I feel it is my duty to tell you that I write this post with anger. It is possible that I could write this post from a different starting emotion if I were… well, a different person. The experiences that lead me to anger are the experiences that shape my understanding. It is what it is.
As a mathematician, I further feel a duty to tell you that I can not and will not define “dialectics” or “disability” and that is not because I am obnoxious, but because I do not know their definitions and am not burdening myself with the task of learning. If you do not know what they mean, that is fine. If you want to know what they mean, this post may help, or it may leave you frustrated. Please read with caution and take care of your feelings.
In the beginning
One thing about me is that I’ve always been thinking. As a child, I fully believed I could think through any issue. I ran simulations in my head at bedtime, trying to decide an evolutionary basis for love and whether one could expect to see any differences in a universe with or without God. My dad would talk to me about (amateur) theoretical physics and we’d exchange thoughts on time travel while my mom rolled her eyes and left us to it.
That was at home. At school, with the exception of the day a peer and I accidentally missed class trying to imagine actual nothingness, I never had the chance to talk about anything theoretical or challenging. School was always, not quite hell –I was never bullied or in trouble– but a form of purgatory in which I suffered all the same. I now recognize this as the result of ableism in the face of my learning difficulties.
I have two competing understandings of disability; neither of which has been able to completely subsume the other. Whether this is a truth about disability, or just a function of my not having read enough, I will not find out before I publish this post. What’s worse is that one of the understandings is clearly ableist in nature or at least it is pathologizing and I am happy to call that ableist. Yet, my disability justice lens hasn’t given me a full picture that I am happy with.
Disability as “what’s wrong with me.” I have purposefully phrased it this way because it is the understanding that definitely needs updating. It’s based off of what I learned growing up in ableism, but tempered slightly with “progressive values.” This framework says that there are expected ways that a human body (including the brain) is meant to work and present itself, and any deviation from this that has a negative impact on a person’s life is a disability. I hope you caught all the highly subjective and subject to change aspects of this understanding! We expect humans to be able to (learn to) walk and talk, read and write, to be able to perceive through all their senses, not to require human or technological assistance to live and function in society as adults. When they can’t, it’s a disability… unless it’s normal! We don’t consider people who need glasses to be disabled, and we don’t consider glasses to be a disability aide. There’s no reason for this except that disability, for some reason, must be unexpected. (I am certain I have left something out, and I am sorry!)
Disability as “what’s disallowed in my society.” My understanding of this version may be incomplete, but I am under the impression that this says that human biological/neurological diversity is in fact normal and that when the less typical presentations are excluded from our expectations/designs then this creates disability. The hardships of disability come from the way society is organized against us. This is why needing glasses isn’t viewed as a disability; needing assistance to see clearly is something we expect and it is built into our understanding of a generic person’s needs. Meanwhile, even though wheelchairs have been in use for over a thousand years, people do not expect to have to “accommodate” one, and will design, build, and use inaccessible buildings without any thought. Basically all humans have needs, and if the ruling class identifies with those needs, they will be accommodated by default in all planning. Other needs are considered “special” and have to be begged for and having those means you are disabled. (Again, I have not re-researched this and am just telling you what lives in my head!)
Disability as part of me. I have one (late) diagnosed learning disability, ADHD, but I was never evaluated for learning disorders. I am also (peer-diagnosed) autistic which may or may not be related to issues I had learning in school. I know that I was bored, miserable, and confused. I know that even though I read early and at an advanced level, my reading comprehension was never great. Did I need accommodations? Did I need autistic teachers? Did I need school to prioritize positive experience over academics? Was something “wrong” with me? or with my environment? Who gets to decide?
I never received support, accommodations, or even curiosity about my academic struggles; because I and my grades performed acceptably. I was, throughout my life, told I needed to stop procrastinating. I did know, throughout my life, that I took way too long to do my homework. I felt a lot of shame for my terrible habits and work ethic even when I did well despite that. My mom instilled in me the belief that children are innocent and deserve support and protection, but nobody understood that this should also apply to learning. It never occurred to me that I was taking blame for something that couldn’t possibly be my fault unless I accepted the premise of faulty children, as it were. Which is to say, I guess I grew up disabled. I guess I grew up with one or more invisible disabilities that deserved accommodations and support and instead I developed a personality of false insecurity. I never lost my internal confidence in my thinking abilities, but I knew that to the outside world I was broken. I didn’t talk enough. I didn’t know how to use words to say nothing. I wasn’t able to operate thoughtlessly in the way that was demanded and assumed everywhere I went.
Access Denied
Being autistic in a world that doesn’t know or care that we exist, is basically a never-ending distributed denial-of-service attack. We are flooded with information allistic (non-autistic) people don’t perceive or interact with, and processing or protecting oneself against the deluge uses up resources we need to actually function. It’s exhausting and for those of us who were not diagnosed in childhood because we were “fine,” we often hit a point where we just can’t do it anymore. They call it burnout but that reminds me of hitting a point studying where nothing matters anymore… until the next day or the next test or the next semester, and in the meantime you can still care about and for yourself. Autistic burnout can last years, and it can be hard to do more basic things you once took for granted.
I’ve always had this confusing duality of internal vs external life. Inside my own head, I knew my thoughts to be quick and analytical. In the classroom, I was easily distracted and bored and basically just trying to survive; it wasn’t really a place of thinking. Trying to read anything for school was just awful. My brain refuses to take in words that aren’t to its liking. It doesn’t matter if it’s important, it doesn’t even matter if it’s interesting! The way the words sound in my head have to be just so in order for my brain to cooperate. I never thought about how demoralizing it is to just be incapable of doing reading assignments in your own language when you know you are “smart enough.” Meanwhile, and perhaps stemming from my reading difficulties, my vocabulary has always felt smaller than my academic peers. So whenever I would speak about schoolwork (which I would never ever do in class if I could avoid it), I always felt less than. Not to mention that I am always trying to find out what’s true (which I thought was the only reason for discussing things), which consistently puts me at a disadvantage when talking to peers who view everything as a debate or are emotionally invested in having been correct. My entire youth and college years were spent knowing that I had an impressively mathematical and analytical mind, but that it did not matter at all. It would not save me from condescension, it would not grant me access to respect or support.
Too smart to need help.
If you have ever been treated as though you couldn’t possibly need the help you are requesting, you are probably currently screaming at this heading. I know I am. If you have ever unwittingly said anything of this nature to anyone, please know that I am screaming at you personally.
I will get into how I met “dialectics” next time, but just to jump ahead a bit, the word references a sort of duality that is unavoidable in real life. My entire life has been shaped by allistic people’s inability to believe I exist. How it works is rather than holding onto the fact that intelligence is (well, first of all fake, but more relevantly) about ability to exceed subjective expectations on specific types of tests, they hold onto associated vibes like “good” and “knows things” and “receives praise” and “doesn’t need help.” They have seen intelligence used to convey these things, and that’s what matters for communication. Rather than holding onto the fact(ish) that disability is about an inability to do specific tasks without help, they hold onto associated vibes like “deficient” and “has something wrong” and “receives pity, but can also inspire” and “has special needs.” These associated vibes are ableist and awful and I’m sorry to have typed them, but they are also what most people have seen disability used to convey. I have been labeled intelligent; to them this means I have been labeled “good, knows things, receives praise, doesn’t need help.” When I need help or an accommodation or when I complain about struggles, they perceive a contradiction. For reasons I hope I never understand, instead of dealing with this perceived contradiction secretly in their heads like grown-ups, they will resolve the issue at me, against me, by correcting me.
Dialectics! Is apparently what teaches some people that “a person can be smart AND struggle to understand things.” Now I must run away from this post without a nice little closing because I risk fury-induced self-combustion (words should only mean what they mean!!!!!). Until next time!!