It's Not That Simple

Given that it's Autism Awareness Month (and for the love of whatever you may hold holy, remember that awareness is not the same thing as paranoia, please), I thought this was a good time to write this.

A well-meaning person (friend of a friend of a friend) said to me, "Look at how smart your Lizzy is! She must do really well in school!" They were saying this in reference to a Facebook Memory I posted, wherein then-six-year-old Lizzy stated, "myths are like fairytales we used to believe before."

Well, yeah. She was right, they are.

But this well-meaning friend of a friend of a friend (WMFFF) doesn't seem to get that wise little statements like these and excelling in school (or even attending school every day) are not the same. Not at all.

One of these is a one-off statement, clever, off the cuff, probably when everything was okay in her then-very little world. 

The other is a complicated series of things, involving self-confidence, executive (dys)function, anxiety about everything from grades to antimaskers up in her face, self-esteem, boredom with some subjects, being a teenager, shame about previous school behavior, the inability to grasp why she needs to know dates and names when she already understands the stories behind them, trouble staying on task, finally being able to start to deal with her father's death, poor habits she picked up during distance learning, being terrible at asking for help, impulsivity when stressed, the need to understand the why rather than just the name/date facts, and a lot of autistic/ADHD overwhelm at the mere thought of facing any of these, much less all of them.

(And no, none of it is due to vaccines, none of it can be cured or even should be; the issue here is that the world is not built for people who think differently. That's it. That part is that simple. If the likes of Autism Speaks would shut up and let actual autistics speak, they might learn something.)

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here (through my own slippery neurodivergence) is that the issue lies not with Lizzy. Nor with me. Not even with her school (they have tried so hard - bent over backward - to get her on a track that she can thrive in, from switching teachers to letting her draw or read to other accommodations. They're great!). 

The problem is with the system at large. Not even just the educational system (though that's part of it) but the whole dystopian, unrestrained-capitalism, screw-the-planet, -ist and -phobic, awful system that basically says, "If you can't conform to this set of mostly unspoken arbitrary rules, then you're not a whole person."

And because we're all steeped in this since birth, programmed to think this way by society at large, even the kindest of WMFFFs think - way deep in the backs of their minds where they can't even perceive it consciously - think that if we just tried harder, we could be rich or lose weight or get straight As in school or avoid illness or climb the corporate ladder faster.

I wonder how many of them stop to think that maybe - just maybe - it's not all about "getting ahead."