What Happens to Performance Identity in the Wilderness

What happens when a ‘gifted child’ finds himself in a wilderness where he’s stripped of any way of proving his worth? What does he do when there’s nothing he can do, when there’s no audience to applaud his performance, when he faces a cold, silent indifference, if not hostility? His world falls to pieces. The soul hungry for approval starves in a desert like that. It reduces the compulsive achiever to something little, utterly ordinary. Only then is he able to be loved.