When You’re Not Gifted Anymore

I was a “wunderkind” for much of my high school career. I took more AP classes than anyone I knew and I got amazing scores on standardized tests. I tried to take classes during lunch my junior and senior year (not something I recommend). I went to college at 17 and graduated with an MA and BA at age 19, got a perfect score on the GRE, and went off to Princeton for a PhD as a still-teen. That was where I realized very, very clearly, that being a “wunderkind,” even in a German graduate department, was nothing to be proud of. It felt like no one took anything I did seriously because of my age.

When I’d finished my PhD and went back to my alma mater (Brigham Young University) as an adjunct professor, I discovered that at least some of my students were people I had gone to high school with. This was extremely uncomfortable for all of us. I hated the general sense that I wasn’t respected. Sure, people thought I was “smart.” That gave me no cred. Students argued with me constantly over grades, particularly male students who threatened to tell on me to the department chair for not giving them the grades they “deserved” because I was too “inexperienced” to recognize their quality writing.

In my 30s and even into my 40s, people kept telling me that I looked like a teenager still. I didn’t think of this as a compliment at all. It was a reminder that I would never, ever, be seen as a real…