Neurodivergent Identities
Gramps49
Shipmate
This last Sunday, I heard a podcast on The Pulse about how Smart Kids are likely as neurodivergent as someone, say, with an High Spectrum Disorder. Smart kids are typically defined as a child with an IQ of 130 on the Stanford Binet test. (I know the test is now not as standard as it once was). The discussion dealt with how kids could sail through the elementary/primary grades, but by the time they got into secondary education or higher they would find themselves falling behind. A psychologist they interviewed stated it was quite possible for a 12-year-old to be able to do academic work at the level of a 16-year-old but socially be at the level of a 10-year-old and emotionally at the level of an eight-year-old. Smart kids will often find themselves struggling in college because they never learned study skills they will need in college. Sometimes they have to drop out of college and take remedial programs to learn how to progress in higher education.
As I was listening to this, I got the impression the psychologist was describing me almost to a T. I sailed through elementary school. Socially I struggled through middle school and even high school. Academically I had a heck of time when I got into college. To this day, I often miss social cues.
This got me to thinking maybe there is no such thing as nuero normal in the general scheme of things.
I know some people here have already identified of neurodivergent in one way or other. I would like to know how they came to that conclusion and what ramifications they have experienced with their differences.
As I was listening to this, I got the impression the psychologist was describing me almost to a T. I sailed through elementary school. Socially I struggled through middle school and even high school. Academically I had a heck of time when I got into college. To this day, I often miss social cues.
This got me to thinking maybe there is no such thing as nuero normal in the general scheme of things.
I know some people here have already identified of neurodivergent in one way or other. I would like to know how they came to that conclusion and what ramifications they have experienced with their differences.
Comments
The honest answer to ‘how I came to that conclusion’ is a year of counselling, a gateway assessment with an appropriately qualified practitioner, and secondary assessment with a clinical psychologist.
It’s definitely a spectrum. But I’m (and beforehand was) as wary of saying ‘I’ve got x’ as I would be of self diagnosing myself with cancer.
And I know all about (in the UK) the backlogs and waiting lists for diagnosis - but self identifying is a massive problem IMO
I've never had a formal IQ test, but informal ones put me somewhere in the 130-160 range. I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, now under the Autism umbrella, a few years ago, long after leaving school.
I don't know about emotional maturity; it always seemed to me that it was those around me that were immature.
I was a very successful deputy headteacher at the time -no need to sit for long at any task!
I tried the medication, it worked but I gave up on it -I no longer felt like me.
Too long living with my differently wired brain!
(ADHD)
Emotional maturity? Too much empathy, I deeply feel everything, for myself and others. Alongside lots of fun and laughs. Nothing I like better than getting everyone laughing.
I definitely would be classified as ADHD now. To me it’s just normal. The same applies to what would currently be called the autism spectrum, especially when my stress levels get high.
I was one of those “gifted” kids. I kind of assumed for a long time that this was all just because of my IQ, plus being raised by toxic people, and/or various other things, but basically all of the stuff about ADHD and some parts of autism really does fit… the way I’ve been all my life.
I think the internet has exacerbated my ADHD, and am working on staying focused on things—I used to be a voracious reader, and now making myself actively, intentionally sit down with long blocks of prose is a thing I have to make myself do. The same applies to even watching an entire episode of a TV show or a movie, or listening to an entire music album.
I half wish I didn’t know about some of this, because I tend to use things like that (including my toxic upbringing, for years) as an excuse for not working on my issues.
I have lots of little tricks I’ve used for years to get by, some of which appear to be standard in the ADHD community (making lists and things, etc.).
I’ve gotten Penn and Kim Holderness’ ADHD is Awesome, which looks promising. And yes, I have said for many years that I would not get rid of the good parts to lose the frustrating parts of how my mind works, even when I just thought it was all just unique to me. ❤️
I've had years of therapy for the anxiety and I found that lockdown and coming out of it were causing issues that anxiety didn't account for. Two other things suggested to me that there were things that needed investigating. The way I react to heights and to bright sunshine both felt entirely excessive, and like something beyond the standard version. Secondly, I realised through the daily walks I was prescribed as part of the rehab for my achilles tendon injury were more important to me than pure habit would account for.
I was also reacting to traumatic situations in my family - my mother's cancer and my niece's self-harm - in ways that I couldn't account for or change.
All of this made me investigate autism and ADHD because of the sensory elements for the autism and the emotional things and movement for the ADHD. I then discovered that I could trace so many other things back to them - the social awkwardness, the inability to marshall my intellectual resources, being a brilliant child who never managed to realise his potential, total inability to convince people of the validity of ideas which feel perfectly clear and well-expressed to me.
I went through the usual onlne tests and the scores came out at 95% or more on every one I did.
None of this is proof, and my life hasn't been transformed by the near-realisation yet. I may seek formal diagnosis on the basis that it will set the pieces of the jigsaw in place in the way that my gathering of evidence hasn't. But this is no passing fancy, and I don't feel that my status is any higher for it. It is not true that he who dies with the most labels wins.
Although this is not uncommon in the non-neurodivergent population.
I think this specific feature is often just a consequence of being a "smart kid". If you can just do the work without having to study, then you don't learn good study habits. Is there a solution beyond putting the smart kids on a sharply accelerated schedule, so they hit the point where they have to study while they're still young, and it's easier to learn these skills?
The challenge, of course, is that it's difficult to construct a highly accelerated schedule for the one or two kids in the year that are significantly more able than the rest, because schools don't usually have resources to devote to individual instruction.
I think I would have believed it if it had been explained to me in purely instrumental terms. ("Look, this thing isn't real, but people believe it should be, and it's just a hoop you have to jump through to make your life easier later on").
I thought I was preparing myself to do the exams by doing them without using any text books.
When I squeaked into University (I didn't get the grades I needed for my chosen course but they rang me up and offered me a related course - well, what's a disappointed 17 year old going to say?) I was totally unprepared for the independent study required.
I could say so much more about the undiagnosed autistic experience at school and university towards the end of the last century.
I am still considering whether or not to pursue a formal diagnosis but am pretty sure I am autistic, with the classic autistic girl's masking skills. I never even thought about the question until my daughter was diagnosed (too late to help her in school) and then realised that I have gone through most of my life feeling like everyone else got a book of instructions on how to behave and I have to work it out from scratch.
In school... it's not simply not learning study skills that's problematic: if you sail through all your lessons until you get to university and *then* start having problems, it's tempting to just give up in despair and assume you're never going to be able to do it. And at university you also have to learn how to talk (and argue) like an expert in your subject so that people will take you seriously. Universities have only recently realised the need to teach these things explicitly instead of just expecting students to pick it up by osmosis.
I would have been a better tutor had I known then about the autistic/Asperger's spectrum, especially as (Mrs RR says, and she should know) I'm on it myself.
This is exactly what happened to me. It was exacerbated by being a bursary lad at an independent school which assumed that you came from a family setting which could provide you with study skills.
I did not. Even by GCSE my profile was spiky - basically high grades in stuff I was naturally good at and borderline pass grades or fails in stuff I wasn't. A Level same thing; first attempt at University absolute disaster.
There are at all levels definite differences between the norms communicated by peers and adults. Of course, the norms communicated by peers are actually deceptive - people claim to spend all their time shagging and drinking but actually they're burning the midnight oil hammering out assignments.
As an undiagnosed autist student, totally unaware of this disparity between what peers say and what they really do, and desperate to fit in with my peers which I found very difficult to do, you can totally predict what happened. Coupled with lack of knowledge of how to study anyway, and executive processing problems that make studying harder even if you do know what you're meant to do.
I did eventually get a degree - after two attempts at university and a totally fecked up teaching practice I scraped a 2ii BA(hons) in Science Education without qts. Absolutely useless. I work in IT now - I have to; I have had terrible experiences in more general clerical stuff both socially and in terms of not seeing the obvious. Obvious to everyone else that is. Stuff I think is obvious other people need pointing out to them.
With more awareness and support I think/hope that the outlook is better for autistic students now.
Let's not talk about employment though. Really struggling with this at the moment for Backslidet #1 who's been trying to get a third year undergrad IT placement for the past nine months without success.
He’s now doing a PhD is high performance computing - he is a self-taught programmer. He lives in private halls which are expensive but easier than navigating relationships in shared houses. There have been lots of struggles along the way but he seems to be managing them better now. But employment will be the next challenge.
This is still my universe at age 56.
I too had, and still have, little realisation that this is generally the case. 'Let your yes be yes ....' etc I thought was (nearly) universally held to. Mrs RR, also somewhat ND, is as straight as a die (a well-known Welsh person).
Prior to going through that phase, if he asked me the time and I said 2:30, he'd get very upset and say, "No! It's 2:32." After learning to be an inaccurate reporter, he became more comfortable with imprecise language. He still doesn't like it, but he "gets" it.
He's now 22 and a beautifully and gracefully honest person (who also understands that the world has lots of shades of grey).
(It had never before dawned on me that when toddlers go through their lying stage that they are performing a developmentally necessary task!)
I … when I post what I’m eating on Facebook (yes, I do this), it’s with the exact time, 2:32 pm, etc., myself. Being … well, in my mind, it’s “accurate”… feels right. It feels wrong to say 2:30 if it’s 2:32.
Hi @ChastMastr ! Much empathy for that here. Late diagnosed autistic struggling to cope in a bothersome neurotypical world. Why can't people dratted well say what they mean?
With the timings I can cope with 2.30pm (as opposed to the more accurate 2.32pm) because my brain just says to itself "on this occasion we're rounding to the nearest five minutes" and then all is well!