Gifted student™ brains are about as functional as horses when you get right down to it 

Which sounds like a shit post but consider: horses? Hypothetically MADE for running. Look at this magnificent muscle beasts. Look at those legs. They must be so good at running, right? Wrong. Horses are fragile as frick. Horses break their goddamn legs so so easily, and if they break their legs you just have to fricking shoot them. If they run, the thing they are MADE FOR, too fast their lungs will start bleeding. I just googled horses to see if I was missing anything and apparently if they lie down for a day their organs start collapsing or something so they can’t rest from their One Horse Purpose even when they’re hurt. They’re made to do one thing but they can only do it under Very Specific Conditions and if a single thing changes they just die.

Which, you know. gifted students™ get applauded for being naturally smart when we’re five or whatever and then develop a terrible inflated sense of self that makes us highly averse to anything we’re not naturally good at because it challenges our fragile child brain egos and if we wait too long we’ll develop mental fences around entire subjects and skillsets (mine are math and art) because we think we’re bad at them when in reality we just need to practice but are frustrated by that because it’s harder than being ~naturally talented~ was. We get applauded for doing One Thing but the second we run into slightly different things that our brains don’t comprehend as readily? It’s a Bad Time. I still have so much anxiety over things I don’t feel Naturally Talented at that I’ve been sitting here writing this post for like 10 minutes rather than read the feedback on my religion paper. I got a 100% on it, but I’m still That Scared of anything other than straight heaps of praise because that’s what my child brain was acclimated to. Just send me to the glue factory already.

It's important to note that a lot of horse problems are because of how they are exploited by people, pushed too hard and made beasts of burden that they were never meant to be. I think this strengthens the analogy