"For neurodivergent individuals, the fear of being perceived can feel all-encompassing, consuming one’s thoughts and influencing behavior in nearly every social situation."
I was in college for about eleven thousand years because it was a struggle bus for me. In community college I was required to take a health class.
I'm a major doodler. I'm a major fidgeter, actually. I cannot sit still. Some part of me has to be moving at all times. I need something to be stimulating my brain. When I was in school, from kindergarten through my graduation from college, any worksheet or notebook I owned was covered with doodles. Sometimes I would just draw a random shapes and color them in. The very act of coloring with a juicy pen is a real sensory delight for me. In fact, in some of my lecture classes, I would just color in lines of my notebook paper with different colors of glitter gel pens. It helped me focus and it didn't bother anyone.
Well, almost anyone.
So this health class. Taught by a man who was surely a former high school jock, very full of himself, very disgusted by anybody who didn't work out on a regular basis.
Like most classes, we would have a unit of instruction and then there would be a written test. Whenever I took any written test that wasn't one of those Scantron ones, I would usually doodle and draw in the margins of the paper while I was thinking about each question. Doodling could also give me a little sensory break between questions.
The first time I took a test in this class, when my test paper was handed back to me by the teacher, he pointed to the doodles and said, "What is this supposed to be, extra credit?"
I laughed politely and didn't think anymore about it.
The second time I took a test in this class, when the teacher handed it back he told me in a low voice, tapping his finger on the paper, "If I see this kind of thing again, you failed the test."
I cannot stand being reprimanded. Any neurodivergent people, can you relate to this? For me it comes from a lifetime of knowing the expectation was to never cause any trouble to anyone or give any adult outside of my nuclear family a reason to complain about me... and then always, no matter how hard I tried, causing trouble and giving adults a reason to complain about me.
The shameful feeling that flooded me. The embarrassment. The sick feeling. The impulse that I just wanted to run out of the classroom and never return. All I could do was nod my head, unable to even make eye contact. I probably mumbled, "Sorry." The incredible shame of just being me. It was a physical feeling. Just sitting here writing about it, I can feel it like it was yesterday.
Did I hurt anyone by doodling on my paper? No. Was I doodling swears, slurs, or other offensive material? No... Just random hearts and stars and maybe sketches of Snoopy. Yet that horrible feeling that I had unknowingly misbehaved, once again, and caused an authority figure to have to talk to me? I wanted to die.
And for the teacher it was probably just a tiny, tiny moment. It was his class and he had every right to demand that people follow his instructions very, very specifically. If I had told him the effect his admonishment had on me, he probably would have called me a snowflake, or whatever version of that was something people said in the early 2000s.
Just one small example of why everyday is filled with anxiety for me. Just by being myself, just by living my minute-to-minute life, I can break a social rule and get reprimanded. If somebody hates it when people are late, it's my responsibility to never ever ever be late when they are involved. If somebody doesn't like to be interrupted, I need to be very very careful to never under interrupt them. If there is a certain word somebody doesn't like... For example, I knew somebody who didn't like me to say, "Uh-oh" in a joking way because saying that should only be for when something was terribly wrong... Then it will be my responsibility to be vigilant about the words that come out of my mouth so that I don't cause them a moment of irritation.
Yet as hard as I try, just by being me I always end up showing up late, learning stuff out, saying uh-oh in a joking way while playing with a child, and doodling on my paper without thinking about it.
What is the point of this post? It's an explanation of how, for me, and maybe other neurodivergent people, being out in the world is like walking through a field of eggshells with landmines underneath them.
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