Looking back it's crazy how there were so many problems in my life that I only just now have the words to convey. And how much of it could have been made so much easier if my neurodivergence had been recognised for what it was and not just some 'quirky quiet kid' habits.
I remember struggling with math so much even though I loved it, and whenever my parents or teachers asked me why it wasn't working out, my response always seemed to fall on deaf ears or no one really knew how to work around it/interpret it. It didn't help that I used to ace math up until around my pre-teen to later teenage years, so eeryone thought I was either lazy or just falling off the learning curve (to be fair the latter may have still been true).
But I didn't have the words to articulate the complex feelings I had around math. Not the way the numbers seemed to mean more than my teachers let on. Not how looking at them made me feel obsessive and feverish. Not the way I used the colors and personalities I associated with them to try and reverse engineer my own equations to solve problems. Or how I could solve them 'correctly' in secret ways I only learned from 'looking further behind the numbers'— Only for my work to be marked as wrong. And how confusing it all was for me. When things made sense I felt invincible, but when I looked at the numbers too hard it was like I ended up lost inside them and frustrated. Swearing off math until it made sense again, and then breaking down when it inevitably fell apart. And being so innatentive and prone to zoning out only made things worse, because I rarely had notes from class to fall back on when things got hazy.
And to my teachers, those messy papers, margins full of so many numbers and arrows you couldn't tell what was proof and what was the answer... That was all just a bit of laziness or odd habit they couldn't quite remedy (making sure to highlight my answers was all they could ask of me). And I can't even really blame them. I've always been a quiet kid, so when things did start going wrong for me it's not like I ever would have told them. When pressed, I would half explain my thought processes, leaving out what made me dizzy lest I spiral, and they did their best to explain the problems to me again. To varying levels of success.
Somewhere out there are dozens upon dozens of papers: Printed math homework covered in nonsense scribblings. And they match the 'textbooks' and 'lectures' I used to write while consumed by the manic belief that I was going to educate the world on my higher form of math. Word for word, number for number.
Teachers thought I was confused and messy. And my parents, if they ever saw my homework, were convinced it was a mark of my dedication to math 🫠
