While I don’t have a full answer for you, there are some ideas that might be worth trying out.
Maybe there is a way to do smart-people stuff at your own pace, like learning from books/youtube videos instead of in a public setting. Books and videos have infinite patience. People all have different paces for everything, and if you notice that yours is lower than your peers it might be worth carefully trying not keeping up for a while. This can be dangerous though, so be cautious with this.
Personally I’ve always been frustrated with my pace of learning, and this feeling has always vanished when I look back and see how far I’ve come. Some (very good) lecturers explained this to me both in terms of a maze (“At first you don’t know which path to take so you have to spend a lot of time making dead turns, and then when you’re done it looks like you didn’t cover that much distance. But really you did.”) and in terms of exponential growth (“At the end of a learning curve you look at your rate of progress, which is the derivative of your knowledge with respect to time, and say [I could have gotten here way faster, look at how high the derivative is now and how low my total knowledge level is]. But that’s not how exponentials work, since learning also increases the rate of learning.”). This has really helped me think of asking ‘stupid’ questions as an investment, and if I look back at the things I didn’t know half a year ago I tend to be quite proud of my growth.
Epistemic status: uncertain.
While I don’t have a full answer for you, there are some ideas that might be worth trying out.
Maybe there is a way to do smart-people stuff at your own pace, like learning from books/youtube videos instead of in a public setting. Books and videos have infinite patience. People all have different paces for everything, and if you notice that yours is lower than your peers it might be worth carefully trying not keeping up for a while. This can be dangerous though, so be cautious with this.
Personally I’ve always been frustrated with my pace of learning, and this feeling has always vanished when I look back and see how far I’ve come. Some (very good) lecturers explained this to me both in terms of a maze (“At first you don’t know which path to take so you have to spend a lot of time making dead turns, and then when you’re done it looks like you didn’t cover that much distance. But really you did.”) and in terms of exponential growth (“At the end of a learning curve you look at your rate of progress, which is the derivative of your knowledge with respect to time, and say [I could have gotten here way faster, look at how high the derivative is now and how low my total knowledge level is]. But that’s not how exponentials work, since learning also increases the rate of learning.”). This has really helped me think of asking ‘stupid’ questions as an investment, and if I look back at the things I didn’t know half a year ago I tend to be quite proud of my growth.