What
twice-exceptional
adults say school
got wrong

Diagnosed at thirty-four, on average, for something visible at six

Last week’s twice-exceptional piece was the definition — gifted and neurodivergent at once, each exceptionality masking the other. This is the retrospective. Geraldine Townend and colleagues at UNSW and Autism Spectrum Australia interviewed seventeen intellectually gifted autistic adults from Australia, the United States and Canada, and asked them to look back at what school did with them. The average age at which they received their autism diagnosis was thirty-four. The oldest was seventy, and would have started school when autism was discussed as a psychosis.

The mechanism that produced the lag has a name in this literature: cognitive masking. Giftedness compensates the autism into invisibility — advanced ability papers over social communication difficulty, executive difficulty, adaptive struggle — so the support need never surfaces, and the child presents as either unremarkable or merely difficult. Antonio, at 56, hovered around B and C grades his whole schooling “because I was bored,” and never considered himself gifted enough for the higher classes. Luke was told repeatedly he was capable and stronger than his peers, and “didn’t quite absorb it.” Others were identified as gifted first, then waited a decade or more for the second identification that would have explained why the giftedness kept failing to translate.

Aiden’s line carries the whole predicament: “You always feel like you’re treated with a different yardstick as everyone else and there’s nothing you can do that’s right. In addition to that, as an autistic person quite often, you’re failing the demands of the standard.” Two rulers, both applied, neither accurate — held to a gifted standard he could not consistently meet because of an autism nobody had named, and to a standard-issue social standard he could not meet because of that same autism. Failing both, without a word for why. Milly, entering high school, hid the giftedness deliberately after being bullied for acing tests without reading them; the older piece on 2e camouflage covered exactly this concealment, and here it arrives in the participants’ own memory. And this is what the identification failure produces: not a child left unsupported, but a child left uninterpretable, to others and to themselves.

The dissonance installed — capable from the outside, a mess within

The psychosocial injury the paper documents most consistently is a dissonance between the outside verdict and the inside experience, and Antonio names it exactly: “All my life I’ve had the constant feedback of how exceptionally talented I am. But I’m still, in my private life, a mess. So there’s this huge dissonance; what you keep getting fed back is that you’re so capable.” Imposter syndrome ran through the sample regardless of diagnostic status — Aiden feeling like an “imposter,” a sense of “letting you down,” unable to feel gifted in himself. Several were reluctant to claim the giftedness label unequivocally at all, prefacing descriptions of their own advanced abilities with hedges about the strength of their credentials.

The mechanism was named a fortnight ago in the shame piece: repeated corrections harden into identity. Here it is at its full developmental length. Lucila’s teachers “would get cranky” because she never had the right things for the right class on the right day, and the accumulated verdict — “very incapable” — swallowed any sense of being special: “there were so many things that I would get in trouble for.” Juliet never cut herself any slack for what “other people can do just fine, so why can’t I?” And Antonio, for decades before identification, read his depression, anxiety, relentless self-doubt and suicidal thinking as “personal deficits or flaws,” and worked hard to change himself to meet external expectations. Recognised at six, that is a support need. Unrecognised until fifty, it is a self.

There is a specific cruelty in the gifted case, and Agnes puts her finger on it: the assumption that giftedness means “everything is going to be fine and that you succeed, and your life’s all set out for you.” The verdict of failure lands on someone the world has told is exceptional, which makes it worse, not better — you of all people have no excuse. And peers noticed the exceptionality before they noticed the struggle: friends jealous, upset, “trying to take it out on you as if it’s some kind of fault,” and the sensitive child taking that in and playing down their own ability in a loop. The two exceptionalities cancel on paper, but in the child’s inner life they compound — the giftedness raises the bar the autism prevents them clearing, and the child concludes the deficit is in them.

The environment did its own damage. Luke described spending “most of my mental calories trying to adjust to the structure. My mental calories aren’t on the actual learning” — cognitive load consumed by classroom noise, proximity, unpredictability, and group work, before any thinking about the content could begin. Aiden was blunter about bullying: “if I get affected emotionally by a bully, you think I’m learning the rest of the day? I’m barely functioning the rest of the day.”

What actually grew the talent, and how little of it was the school

Ask what developed the ability anyway, and the answer is quietly damning: mostly the participants themselves, and mostly against the grain of the classroom. Self-directed learning was the strongest facilitator in the study — Lucila found prescriptive teaching “really difficult” and thrived when left to direct her own; Luke described the ideal condition as a teacher who “literally dropped down the textbook and basically said, ‘Here’s your exercise, figure it out.’” Sally liked school in hindsight because she could finish the work quickly and be left alone to read. Milly still holds her school’s record for books read in a year, because she could read a whole book in a lunch break. What these have in common is that the talent developed in the spaces the school left empty, not in the provision it made.

Where the school did help, it was individual teachers, and never the system. Sally’s “really, really brilliant teachers” who redirected a social rejection toward something she was good at; Agnes’s fourth-grade teacher who introduced her to the eighth-grade teacher so they could work on poetry together; Louise’s teachers who “would encourage me to take those skills where I wanted to take them and not just into specific careers or areas where people with high-end intellect are expected to go.” Every one of these was a person who happened to notice — the paper calls the teacher role pivotal but inconsistent, and the reason is the absence of any professional learning in twice-exceptionality that would make noticing systematic rather than lucky.

Parents mattered — but the paper is honest that the support was double-edged. Juliet’s parents overrode a school that had recommended her for remedial maths despite her acing the year, got her onto the competition team, and later backed her leaving eighth grade for university; Benjamin credits his mother’s influence as the driving force. But most participants also described parents pushing their own idea of what was worthwhile, and Toni’s father teaching abstract maths at ten was “kind of stressful.” And here is the finding that should reorganise the whole conversation: participants reported more relational support — acceptance, belonging, emotional validation — from community contexts than from either school or home. Sally, learning a local language in a foreign village, “was able to go somewhere so very, very foreign and find myself so much at home.” Benjamin’s community was supportive “not in any way related to autism, but just of me as a person.” The place where the strengths were finally allowed was usually neither of the institutions responsible for developing them.

Grief, and the question of which self was the real one

Late recognition, when it came, was described as freeing — Lucila: “when I came to realise that there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with who I was.” But the paper does not let it rest as a happy ending, and neither should this piece. Ophelia, diagnosed at 61: “There’s been grief. That is so real. The first couple of years, you just beat yourself up. You’re looking at your life through a new lens. It’s almost like you’re repenting for the way your life went. Is this the real me now? Or was that the real me back there? Which one is going to be put forward now?”

That is the price of a childhood spent uninterpreted: an adulthood spent re-reading it. Every entry in the record has to be reassessed — the boredom, the trouble, the “very incapable,” the decades of self-blame — as mechanism rather than character. It is the same re-encounter with the record the shame piece described, but for these participants it happens at fifty and sixty, over a record that long. Louise called being 2e a double-edged sword, using her intellect to mask her autism and disclosing it only to people she trusted, while also finding in the autism the source of how she perceives the world.

Every participant told the researchers the same counterfactual: earlier identification of both exceptionalities would have changed the academic outcome and, more importantly, the psychosocial one — the self-concept, the self-blame, the years spent working to become someone else. The paper’s structural asks follow directly: professional learning in twice-exceptionality for teachers, systematic identification rather than lucky noticing, and dual differentiation — support for the autism and extension for the giftedness, at the same time, in the same child. Milly named why that last one is hard: “people like to put you in one box or the other. And you’re either going to get supported for this thing over here or you’re going to get extended over here, but the idea of providing both at once is a bit…” She trails off. Seventeen adults, three countries, an average of thirty-four years to reach the sentence Lucila reached. The abilities were always there. So was the autism. What was missing was anyone whose job it was to see both.

Citations

Townend, G., McGregor, M., Jung, J. Y., Merrington, H., Robinson, A. & Clark, T. (2026) — Looking Back: Twice-Exceptional Adults’ Perspectives on Their Educational Experiences — Education Sciences

Gelbar, N. W., Cascio, A. A., Madaus, J. W. & Reis, S. M. (2022) — A systematic review of the research on gifted individuals with autism spectrum disorder — Gifted Child Quarterly

Atmaca, F. & Baloglu, M. (2022) — The two sides of cognitive masking: A three-level Bayesian meta-analysis on twice-exceptionality — Gifted Child Quarterly

Townend, G. & Brown, R. (2016) — Exploring a sociocultural approach to understanding academic self-concept in twice-exceptional students — International Journal of Educational Research