At first I believed that talent was equitable. That all of us were best at one thing— and anything else we would try, we would be good at or bad at, at best. I believed that some were best at drawing, while sucking at math… And that others were great with numbers, but never with their hands.
I thought we were all born with an innate talent, and that all of the wonderful people around me had simply found theirs first, and it was up to me to try new things until I finally found mine. As if some magical force decides all of our fates— as if practice and hard work were null— because, well…
It seemed like savant had become the bare minimum during the time I had grown up. For if the 80s and 90s were the ages of trying to rigorously cure autism, the 2000s were the point they realised they could simply make profit off of us. Aspergers. High-functioning. Prodigy. If only the parents and teachers could apply enough pressure— all of these children would surely become geniuses.
Perfect little workers who love a routine, and didn’t you know? Einstein might have been autistic! But now they expect Einsteins out of 14 year olds, not realising that the man wrote his book at 26. As if he didn’t hate school. As if the years of patent clerking meant nothing, even though that is what inspired the whole thing. The story was always told with the connotation of “now imagine if Einstein had tried at school.”
Even he had teachers breathing down his neck, telling him he was smarter than his effort. However, today the tone is quite different. The difference is, in our modern times, we have diagnoses that say “This child is lazy and/or unreasonable. Here is evidence that children with this condition are capable of being extremely smart. Do not offer educational support. You must give the child lower grades and tell everyone it is not trying hard enough to make them perfect. This child will achieve straight As if you tell it that it is not doing enough, and it will grind down its own fingers to make it happen. Do not accommodate its disability. This child will be a prodigy.”
I never could really understand why the teachers circled in the air like vultures the moment I learned how to read, but I always, always, recognised the sense of unease I felt as they stripped me of my desire to be anything other than a brain in a jar, by telling me constantly of a fantastical girl, who always tried her best and always got the highest grade. They told me that girl was me, and that I wasn’t trying hard enough to be that girl. That if I wasn’t being that girl with straight As, then I wasn’t being the girl who tried her best, and in not being the girl who tried her best, there must have been something morally and fundamentally wrong with my entire being. To the point that they told me I was addicted to the things that I loved, instead of seeing the young woman exploring art, philosophy and society in a virtual sandbox of infinite information, and ultimately finding a way of internally escaping the god forsaken talent factory that the educational industrial complex had become. I didn’t just play video games because they were fun, they were my lifeblood. I wanted to move to Japan and design them, why wouldn’t I be playing them? It. Was. Research.
So, because of all of that, no one ever stopped to ask if I might have a barrier to learning. No one thought to realise that it might take me a little bit longer to reach the same conclusion as my peers and that I may need a fundamentally different structure to what public schooling provided. They saw an A on an exam and a fail on an essay, and it just had to be proof that I could do better, instead of a flying red flag that something was completely dysfunctional, and I had a real disability, because that is what autism is to me.
Anyway, enough about this… I must return to my initial statement.
At first I believed that talent was equitable. I was the numbers girl. I flew through early mathematics, and reading was a breeze. I loved to write stories, though they were a little one note, but it was certainly better than my throwing arm. I thought that my drawing skills were sacrificed to make me a human calculator and a spelling bee monster. The hypothesis on talent seemed to ring true— until all of my peers surpassed me in every single way.
Something had to change about my philosophy, and so I decided that practice makes perfect. Practice, practice, practice. That’s what I was missing, right? It seemed like low self esteem to rule myself out of practical things. If my special talent didn’t end up being mathematics or science, surely I could force competence into being. So I tried, and tried, and tried… I tried to be something that doesn’t just involve pouring your brain into documents. I tried to be skilled with my hands even though I am constantly vibrating. Even though I trip over my own feet and am covered in unexplained bruises all of the time. I tried to be the best at a video game, pouring thousands of hours into it just to find myself at the very bottom of the ladder. In my brain, I told myself that I could do anything, but in doing so I broke my own heart, because deep down, I could see with empirical evidence that there was a clear ceiling to my physical abilities. I needed to accept the limitations of my skills a long, long time ago, because I have spent the better part of a decade thinking I am a moral failure for not succeeding at the more finessed aspects of womanhood, among other things like career, education and executive skills.
I have autism, and quite likely some kind of non-verbal learning disorder, among other things… I should have been trying to find even more support. Instead I spent years trying to practice my way out of a disability when it is clear that 100,000 hours isn’t enough training to become proficient at living with neurodivergency, let alone 10,000.
I have no doubt whose fault it is that I feel this way.
I also have no doubt as to why my ultimate power fantasy is to just…
do the dishes… clean my room… shower often…
but not all of us will possess ultimate power.
So I’ll settle for just being happy.
