So much to say and no one to talk to

A child with highly developed reasoning and abstraction skills may become interested early in complex questions: the universe, death, time, justice, consciousness, history, how matter works, the deep reasons behind human behaviour. The particularity also concerns how he thinks. One question leads straight to another, an answer generates an exception, a detail becomes a connection.

When a friend wants to change the subject after a few seconds, the two children may simply find themselves at different points of the same conversation. If this experience repeats itself, the child may discover very early that some parts of his own thinking find few listeners.

The phrase used in Solomon J. in the village of the Pepileni is deliberately imprecise, and is recognisable precisely for that reason: too curious, too intense, too precise, too sensitive, too insistent when something interests him. Too serious at certain moments and still deeply a child at others.

The fable turns this feeling into the metaphor of light. The Sun Child carries an intensity that takes time to find relationships able to tune in to his frequency. The story thus raises the idea that some Sun Children may need more time to meet people with whom to feel a "true rapport".

The question that remains concerns the real world: how heavy can it be, during childhood, to feel constantly out of tune?

Advanced abstraction skills can create a misunderstanding. A child talks like an older boy, understands complex concepts, catches irony and contradictions, and reasons with adults who are surprised by the precision of his observations. Then playtime arrives and no one chooses him. In that moment he is exactly the age he is.

Cognitive ability offers tools for understanding the experience; the emotional tools needed to get through it still need to be developed. A child can rationally understand why a group behaves in a certain way and still feel the weight of being left out. He can formulate a sophisticated explanation of his own loneliness and still need one simple sentence: "Do you want to play with me?"

A subtler difficulty can appear when the child gradually changes himself to make the relationship easier. He talks less, shortens his explanations, holds back some questions, and learns which subjects create interest and which produce silence. He watches others and tries to work out how much of himself he can bring into the conversation.

This ability to adapt can be useful. It becomes painful when the child senses that belonging requires a constantly reduced version of his own presence. At that point the issue goes beyond the difficulty of making friends and concerns the price he feels forced to pay to succeed at it.

In the book, loneliness also finds a precise image. When Solomon J. struggles to find his place in the group, Shadow takes on a particular role. His imagination builds a companion exactly where the real relationship becomes most fragile.

The metaphor allows loneliness to be read also as a space in which the child keeps producing thought, play and imagination. He can invent worlds, draw, read, build stories, talk to inner characters. Yet a deeper question remains: who would he have wanted to share all of this with?

Telling a child "you need to socialise more" offers little guidance. The matter can be much more concrete: with whom, doing what, talking about what, in which setting?

For some children, meeting others becomes easier when it grows around a genuine interest. Astronomy, dinosaurs, music, LEGO, mythology, science, books, drawing, chess or coding can become common ground. A shared passion reduces the initial effort of the relationship and lets the child stop, at least for a while, wondering how to join the group.

In Solomon J. in the village of the Pepileni, the Bridges are linked to play, imagination and the possibility of making connections. Among Solomon J.'s memories is also the feeling of the moments when "there was no one to play ball with or to invent a story with".

A ball and a story seem to belong to different worlds. Both, however, need someone on the other side. For a child with very specific interests, building bridges can mean increasing the places where he can find kindred spirits, inside school, outside school, in groups built around shared passions.

The adult's task can also lie in creating those opportunities.

Explaining loneliness by saying "others don't understand you because you are cleverer" risks building an even more rigid distance. Giftedness may help create interests, cognitive rhythms and ways of talking that find little match in a particular group, but this distance does not establish a hierarchy between children.

The wording then changes: "Here I find it hard to find someone to share this part of me with." That here leaves other possibilities open. There are other groups, other workshops, other children, other opportunities and other shared passions.

In the language of Pepilandia this is called "true rapport". It means finding someone willing to listen to a question all the way through, someone able to answer "me too", to propose another theory, to argue seriously and, five minutes later, go back to laughing about something completely childish.

The child who reasons far beyond his years still needs to live his own age. He needs to think, play, be sought after, and meet people in front of whom his depth can exist without having to prove its own worth.

Solomon J. wishes only to hear someone say, "I like being with you."

For a child who has spent a long time wondering whether he is "too much", a sentence like that can mean something very concrete: here I can stay whole.