High Cognitive Minds

There are times when I find it impossible to write. More accurately, it's almost impossible to think in an organized, coherent way.  Either there are too many ideas swirling around in my mind, competing for attention, or I'm mentally burned out and can barely think at all. And I wonder whether there's a sense in which mental burnout is real and not just a more or less meaningless figure of speech? I wish I understood what's going on in there.

Intellectually gifted people get used to being told "you think too much," and maybe that's part of the problem. We not only think a lot, we also tend to think about thinking, which sometimes leads nowhere useful and burns up energy that could better be used in other endeavors. Is my mind running away with itself because I have Attention Deficit Disorder or is that just one of the penalties of having an unusually active brain? Have I dropped into a temporary mental limbo because my brain is exhausted from so much hard work, or am I depressed? Am I totally engrossed with my current project because that's a pre-requisite for creativity or because I'm a geek, and if I'm a geek is it because I'm a person with Asperger's? Where does one draw the line in determining what's a disability and what is merely a trait that needs to be understood and managed?

Things which look alike often have entirely different causes, and things which look dissimilar can have the same causes. Some gifted people think that their mental abilities come from being ADD, but we don't assume that because a highly gifted person is also autistic, that their mental abilities are a result of autism. (And I'm sure that the possibility of an autistic person being gifted is a new thought for many.) What I'm trying to work through, I suppose, is the ways in which we confuse abilities and disabilities. We tend to define particular traits as one or the other and then give them names which then become part of a person's identity rather than a mere description of part of their functioning.

I have virtually all the traits which are used to define ADD, but what's most important to me is learning which ones are actually handicaps for me, to what extent they affect my life, and how to manage them. Some of my mental traits are common to both ADD and Asperger's, as well as to high levels of giftedness. At this point, we might start wondering if giftedness itself should be in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Finding one's personal identity is hard enough without getting tangled in competing identities which are, in the long run, only labels. Whether mental burnout is a problem with a label is less important than knowing what I need to do to avoid it or, simply how to cope with it. It isn't my identity; it's a problem I have to deal with.