Over the next several posts, I will write about my life in (more or less) chronological order to uncover the origins of my current inability to do any work. Many interesting things have happened during my life which have no direct relevance to my current predicament, so I will skip over them. I will try to stick mostly to incidents which demonstrate why authoritarian parenting is such torture for a gifted child — and there are a plethora of them! I will also mention some incidents which illustrate how gifted children are misunderstood by others or misunderstanding the world.
The first thing that had an impact on my academic attitude that I can remember happened when I was just beginning school. In Hong Kong, report cards came not only with grades, but with a rank. Initially, I thought that the higher the number, the better… » [Expand post] [Permalink]