Once Upon A Time, I Was The Academic 'Golden Child,' But No More

You probably have gone through a similar scenario... you're 10 years old, reading at a high school reading level, and you're thriving. Cut to now, you're a broke, depressed, struggling college student who can't take a standardized test to save your life. This scenario is all too real for a lot of kids around the country, and I've noticed lately that a lot of us are driving the struggle bus.

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How is it that someone can go from excelling in elementary school to being completely average in just a few short years??? We face a crushing blow during high school when we step back and realize "wow we're really NOT the shit... what happened???" For me personally, it's been hard to grasp the fact that we're not really all that our families hyped us up to be, and we're not really as good at school as we thought.

This realization comes with a few downsides:

1) school becomes much harder,

2) you feel like you're letting everyone down and

3) you have to put in twice as much work to get good grades.

My family used to put me on a pedestal and make me feel like I was the smartest kid in our hometown, but I now know that I'm simply just average.

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According to an article on Quora, in the '80s and '90s, "Dr. Sally Reis, U. Connecticut, conducted a long-term study of identified gifted students who were high achievers in elementary school but then failed to achieve well in high school or college." This study found that eventually, the failure of these same students was caused by "excellence without effort" when they were younger. This means that these kids found material so easy, they checked out and ended up not caring about school that much.

I never really realized that I was lazy in elementary school because I found things to be relatively super-easy. This means I never really learned how to study, I never really learned good time-management skills, and I never really learned how to put in the effort and get results out of it. And so when I got to college, it all hit me like a torpedo.

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Now that I've been in college for a year and a half, I've had to come to terms with my struggle. College is incredibly hard, classes are hard, and I have to work harder for the same result. I've realized that I have to get my shit together in order to do well, and I'm prepared to work my ass off next semester in order to get my grades back up (pray for me).

But, look on the bright side: when we come to terms with the fact that we're not ivy-league NASA prodigies, there's so much less pressure and we can actually focus ~more~ on school. Listen up, washed-up first-grade geniuses: we're gonna be fine.