My first thought reading this was very simple. Hell.
I should probably say first that my AS was not diagnosed until after I left school. Had it been, I probably would have had a far different experience.
It was mainly the social side of things that was my problem, if you would call it that. At many times during my years in high school I was almost in tears walking down the corridor to class because I was so afraid that someone, one of the many faceless multitudes of people who I'm fairly sure I had never done anything to offend, would make one of those horrible little slights at me. Many of you know the kind of things I mean, from reading through others' posts. Taunts, jokes that I wouldn't understand yet came to realise were making fun of me, people literally looking or pointing at you or laughing... It goes on. I couldn't shrug it off or make some sarcastic reply back, I just felt horrible. Alone and ridiculed and wrong. I wondered what it was I could have done that would make people be so horrible.
I tried to make myself as normal as possible. My school didn't have much of a uniform at the time, so I tried to mimic the fashions of others. I wanted to stand out as little as possible, hoping that if I was unremarkable enough, they would find someone else to bother. I made an effort to participate in things like sitting with a group at a table talking during lunch, when I would much rather have been in a quiet corner of the library. It didn't work, of course. All it did was make me look bland. I hid so much of myself that there wasn't anything really left to show anyone who might have been interested in getting to know the real me. I got enough acceptance to hang around on the fringes of one of the big friendship groups, but I never really belonged with anyone.
I did well in class, though. It was a refuge; I understood things there. They were logical and reasonable and I have a good memory and ability to mimic the academic language (aka wafflese), so I got good grades. I did struggle in my last two years when I started getting stress-triggered migraines (the cause of this wasn't diagnosed until much later; at the time I didn't quite realise that I was stressed, because I was never not stressed) and it caused me to miss a lot of school. While I felt bad that my schoolwork was suffering, I was also relieved that some days I just didn't have to go through being there. My parents and guidance teacher (a sort of in-school counselor, everyone was assigned one) knew that I was unhappy in school, but there wasn't much anyone could do. None of the kids ever pushed anything far enough that I would have proof to report them or have them removed. All they could do was tell me to wait it out, eventually they would either grow up or leave.
And some of them did. It got a little easier as I went on, but I can definitely say I felt absolutely no nostalgia on that last day of school. I was just relieved. Then came university, which was just wonderful in comparison. Difficult still in many ways, especially when classes had quite a large social aspect, but the kind of hostility I had had problems with in high school was just gone. It just shows what the different learning environment can do. I know this has wandered a little off-topic, but I hope something in there might be of use.
26 Oct 2010, 1:19 pm
