8:33pm July 2, 2014

““That’s a computer game? Firing and guns and screaming your name… is a game? Wow. Really? That’s not like the games at College!” “No! I bet it’s not. What do you do at College?” “It’s just kids stuff.” He hung his head as he said this. He was her older brother, and he did not like it that as she was growing up he could see her doing things he had never done. She was so much younger than him, nearly 12 years. How come she was playing a proper game on a proper computer in her own bedroom, while he had to go to College and play Find The Mouse?”

—

Collins, Helen (2012-10-30). Like A Fish Understands A Tree (Kindle Locations 532-533). . Kindle Edition.

Oh geez. I know that feeling wayyy too well. Not within my family, but in other contexts. I used to feel like I was a two-year-old watching all the adults do adult things and having no comprehension of it. Not because I really was two, not because I bought into mental age, but because I really, really felt like I was being put into the position of a child while all the adults got to do adult things. This was when I tried university, only to find that without the help I’d gotten in community college, my life skills were nonexistent.

It felt like everyone was passing me by, and I was just standing there, a two year old in a dark room, watching all these young adults dancing and singing and studying in the light.

One of them even told me, “college is supposed to be when I’m having fun and finding myself and learning who I am as a person and how I fit into the world, it’s supposed to be carefree… it’s not supposed to involve taking care of you.” And I didn’t blame her for feeling like that, especially since neither of us anticipated her in the caregiver role, but it still hurt knowing that my existence created a giant hole in the life that she thought she was entitled to.

But at the time, I felt like everyone in my life was outgrowing me, and I was if anything growing backwards, back to age five, four, three, two. And if I was not treated like an adult, then it was because I was not behaving like an adult. That’s what everyone with learning disabilities was told in orientation: You’re adults now, you won’t get help with organizational skills or things like that, you’re on your own. So as my abilities dwindled I felt I grew smaller and smaller and smaller, and it was not a good feeling. It’s never a good feeling, in a highly age-segregated society, to see that all these people younger than you are better than you at “easy” things that “everyone should know”. And you hear you must be spoiled, that if you’d been taught right it never would’ve happened… bullshit. That’s what developmental disabilities are like, something all the teaching in the world doesn’t take.