Memories

Individual variations.

Dr. William Dodson states that the average neurodivergent child receives 20,000 more negative feedback statements than neurotypical children by age 12. Statements like try harder, stay still, and why are you so lazy. Little things that accumulate over time. Today I’m going to talk about two incidents that happened when I was nine. The thing about my memories, they are never just general memories. The few memories I do have are very specific and very detailed.

At the time, we lived on D street, it was a block away from the school. This isn’t a city block. I walked past the alley, then the neighbor’s house to the west, and I was at school. For some reason, I don’t recall on this day when I walked home for lunch, why I was by myself. Neither my mother nor my siblings were home. I made my own lunch. This was during the period of my life when I ate little else other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was capable of making that myself. When I got back to school none of my colleagues were on the playground. I surmised that I was early. I sat down at the corner and drew pictures in the dirt. I finally realized that I couldn’t be early to much time had passed, so I walked to the classroom. It was nearly recess so I had been sitting at the corner for about two hours. I spent the next week standing with my face to the wall for every recess. That part didn’t bother me. The part that bothered me is that no one believed that I hadn’t done it on purpose. Being believed was very important to me even at an early age. I may leave out some critical information, but I don’t lie. This may be the reason I can so easily spot someone who is leaving something out of their story. I tried to explain my time blindness to my VA therapist. I have hours, sometimes complete afternoons disappear. I have no idea how long I am engaged with something until I need something. She told me that I had to be mistaken. I didn’t like not being believed this time any more than the first time.

It was also during this school year that an assignment was given out. The assignment was to research something and write a paragraph about it. This was something new and exciting; I was intrigued. I was informed that this assignment was not for me. My handwriting was not good enough to do this assignment. I don’t know what assignment got handed out to me. I am sure it was something repetitive and boring. The students who were assigned that assignment got to use the encyclopedia in the classroom. For those of you who have no idea what an encyclopedia is, you are just going to make me feel old. Although my dad didn’t have an enormous respect for higher education. He felt education was important. Maybe he just didn’t have much faith in the higher education process. For as far back as I can remember, we had a set of encyclopedias in our house. Encyclopedias were not cheap, so it had to be a conscious decision. My mind made a plan, if I was not allowed to work on this project at school. I would do it on my own at home. My mom asked me what I was doing as I was reading the encyclopedia. I replied, “Some homework”. I read everything that I could find in the encyclopedia about whales. I wrote a paragraph about the stuff I had learned. I took that paragraph to school and threw it away. We are not lazy, our minds just work differently. If some thing isn’t interesting than it takes a great deal of effort to accomplish. Everything gets put on the scale of importance versus effort. The more important the higher the effort tolerance is. The Spoon Theory by Christine Meserandino, explains it well. Neurotypical and Neurodivergent people usually start out a day with about the same amount of spoons. There are other things that can limit the amount of spoons you start out with in a day. That is outside what we are talking about. The big difference comes in how many spoons it takes to complete a task. Something as simple as taking a shower for a normal person, that is one task and requires one spoon. To us with the other variety of brain, there are many tasks. The shower requires figuring out what we are going to wear after, laying out those clothes so we can put them on, and deciding if we are going to take a shower now or wait ten minutes. If we decided on waiting ten minutes, the first reaction will be why wait ten minuets, then ok what do we do while we wait for ten minutes. There are multiple decisions to be made, so it requires multiple spoons. Each decision requires effort. Spending hours doing something we enjoy equals one spoon. Some days we run out of spoons, and doing anything requires borrowing spoons from tomorrow. We run energy debts for days, until we crash. That crash will take days of being able to do only the bare minimum to recover.

There are many things that go into making each and every one of us different. Tolerance is something that needs to be equally shared. The more tolerance we give others, that are different than ourselves. The better this world will become.

Peace and Love