Ducks, squirrels, and buses

“Why do you do that?”

I did a quick mental inventory to try and identify what my classmate was talking about. Oh, the hand flapping. I suppose that probably stood out. I didn’t see anyone else doing that. I should stop. And so I stopped flapping my hands, but several other strange physical movement patterns remained, particularly twisting my fingers on both hands together. That one prompted questions from classmates for years.

I know everyone, particularly every young woman, feels like she doesn’t fit in during adolescence, but having spent many of my elementary school recesses walking back and forth on the rocks that separated the playground from the blacktop and telling myself stories, I believe I’m somewhat justified believing I stood out as the odd duck of my elementary/middle school class of forty-something students.

My academic problems didn’t help the situation at all: I could read anything I could get my hands on, but my handwriting was barely legible. A moderate number of math problems felt like an hours-long uphill slog. My standardized testing scores were great. Multi-step, art-based projects (I seemed to have an unusual number in fourth and fifth grades), such as making a brochure on an assigned species of owl, were a nightmare. Trying to keep my handwriting neat and legible, going over lines with sharpie as we had been instructed to do, coloring--it was all so far beyond my skills.

I couldn’t focus on school when my classmates were talking. I realized I had good ears when one of the boys told me that I shouldn’t be able to hear them; they were whispering. My desk was always a disorganized jumble.

At home, I turned somersaults and jumped on the couch until my grandparents intervened and bought me a trampoline. This and a swing got constant use.

During middle school, anxiety drove my sensitivity even higher. I wore clothes turned inside out as much as I could so I couldn’t feel the seams against my skin. I fell into a “brown study” and stared off into the middle distance frequently enough that my classmates began waving their hands in front of my face when I did so. My intense interests began to stand out.

At some point, reading my mom’s Instruction of Special Students textbook for a continuing education class she was taking, I came across the “ADHD in girls” checklist and recognized myself, but somehow I didn’t think it was significant. I never told anyone I had ADHD. After all, not being able to focus was only one small piece of what made me feel so different. Lots of my classmates couldn’t focus well and got distracted, which was part of why I was so distractible: my fellow distractible classmates kept chatting with each other!

And then I went to high school. Now one of nearly three hundred students in my class, I went from the odd duck of the class to a somewhat quirky and scatterbrained good student. Occasionally a teacher’s style and my own wouldn’t line up--my Algebra I teacher checked binders for completeness, and once warned me ahead of time, even though it was meant to be unannounced, since the binder checks could very well mean the difference between a C+ and B- in that class.

But more often, I found things that really worked for me: Anytime a math teacher gave completion grades for homework, I could get an A in that class, no problem. I did poorly on homework and well on tests, so completion grades weren’t a cop-out; they just gave me the time I needed to move through my excessively long learning curve. Nobody asked me for a brochure on anything, or if they did, they allowed for these to be created on the computer. I had learned to type during middle school, and my handwriting rarely held me back, although I did have an English teacher who was subjected to enough of my awful cursive that he dubbed it “Dill-ese.”

I went to community college, got a part-time job, and enjoyed this life of being normal, or at least semi-normal, that contrasted so starkly from my elementary years. Then, I moved to college. My sister and I shared a little apartment right on the bus line.

The bus line was delightful. There was a new style of bus they were using on our line. These were bus numbers 15 and 16. (They didn’t post the numbers on the bus, but the buses had free Wi-Fi for some reason, so you could tell which bus you were riding because it was the name of the Wi-Fi. Also, eventually you could start telling each bus apart if you paid attention, except numbers 8-10, which were identical.)

Anyway, I was completing my undergrad by majoring in Communication Sciences and Disorders, which is essentially a pre-speech-language pathology major. I hoped to attend graduate school and become a speech-language pathologist once I graduated.

Sometimes while I studied, I would pull up the bus tracker in another tab and watch the buses travel their loops. You can’t study speech-language pathology and enjoy public bus routes as much as I did without some kind of realization.

Wait, was I autistic?

To my great dismay, my family had known for a long time that I was autistic and just hadn’t told me for whatever reason. I had grown up before the internet had made everyone an armchair psychologist who understood what mild autism in girls looked like. The pre-2013 term would likely have been “Asperger’s syndrome.” (The DSM criteria and labeling for such things is a kettle of fish far beyond this essay.)

Or was I autistic?

Things had been very different for the last seven years. I had gone from an odd-duck to a human squirrel--always working busily, chattering fast, anxiously fidgeting, carrying snacks. These were essentially just ADHD symptoms, ones I shared with my dad and grandmother. Besides a fondness for routes and borders and boundaries, I didn’t have standout autism symptoms anymore. I like to think I appear normal to most people, although occasionally somebody gets a glimpse of something--usually either just how anxious I am, or the fact that I have inexplicably memorized several school district attendance boundaries. But I now had executive function. Frontal lobe development was good to me.

It’s an odd time to be “self-diagnosed” (really, more like family-diagnosed) with autism and ADHD. The left has decided to adopt these labels into the world of victim culture, while the right searches for some kind of scapegoat to blame for the existence of these conditions.

So I want to stick my neck out a bit and say that yes, ADHD is very real. ADHD and mild autism are probably totally normal variations of human personality, and I would even wager a guess that they are even more common than is currently diagnosed. All those wildly energetic people you know, all those really shy people you know, that young woman who is an absolute squirrel of a person--they’re probably neurodivergent.

But being common doesn’t mean that being neurodivergent is easy. Especially for kids in school. So, Matt Walsh, I have great sympathy for parents choosing to medicate their children. It’s not because the kid can’t focus; it’s because the kid is having a really, really hard time--not just academically, but probably socially as well. I don’t think medicating is a magic bullet, and it needs to be considered very carefully. For the first time in human history, we actually have a solution for the odd ducks, the smart kids who just can’t swing it in school, so maybe we feel like it’s a cure-all and start prescribing it too much.

My suggestion? Reform the curriculum to exclude owl brochures.