this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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You get it.
My parents, and dozens of others, got a hard sell to plop my useless-ass name into the book "Who's Who of American High School Students." As if it mattered at all. It was an ad for kids with dickbag parents that wanted to spend $150 to be in an asshole phonebook. And many did. And their parents were proud and bought the hard copy book for that year, and none of us gave two shits. It had no value, no bearing on anything. A complete waste of money for a fleeting ego boost to the parents.
Yeah, i think we were raised in similar narcissistic households and maybe others didn't share that experience as much. My parents got a scent of the gifted child effect and tried to do everything to nurture it.
For so long they made me feel like I was super special but as an adult I can see how unhealthy it all was, and how much they fed off that attention.
Maybe for some children it was a normal gauge of how well the child is doing, but for myself every little achievement felt like, "oh so you felt okay with x? let's see how well you can do x+1. You know there's a kid who took college classes at 16? I think we should sign you up. What about astronomy? Have you heard of space camp?"
I felt like failure was terrible because of how disappointed they'd look if i didn't take well to some new assignment. Completely fucked way to grow up.
Mine wasn't narcissistic, but my parents didn't mind a little free classicism. Then, after years of "your child is so smart!" in high school I didn't want to do work because I was a teenager. So years of "just apply yourself!" lectures. Y'all, I can only do so much calc homework before I lose the will to live.
That you're equating your parents signing you up for inclusion in "Who's Who" with being assigned to gifted classes as kid is perhaps a testament to the failures of the American education system