6:19am June 21, 2014

Too little too late.

If I could do school over again. I’d refuse to take tests or do my homework. I’d walk out of class each day, every day, and hide where nobody could find me. I’d go to the top of the tallest trees. On recess, I’d leave campus and go for long walks. I wouldn’t allow bullies to entice me into friendship. I’d spend all day doing whatever the hell I felt like. I’d turn off my ears when people talked to me. I’d press myself into the ground.

Sure, I did many of these things anyway. But I also tried to succeed in school. And that was my biggest mistake of my life. I should’ve goofed off and done what I wanted. Not just when I was too overloaded to do anything else. But all the time. School is a place to indoctrinate children. I owed it nothing. But instead I let it eat my childhood alive. Any punishment, anything, would have been worth being free at least between my ears.

Being an obedient, trusting little Hufflepuff destroyed a lot of my childhood. I came to school every day with the bright expectation of hard work to do and learning to be had. Every day I came home traumatized to the bone. I never, ever learned. Each day was a new day of high expectations, hard work, and shattered dreams. If it wasn’t bullying by students or teachers it was overload so bad my mind shattered to pieces. I came home every night and cried my eyes out. Then I went back the next day as if the previous day had never happened, like it couldn’t remember.

I could have spent all day exploring my sensory world and the rules be damned. Instead, I only did such things when too overloaded to do anything else. Which meant if wasn’t doing anything to prepare for overload, only respond. I should have ignored every rule, ignored every order from a teacher, and done what worked for me. It’s not like I learned at school anyway. I taught myself at home out of the textbooks. Half the time I barely understood what was happening in class and got by on mimicry and echolalia.

But my life, no matter what they did to me as a result, would have been much better if someone had taught me to go against my Hufflepuff tendencies towards hard work and following the rules. Those tendencies aren’t bad in their place. But for an autistic, overloaded, highly sensing child, school was torture and I needed to learn to break all the rules at my leisure to reduce overload however the fuck I wanted. As it was, I waited until the breaking point before I did those things. The breaking point came every day, and the strategies for dealing with it came too little too late. One of my greatest regrets in life is taking school even a little seriously.