent. Like a household with too many children, it exhausts me. Like Cassandra, I believe I know the dangers of the future, but no one listens. It leaves me desperate, powerless, and angry.
My thoughts are my downfall, but also my love and refuge. I'm at their service, they are my mistresses. They consume me, and I feed myself to this rage to learn and understand. I’m hungry for information, in need for learning. My mind is like a castle, with an infinite number of rooms, and I’m like a young child, sliding over the marble floors, outrunning my siblings, to touch and open every door, to colonise every room.
The pleasure of the new is too delicious, I exhaust myself to obey my brain. Obsessed by learning, I forget everything else. When I’m writing or grasped by an idea, I stop eating and barely breathe. Don’t feel hunger, almost forget I have a body. I give it all up -willingly- for one purpose: the perfect logic and erudition. It’s a trance, lifting me above the clouds, the insights present themselves like arrows of smoke from thin air. I’m a worshipper of this magic, forgetting myself, for a moment to be released from being a person, I exist as pure thought.
Hours pass until I wake up on the floor, exhausted and alone, but in the joyful gloom of a new insight. I am an addict, and these flights make me feel alive. But afterwards, I fall on the ground, just a person on my own. My fears and doubts return. I feel suffocated, contained. Then I read over my writing. It feels worthless, I feel useless and paralysed. I can never finish anything, and I’ve begun to put off even the pleasure of thinking, afraid to slip back into that lonely exhaustion and, most of all, the despair of not being good enough.
My mind is my narcissistic lover. I long for her next moment of attention, willing to give myself up for just one shot of intellectual satisfaction."
by Anonymous
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To be cognitively gifted can be an advantage in life. It predicts educational and professional achievement, health, longevity, and more. However, if you don’t learn to discipline your mind, it can take over and lead to unnecessary mind wandering, fear, worries, mental exhaustion, self-handicapping and debilitation.
We have developed a training to help rein in restless and wild minds. Come learn to take control over your mind, so it stops controlling you.
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