First I just wanna say—wow. Finding this sub the other night was like a dream come true. A place where I feel at home with most people rather than the opposite. I could go on and on…. It’s felt life changing to realize that most of my trauma came from being gifted.

Basically, I went to college in the South (WORST decision of my life). It was traumatic. It was a completely anti-intellectual place, almost no culture outside of greek life and church. I mean, it was bad.

I had grown up UBER religious (probably existentially gifted if I had to guess) and stopped believing at 18. Enter 5-6 years of existential crisis (not necessarily a bad thing) while surrounded by bars playing country music and remixes of 10 year old pop songs with $20 covers. It would have been manageable if I didn’t feel so alone.

In HS I did everything right, 4.3 gpa, church 3x a week, sports, 34 ACT and all the extracurriculars. Basically prepared to go to an ivy league or something like it.

Ended up only applying to 3 schools, not getting into vanderbilt, and so I went to the state school for 0$ tuition. No one had encouraged me to individuate (this had been actively discouraged actually), and I just didn’t have any idea how to steer my life. I also lost my religion at 18 and went to college with absolutely no identity. (It had been my whole identity nearly).

I got at least half way through a computer science major. Came out with math and computer science minors. Ended up majoring in psychology after switching ~5x because it was all I was reading anyways to try to figure out why I was depressed. There wasn’t anyone around me who could see it was largely due to the environment and upbringing as well as giftedness.

I left school wanting to go into social work, do something simple, to help others, ended up working with mental health for juvenile offenders in the justice system. This job was deeply traumatizing. I can’t even begin to describe the mindfuck, but can basically sum it up as effectively gaslighting billed as mental health largely.

I lived in Oregon for a year during that time and moved back home.

After that I just fought depression, worked in restaurants at times, part time, lived off of money I had inherited.

My dad controlled the money, and is extremely invasive. Runs a company and micromanages everyone notoriously. He has no understanding of boundaries. Basically anything I wanted to do with the money, he tried to talk me out of, or invalidate the desire. It was exhausting. Terrified of work, bullied by my own bank account. I could use it for “living expenses” but not much else.

Finally I hired a lawyer and got out from under his control this winter.

I have about 20k and am ready to start living again.

I used to want to be a therapist, for the past ~5 years. Now I realize that although I love psychology, I mostly just wanted friends, and wanted people to open up to me.

I also struggled often with multipotentialite. I love health, fitness, religious studies/philosophy, meditation, yoga, did a yoga teacher training, psychology, sociology, have been interested in politics and thinking about how to steer the world towards something better than it is now.

All of these i’ve thought could be my vocation at some point. But I realize now I want intellectual challenge and stimulation more than anything. I know I won’t be satisfied unless I’m using my mind to its capacity. For this I think the computer science route is best. Especially as I feel like it could put me in a position to do the most good in the world.

I plan to move back out of the south very soon. Try to start learning computer science again. Maybe a boot camp and then a degree, maybe just a degree.

How to start? Should I start with just an IT job? I don’t want to be unsatisfied in the utilization of my skills. But I can be very sensitive to food and very distracted from keeping up with my needs. So something easy might help for a while, as I’ll likely be learning to support myself and further education.

I think the main reason I struggled with the comp sci degree was lack of meaningful trajectories that I could see and depression. I think being in a more creative open minded place, and living in an intentional community is probably a great start for me. I really thrive the more community I have around me.

In short—any advice for getting back on my feet? Any success stories?