You’re the one who can hold the most. So you keep getting handed more.
You metabolize it faster than the people around you, and the reward for finishing is simply more of it. You override every signal your body sends — the tightness, the exhaustion arriving a little earlier each week, the quiet complaints you’ve trained yourself not to read. Until one day you can’t override them anymore.
I know this pattern because I lived it. In many of my past roles I did the work of two or three people, and eventually I ended up in the hospital. I’m not being dramatic — that’s just the order it happened in.
And here’s what makes it sting: almost nobody, while you’re in it, calls that a gift. The word people reach for is a lot. Too much, too fast, too many questions, too far ahead. The exact wiring that lets you carry the load is the same wiring that gets you read as a liability. When a gifted person finally burns out and leaves, their old job often gets quietly carved up among two or three new hires — one nervous system doing what an org chart later admits takes three.
You probably didn’t have language for any of this. You just thought something was wrong with you.
There’s nothing wrong with you.
Last week I sat down for a live conversation with Emmaly Perks, M.Ed. 🧠 — a gifted-education and career consultant who’s spent fifteen-plus years turning brain science into something usable for gifted and twice-exceptional people. She teaches this work at the graduate level, she wrote a whole workbook on it, and she has a rare talent for making real research feel like a conversation instead of a lecture. She handed me language for things I’d only ever felt in my body.
Scattered or threaded
Emmaly doesn’t help people polish a résumé and fire it at a hundred job posts, praying one of them happens to fit. She helps them design the work around themselves — instead of contorting themselves to fit whatever mold the job arrived in. She calls it a portfolio career. Not gig work, not a single lane, but a set of intentional lanes that form an ecosystem around who you actually are. A little teaching here, a little writing there, client work, a book. Each piece feeding the others.
Which is the thing I’ve been saying in my own words for two years: careers are not ladders, they are ecosystems of experience.
And then — this is the part that matters — she didn’t tell me to niche down. She said something more honest, and more useful. You can run many lanes, but there has to be a coherent link. You have to solve a clear problem. Without that thread, you never get off the ground.
That’s the knife’s edge so many of us live on. We’ve been told our range is a gift, that we were built for more than one thing — and then we look at a Substack with fifteen subjects and a business that won’t catch, and we wonder why nobody’s buying. So let me name the distinction cleanly, because it’s the whole game: the difference between scattered and threaded.
Scattered is fifteen unrelated interests competing for the same hour. Threaded is fifteen expressions of one underlying thing.
I write about brand strategy, sustainable entrepreneurship, giftedness and neurodiversity, and AI. On the surface, four lanes. Underneath, one problem: how do brilliant, differently-wired people build a working life on their own terms without breaking themselves to do it? That’s the thread. The lanes are just where it surfaces. And the moment I could see my own thread, the “all over the place” feeling stopped being chaos and started being a map.
If you’ve been told to pick one thing and it’s felt like a small death every single time — maybe you don’t need to pick. Maybe you need to find the thread that’s been running underneath all of it the whole time.
Why the office broke you (it has a name)
Emmaly shared a framework I wish I’d had a decade ago.
Three things have to be present for a person to stay genuinely engaged at work: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Pull any one of them and the whole thing starts to rot.
For a lot of bright, fast-wired people, autonomy is the first to go. You can see twenty steps down the road while the room is still standing on step five, and when you say so, it doesn’t land as insight. It lands as insubordination.
Emmaly has a name for the cognitive version of this — “skip thinking.” Your brain skips the intermediate stops that other people need, and instead of being valued, you get called arrogant. There’s even research on it: the high performers, the quick ones, get perceived as a threat inside hierarchical workplaces. Threat envy, she called it. I felt that one in my teeth.
Then there’s the flip side of burnout that almost nobody names: bore-out. Working so far beneath your level that the boredom itself becomes the injury. You start over-complicating your own work just to feel something. You ride deadlines for the adrenaline rush. You invent initiatives because the actual job can’t hold your attention for forty hours. From the outside it can look like instability. From the inside, it’s a brain starving in plain sight.
Sound familiar?
I numbed that boredom for years, and I know exactly what it cost me. Five years alcohol-free now — and a lot of that distance is me finally building a life I no longer need to escape from.
The label that opened a door — and the one that became a cage
I was the gifted kid. Pulled out of class, handed the label, never told what it actually meant. Then ADHD at thirty. Then CPTSD. At some point I coined the term Alphabet Soup — a.k.a. how many letters can one person collect?
Emmaly says roughly fourteen percent (14%) of gifted people carry another form of neurodivergence too, and that it’s almost certainly an undercount.
So the soup is real. And it’s common.
When I finally got the ADHD diagnosis, suddenly I had language. I had self-accommodations that actually worked. I could read my own nervous system instead of fighting it. The label was a door, and behind it was a room I’d needed my whole life.
This is where Emmaly and I diverged — gently, but really. Emmaly is more cautious about the labels than I am. To her, they sit closer to a cluster of suggestions than a hard category, which clinically makes so much sense. She shared that we still can’t scan a brain and see ADHD, and she’s wary of how the DSM can do harm as easily as good.
And she named a danger I’d never put words to: identity foreclosure. You’re seven, you’re good at math, and suddenly you’re the math kid — forever, whether or not you ever loved it. The label that was supposed to free you quietly decides who you’re allowed to be.
The label is a door and a cage, and which one it becomes depends entirely on what you do with it. It opened a room for me. It locks people in when it becomes the only room they’re permitted to stand in. Same object, opposite functions. I’m not interested in the tidy version where labels are simply good or simply overused. The truth, in my opinion, lives in the paradox.
So if a label ever handed you language the way mine did — take it. Use the door. Just keep an eye on the moment it starts to feel like the only thing you’re allowed to be.
Not every gift is for sale
Emmaly pushed back on something she called the capitalist mandate — the assumption that a gift, once spotted, must be monetized. And she’s right. Not every gift is meant to become a job.
Some of what you’re good at is a passion that needs no audience. Some of it is a hobby you keep sacred precisely so the world can’t get its hands on it. The pressure to turn every talent into income is its own kind of trap. The real skill is knowing which gift belongs where — and having the nerve to leave some of them off the market entirely.
Widen the lens on “smart”
Emmaly Perks, M.Ed. 🧠 shared some research on creativity and intelligence — that the brain treats them as related, but separate. When you drop into a creative state, the judging, editing part of your brain quiets down so the ideas can run wild. Fascinating stuff.
I gave this some thought, and for me it comes down to what we mean by that word, intelligence. If we only mean the narrow, testable kind — the kind that takes a hundred options and picks the one right answer — then sure, creativity lives somewhere else.
But that’s the part that gets me. The fact that creativity and “intelligence” show up in different parts of the brain isn’t proof they’re unrelated. To me, it’s proof we made “smart” too small to begin with. We measured one kind of thinking, called it the whole of intelligence, and then acted shocked when the big-picture thinkers — the idea machines, the dot-connectors, the people who are obviously brilliant — kept testing as average.
The test was never built to see them. That’s a knock on the test.
What I invite you to do with this
If you saw yourself anywhere in here — the range that got read as instability, the body that broke before you’d admit the fit was wrong, the label that saved you and the one you’re scared to be reduced to — I want you to try one thing.
Stop asking which single thing you are. Ask what thread runs underneath all of them.
And go follow Emmaly Perks. Her Substack is one of the few places that respects how a gifted brain actually likes to think — long-form, evidence-cited, no soundbites. Her book, The CURIOUS Career Workbook, is built specifically for gifted, creative, and multi-talented minds, and it walks you through designing work around yourself one small experiment at a time.
I trust her work, and learned so much, that I signed up for her summer workshop on giftedness, 2e, and identity — because I want the deeper version of the conversation we had here. You should come join me. The first move in her framework is clearing the myths — the inherited beliefs about what a “good” career is supposed to look like. Most of us are carrying someone else’s answer to that question.
You’re allowed to put it down.
More on Emmaly’s Important Work
Below are a few links to Emmaly’s website, her workbook, grad course, and workshop.
Website: www.beyondgiftedservices.com
CURIOUS Career Workbook: https://beyondgiftedservices.com/curious-career-workbook/
Giftedness, Twice-Exceptionality. and Neurodivergent Identity Grad Course: https://www.vthec.org/event/giftedness-twice-exceptionalism-and-neurodivergent-identity/
Giftedness, Twice-Exceptionality. and Neurodivergent Identity Workshop: https://www.vthec.org/event/giftedness-2e-and-neurodivergent-identity-ws/
