4:50am December 21, 2013

Wow, another one where I never thought I could do something at all.

I was at this academic summer camp when I was 12.

And this bully decided to trap me in the dorm hallways so I couldn’t get out.

We ran around in circles. Somehow she was always in front of me, her arms outstretched and blocking my ability to go anywhere. I tried running in every possible direction and somehow she was always right there. I don’t know how she did it.

And…

I never once thought of charging straight at her and barreling through her to get away.

I was probably capable of it. I was able to get past my dad, who was much bigger than me, a few years after that.

But I never thought of it at all. I never thought of running through her, barging through her using force. It never occurred to me in the slightest. It was like the entire thought of touching her was out of bounds.

Of course, if I’d done it, she’d probably have claimed I was the bully and that I’d hurt her. And they’d probably have believed her. So maybe it was a bad move.

But at the time, I wondered if I’d ever get out of the building. Which was also strange, because people would have eventually come back.

I don’t remember how it ended.

I also remember that she made really loud noises at me every time she showed up in front of me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t think of barging through her. Somehow the loud noises repelled me as if I’d been hit with a wall of… something. Going through them was impossible.

It was like she’d pop out in front of me and go “BA!!!!!!” It was a really explosive-sounding noise, more B than A. And she didn’t just make it once, she was making it continuously any time I was trying to get past her.

Why is it that bullies can always see your weak points? Whenever I was bullied in a more physical than psychological way, they always used sight and sound against me. They’d do visually chaotic things and make chaotic noises at me and often times they didn’t even have to hit me, I’d just crumple, or I’d start screaming and flailing at them, and most of the time I was the one who got in trouble, not them.

What was it that one of my report cards said? "Amanda must learn to tolerate silently, minor inconveniences caused by her peers.“

Minor inconveniences like having my entire system overloaded. It reminds me of the way I jumped and screamed every time a particularly loud school bell went off, and they’d accuse me of "seeking attention”. How could a person who was seeking attention, possibly think quickly enough to jump and scream the instant they heard a noise? I don’t know, maybe some people think more quickly than me in response to things like that. Maybe they were making excuses not to deal with sensory issues.

I do know that right around 12 years old was a turning point for the bullying. Before that, it had been largely physical and sensory, and after that it became largely psychological. And I had a much harder time noticing the psychological bullying. Getting the weird kid to act even weirder was too subtle for me to pick up on, which was fine with them.

I remember a year that I saw as fairly bullying free. Well it wasn’t a year, it was my 3 months in high school. When I talked to a fellow student as adults, he told me he’d been bullied plenty in junior high but he’d never seen anything like what I was dealing with in high school. I’m sure I was bullied, in fact I know I was, I know that even the teachers joined in. But a good deal of it didn’t register fully, especially because I was accustomed to seeing bullies as people who hit you or made loud noises in your face or otherwise physically messed with you rather than psychologically.

But it continues to amaze me the things I didn’t know I could do, that other people all seemed aware they could do. It’s just strange. I never get used to the realizations that I could’ve done something that would be the “obvious” move to anyone else.

Oh, did I mention that the academic summer camp is thought of as some kind of paradise by the majority of alumni I’ve run into? I mean, not necessarily with regards to the administration. But with regards to the other kids. "Finally being with people like myself,“ "No more bullying happened there, not like in junior high/high school”, “A safe haven from being bullied for being smart,” “Everyone was smart there, I finally fit in,” that kind of thing.

I liked being there because it got me away from home during a really unpleasant period of my home life.

I learned to parrot the “everyone’s like me and it’s wonderful” thing.

And I got trapped in hallways, punched in the face, mercilessly mocked, called crazy and psycho and weird and all kinds of other things, there was no safe haven for me there. And that’s one reason I know I’ll never be a Ravenclaw.

I think I’ve got a ton of baggage around the whole concept of giftedness. More than I even understand. It feels more like a weapon than a compliment, more like a horrible nightmare than a reality, more like a punch in the gut than a pleasure, and I am just at the beginning of unraveling the why of all that. I hate it to a degree that’s irrational, even though I have perfectly rational reasons for disagreeing with the entire concept too. But my gut reactions to it are completely irrational and based in layers and layers and layers of hell.

I know that I don’t value it the way I was taught I was supposed to value it. The way the other kids valued it, wore it like a badge of pride. Like they really were better than the kids who, for reasons of everything from actual abilities to classism and racism and ableism, didn’t test as high as they did. And they didn’t understand that thinking they were better than other people was, at least in some cases, one reason they were resented for it.

Most of them have never set foot in a special ed classroom in their lives. Or if they have, it was only to work there, not to be ‘taught’ there. I was in various types of special ed and institutional classrooms for most of what passed for my high school career. Ages 15, 16, and 17. (3 months of 9th grade age 13 then homeschooling after that, college age 14, educational no-man’s-land in institutional and special-ed high school age 15-17, community college with extensive disability supports 18. I have one of the weirdest educational histories I know. So I was in 'special’ programs for a total of 3 years, and 'gifted’ programs for I think 3 school years (GATE, in public school) and 2 summers (academic summer camps), possibly including that year of college if you’re being generous, even though you didn’t have to be 'gifted’ to get in.)

One of the things that angers me the most about the whole concept is the way that identical behavior is seen differently if you’re 'gifted’ than if you’re 'crazy’ or disabled in any way. Lying down on the floor is fine in MIT and will get you tied down in a mental institution, reprimanded or put on a behavior program in special ed, and it enrages me to see the contrast. All those 'gifted’ kids getting away with being eccentric while the disabled kids are tortured for the same things. If you’re 'gifted’ eating paper makes you quirky, if you’re not it gets you a diagnosis. Don’t tell me this has no bearing on the entire idea of 'passing’, for people who are both 'gifted’ and disabled. Something that gets you seen as 'slightly quirky’ in a gifted program will get you seen as grossly dysfunctional in a special ed or institutional setting. Just ask people who’ve seen both. Really. Ask us. Then ask us why supposedly 'grossly dysfunctional’ people can 'pass’ in a 'gifted’ setting.

Of course I don’t remember passing, exactly. I remember being called every name in the book, plenty of actual slurs, plenty of disability-based insults, before I had any diagnosis whatsoever. I remember being picked out as different and bullied no matter where I went. You think Luna Lovegood passed, even in Ravenclaw? But unlike the portrayal of Luna Lovegood serenely accepting her fate as the butt monkey of Ravenclaw, most of us are severely hurt and even traumatized by the bullying.

And I have to believe Luna was more hurt than she let on. How many times have I heard, as an excuse for bullying “but she doesn’t care”, “but she doesn’t understand”, directed at me or others. In high school, kids jumped up on my hands when I was unable to respond to them, and when teachers told them not to, they said “But it’s okay, she doesn’t feel it, if she did she’d respond.” Not responding, seeming accepting, are not actual measures of how badly a person is being hurt by something. It just makes it easier for everyone else to pretend nothing horrible is happening.

(And don’t get me started on “You know you’re probably not actually gifted, that’s just what they tell re***ds to hide the fact they’re in special classes” crap I got. And of course, by the age of 15, when I was being put into special ed schools, I no longer tested in the 'gifted’ range. Yet some people assume that your test scores are lifelong and identical. They’re not. Mine have gone down every time I took the test. Not that they mean anything, at all, other than my development has taken different directions than most people’s, and therefore doesn’t fit in with a standardized norm for how people’s academic skills grow with time. But people ignore this fact all the time. I know tons of people it’s happened to, though. People who were in gifted programs as kids and score in the average, low average, borderline, or even low ranges as adults. It happens all the time for a wide variety of reasons. Number one reason: These tests don’t mean what people think they mean, and not everyone fits the pattern of development described by the tests. It’s really that simple, it’s not mysterious or strange or impossible.)

Anyway, unlike Harry Potter, in real life if you get put in our equivalent of Ravenclaw, it’s not because you value 'wit and learning’ and a magical hat has divined this by reading your thoughts and understanding your true nature and essence and values and priorities in life. It’s because other people have decided, on your behalf, that you’re 'smart’. Usually because you’ve taken a test or done something they consider extraordinary. And then you're systematically taught all these values about how to see yourself and how to see intelligence and how to see other people based on intelligence.

How many times have I sat talking to other people who were in gifted programs, and had them say they can’t imagine talking to anyone with an average IQ, much less a low one, and they don’t even know my last IQ was 85 and that I am seething beneath the surface. I’ve learned not to tell them my IQ unless I’m ready for emotional responses from them that are worse than being punched in the gut. Especially when they try to tell me my “real IQ” must be higher because, after all, I am talking to them and having an intelligent conversation. I’ve had intelligent conversations with people who can’t talk at all and have extremely low IQs, so stuff it. Intelligence isn’t IQ. That’s all there is to it. Intelligent people with low IQs don’t have a hidden, “real IQ” that’s higher any more than unintelligent people with high IQs have a hidden, “real IQ” that’s lower. Believing that is an insult to all of us. Laughing out loud when you hear my IQ is like a knife in the back.

Of course there’s people who go the other direction, who don’t believe my IQ is as high as it is. They’re the ones who devise tests to prove that I’m not really communicating, even when I’m clearly touch-typing at over a hundred words a minute into a computer that’s saying my words as clear as anything. Quite often, they believe there’s some kind of mysterious computer program that’s creating responses that sound realistic. Like my communication is all a trick, because someone who looks like me couldn’t possibly be communicating at all. Then they try to find the trick. I can say for a fact that most people don’t have strangers try to perform Turing tests on them in public.

But people think they’re paying me a compliment when they pooh-pooh all that and laugh it off and say that they can’t possibly see why anyone could possibly imagine that I don’t understand anything. It’s not a compliment, it’s just more twisting the knife.

I’m not sure they can understand that any judgement of my abilities feels dangerous to me. Dangerous. Whether it’s an overly high judgement, or an overly low judgement. Overly low judgements mean that I could get stripped of all my rights. Overly high judgements mean that I could get stripped of all my assistance. Both of those could result in my death. I take them seriously.

The reality is that ignoring my deficits doesn’t help me any more than ignoring my skills does. Laughing in the face of people who think I have deficits does not help me. Laughing in the face of people who think I have skills does not help me. I’m one of a group of people, larger than you’d think, who’ve lived in both situations, being overestimated and being underestimated, and both of them draw blood. So don’t be surprised when I’m nonplussed at people who try to deny one side of me by invoking the other.

And also… I look drastically different in different situations. In some situations, I’m completely unreadable to anyone who isn’t highly familiar with specific kinds of autistic people. In other situations, I’m readable to a larger number of people. You’d be surprised why.

Nothing is simple. I am not simple. People like me are not simple. Simplistic reactions to us don’t help us, they terrify us, because they evoke reactions we’ve experienced in the past, whether those who’ve overestimated us or those who’ve underestimated us.

And I have barely even begun to understand, myself, the minefield that is the concept of giftedness in my life. So don’t think you can understand it without knowing me as well as I know myself.

But this is why I will never be a Ravenclaw. This is why I’ve barely even thought of the possibility. Because Ravenclaw environments are some of the most dangerous I’ve ever encountered, for me. Ravenclaws can spot difference faster than usual, and come up with more elaborate ways to hurt people who are different than you can possibly imagine.

And you’d be surprised how many people, discovering a place where they find 'people just like themselves’ (as many 'gifted’ people see each other), and then proceed to make their 'safe haven’ into a place where they exclude and mercilessly bully people who are different. That’s what I experienced in those environments. (And in later environments, including many disability communities that call themselves 'safe spaces’. Not safe for me.)

Not that all Ravenclaws are like that, but that is not a safe environment for me. Even if, even if I had the values that place someone in Ravenclaw. Which I don’t. I don’t value 'wit and learning’ above Hufflepuff love or Gryffindor bravery. And values and choices tend to mean more about your House than innate characteristics, even though innate characteristics play a role. I don’t value intellectual pursuits over other areas of life. I don’t totally devalue them either, but they’re not the highlight of my values at all. My values center around love and inclusiveness and diversity and real human beings and hard work and fairness and the courage to stand up for what’s right and… oh yeah, Hufflepuff stuff, most of it. Go figure. I’d be a Hufflepuff no matter how nerdy or 'gifted’ I was, even if I believed 'giftedness’ was a thing… because those are my values in life, and always have been. I was always an extremely emotionally sensitive kid who cared deeply about other human beings, no matter what my social skills looked like… and that got me bullied as much as being different in other ways did.

I’ve probably made this post a zillion times… I’ll probably make it a zillion more times until I understand myself better, and why these things have hurt me so much and left me so messed up around these concepts.