Massive hugs James.Thank you, your story gives me some hope. I guess I try to keep in mind that I'm still young, and that there will be a lot of possibilities in the future, but negative feelings in the moment can be very powerful.
For some reason I was put into a "gifted" class in elementary school, and I did not have a good experience overall, and when I'm feeling down at least, I think that it was due to others overestimating my "innate" capability. I feel like one year was good, because I had a particularly good teacher that year, but the rest was pretty miserable. I guess I did okay "academically" in most areas, yet still struggled with math, and got bad marks for organization, "working well with others", and stuff like that. Then I had a really bad experience with a teacher in the last year of elementary school, and while I do feel that a lot of my experiences have been due to there being something inherently "wrong" with me, the experience I had in 6th grade was something that was pretty damaging. I had trouble even attending consistently after that, and I still do.
In 2018, I was seeing a psychologist about the school issues, and additional family issues, and they did some testing, pretty much the same kind that I had when I was younger which determined that I should be in that "gifted" program in elementary school, and the second test showed that I have very low processing speed and below average reasoning ability, although I think I still did okay on the verbal portion of the test. I should probably note that around the same time of the testing, I had started an anxiety medication which caused me to lose a dangerous amount of weight, as it caused me to lose my appetite, and I was also very tired before the test, since it was in the morning, and my sleep disorder was undiagnosed at that time, but when I'm feeling down at least, I tend to think that I have "regressed", and that I'm now cognitively disabled. Then that makes me search for rare brain diseases that I could have, which could have caused such a monumental regression. Other times, I think that I was somehow overestimated the first time like I mentioned earlier, causing them to put a cognitively disabled kid in a gifted class, which in turn could have developed my bad attitude towards school.
