I initially opened this thread with trepidation, as I don't generally like bragging (from others or myself). However, I find myself quite enjoying the responses.
It's reaffirming to read of these abilities and how they were NOT sidelined by mainstream or environmental pressures.
I became friends in college with a fellow who is one of the brightest people I've ever met. And a great "explainer" and story-teller, to boot. His grades suffered at times, and he nearly left once or twice, because he was so simply and totally into his own interests (some very technical) as opposed to some of what was going on in the classes.
Half his life some, particularly conventional people might call "a mess". On the other hand, he's an engineer on the CMS at CERN.
As for myself, I was considered very bright, but struggled -- mostly with conventional social settings and also with very heightened sensitivity to environmental stimuli. (E.g. I can't tune out neighboring noise; my brain doesn't filter it from my attention.). A couple of physical injuries with chronic after-effects sidelined me for a long time. (Injury I can deal with. Having no recourse against chronic symptoms is something else.)
Nonetheless, I've had my moments. Such as pretty much single handedly converting a billion dollar cost accounting system from a hard coded legacy environment to instead interface with an underfunded SAP implementation.
Pretty much ALL the inputs changed. Things were handed "over the wall" from the SAP implementation with no negotiation and very little in the way of instruction. No one taught me a thing nor provided me any tools or budget beyond my salary. The method proposed by "the other side" of the wall would not have worked at all. So, I rolled my own.
It worked. It worked when raw, detailed order records replaced summary reports the manufacturing facilities used to provide (leaving me to processed multiple hundreds of MB of essentially raw data with product identifiers floating anywhere within a free form text field supporting any number of simultaneous and varying data points). It worked when headcount was reduced from four, for a while five, people down to just me.
Not only did it work, it became much more accurate and full-proof.
I like reading here how other people simply did things that were "impossible" or certainly not expected. And that it's not a matter of somehow placing oneself into some "abnormal state of being". It's who you are, and getting done what interests you and/or needs to be done.
I still don't fit in to mainstream society. I burned out, hard-time, in my last job mostly fighting an environment of distraction and complacency. Reading other stories here provides a small boost; there are other people who "make it" being something other than conventional. And by "make it", I mean in their own eyes, as opposed to someone else's measure.
Somehow, for me its been a difficult and necessary lesson that a lot of convention is a straight-jacket for bright people, and that criticism that is leveled against them is often hypocritical and self-serving even while it is espoused as being "for their good".
P.S. Even when such criticism and suggestions are well meant, they may simply not fit. Trying too hard to please or accommodate the other person becomes self-destructive.