There's a third key thing floating around, though, which I've always dismissed, which is the age thing. Most of you probably know that I'm two years younger than you expect me to be (well, than you would expect me to be if you didn't know that I'm two yea... right) -- this comes from skipping second and third grades, and in particular is far enough back in my life that it's not at all ridiculous to cite it as a constant presence throughout my formative years. Fourth grade at seven -- my birthday's in the summer, which has serendipitously saved me from the constant dilemma of which age number to use when talking about an academic year -- was, I guess, pretty traumatic, though I don't really remember.
The reason that I don't put too much stock into this, though, is that the usual psyche-crushing effects on people who are skipped haven't shown up in my life at all as far as I can tell. I never went through a period where I wanted desperately to be accepted and started hanging out with the bad kids. I never did other people's homework hoping that I would be admitted into their social circle. I didn't grow up asocial, or ridiculously introverted, or pampered to the point of severe spoilage. Granted, I'm not really in a great position to evaluate the last one, but I don't think it has happened.
I was thinking about this the other day, though, and I think a lot of my parameters, for better or for worse, have been affected by this. The most interesting is the fact that I hang out with what I'm going to start to call a quantitative crowd.
There are two things contributing here, I think, one of which is obvious and the other of which is more insidious. The obvious one is the fact that I was pushed ahead in math; for reasons which are pretty clear, it's easier for a smart kid to take advanced math than it is for him to take, say, advanced history. I've never thought that I'm particularly better at math than at anything else, but I have the head start from my upbringing.
Anyway, taking higher math classes and doing math team in high school and going to math summer camp naturally fell me in with other people of the same ilk. This was true to a greater extent in middle school, when there were a couple of other kids who were taking the same advanced math I was and in the same grade (or one lower) -- we naturally bonded over this set of shared experiences. Still, why was it in college that I gravitated to a group of friends who came largely from my math class, instead of say my Moral Reasoning section or my dorm?
Discarding for a moment the fact that I never went to Moral Reasoning section (as I've mentioned before), I think there's another reason: quantitative people are more likely to accept the younger kid in their midst. The reason for this is that they live in a society of numbers, puzzles, and above all results; since the communication takes place in a more restricted environment, it's easier to establish the initial bonds simply by "having the numbers."
Basically, it's a lot easier to tell a twelve-year-old from a ten-year-old by talking about historical forces or sociological patterns than it is by talking about mathematical games. That might not be convincing, but my point is that when interacting with normal people in normal ways, I was treated like a person, and thus inherited all of the stereotypes of preternaturally young people. I was never allowed to develop a rapport with these people.
With math people, though, and especially interacting in these quantitative ways, this didn't come up. Math people are stereotypically, and I think this is true in general, less likely to treat you as a person and more likely to treat you as an object. This is a good thing, in the sense that they don't stereotype as much (I guess I'm an exception); all they care is whether you deliver the goods. So I wasn't immediately disregarded as a potential friend in these circles, which allowed me to fit in nicely.
This happened three times in my life: middle school, high school, and college. In each of these phases, the first friends I made were math-type people; as time went on, non-math people comprised more and more of my friends. Now, of course, it doesn't really matter, although every now and then something comes in and I shiver a bit.
I mention this because for a good part of my time in college, I felt trapped in my social circle -- like these weren't really the people I should have been hanging out with, but that's just how the opening went and thus I was consigned to it for better or worse. (I don't mean to insinuate that it was excruciating by any means; I had a lot of fun in college, but the fact is that my lifestyle was not particularly diverse.) When I started wondering recently why this had happened, the link between the age thing and the type of friends I have made throughout my life clicked.
A lot of my closest friends are the same age as me, two grades lower. It's interesting; I don't have a really good explanation for this, except that I value youthful exuberance highly (probably a self-esteem thing, since I've always had that relative to my social peers), and thus look for people who have been through less of life and thus are less jaded, cynical, and cautious. But regardless, one interpretation of the facts is that the "normal" people in my grade have been too mature, too adultlike for me, and thus I seek out math people (who are pretty timeless in nature) for the two years of schooling before the people who have the most in common with me arrive. This is a complete guess.
This is the only clear, important link I can see between the age thing and my chronic life. There are a bunch of others, which are somewhat speculative. For instance, I really like physical activity, by which I mean sports; it's not hard to imagine that if I hadn't been at such a disadvantage in this area growing up I would have played sports in high school, which might have sent my life off in a very different direction. The maybe-spilled milk that is a sea of possibilities is the fact that my two most serious relationships have been with people who are two years behind me in school, and who knows what would have happened if I hadn't graduated two years before.
I don't think about this much, though, for the simple reason that it's totally unclear to me that I would have been even a similar person if I hadn't been skipped. This sounds strange, but I don't know if I would have gotten into Harvard, for instance, if I hadn't been skipped. The fact that I ended up with nerdy friends, I think, caused me to acquire values of ... well, not hard work, obviously, but I guess learning and the valuing of knowledge. This is terrible reasoning, of course, but knowing my personality now I can totally see how being surrounded with a different group of people would have resulted in me blowing lots of things off.
Maybe this is wrong; maybe I would have ended up with the nerds anyway. I certainly had a love of learning instilled in me by my mother, so it's not like that's the sole creator of it. (The same mother, of course, who had me taking piano lessons instead of playing Little League.) But the speculation is fun.
With regards to academic achievement... I'll probably talk about this more later, but I think the fact that I was two years younger and pinched-cheeks cute accordingly probably helped my grades in high school significantly. I wasn't just 12 to others' 14; I was a young-looking 12. (I've always looked young for my age, I think.) Teachers probably refrained from giving me bad grades because they didn't want to hurt this kid, as opposed to the punk teenagers who needed to be taught a lesson. If I had to measure the effect, I would call it two points out of 100, which could easily have made the difference between getting into Harvard and not.
Have you ever noticed that kids who get skipped are almost always at or near the top of their class? Logically, this doesn't make too much sense; you'd figure that after the adjustment, there's no reason why they should be better than their new academic conspecifics. But I think the forces that I described here apply to all of us, and that the skipping itself raises the academic performance or at least the academic results.
The other thing, which I hadn't considered until literally just now, is that the skipping is probably partly responsible for the preservation of my youthful values (impulsiveness, impetuousness, intuition.) I was in a position to observe a great number of people who were two years ahead of me, and thus had a lot of data as to how I should proceed with my life. I saw which of them were happy, and what they were like, and thus I had an expansive data set to guide my actions. I had perspective.
This also ties in with the fact that I value perception highly, and the conjecture (despite a huge recent gaffe) that I have pretty good perceptive powers. Being on the outside a bit, I had a lot of time to observe, and a lot to be gained from observing. I definitely didn't do any of this consciously -- I always considered myself a complete equal to my social peers, as well as basically everyone close to me in age for that matter -- but then again I don't notice things consciously either. Taking this a step closer to logical preposterousness, this might have something to do with the fact that I screw things up the first time; I'm so used to having a lot of data that I don't really know how to think in the absence of data.
There are two remaining things to account for: my romantic idealism, and the fact that I value conversation so highly (as opposed to, say, "common interests," or going to bars, or movies, or I guess activities in general.) These are, uh, left as exercises to the reader.