![]() ![]() I chugged my way through elementary school, then high school, then college - getting consistent B’s and C’s. And as a society, we didn’t really have a concept that someone who has a non-typical brain can be highly functional - it was a time when we didn’t know that the world’s richest man was on the autism spectrum ! Growing Past a Label These were very early days, long before attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was well known, and long before people had really figured out how to talk to kids with neurodiversities. So, the other kids would watch me walk out of the classroom and ask why I left the room when tests were happening - and they, too, were informed that I had a learning disability.Īs you can imagine, kids aren’t really lining up to be friends with the “disabled” kid, nor did they hold back on playground taunts around the issue. I was told that I had a “learning disability” - which, to 7-year-old me, didn’t make any sense since I LOVED learning! I was told that I would take my tests in a special room so that I’d have fewer distractions. A week later, my pediatrician started me on Ritalin and I was told several things that really honestly messed me up. They removed the hyperactive part because I wasn’t having the type of behavioral problems like running around the classroom (I’ll cover later why I now proudly identify as hyperactive). The prognosis was that I was high intelligence and had attention-deficit disorder (ADD). I remember I solved the block test so fast that the clinician was caught off guard and I had to tell them that I was done - but I also remember them trying to have me repeat numbers back backwards and I could barely do it! Being Labeled To this day, I remember going to the office and meeting with the team - and I even remember having a blast doing the IQ tests. The school, however, wanted me to see a psychiatrist and have IQ tests done to figure out what was going on. Thankfully, my parents rejected the idea that I was “slow” out of hand, as they knew me at home as a bright, talkative, friendly, and curious kid - taking apart our VHS machines and putting them back together, filming and writing short films that I’d shoot with neighborhood kids, messing around with our new Apple IIgs computer! She even volunteered to my parents that perhaps a “special” class would be better for me at a different school. Early in the school year, my teacher arranged a meeting with my parents and stated that she thought that I might be “slow” because I wasn’t performing in class to the same level as the other kids. In 1989, I was 7 years old and just starting first grade.
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