#twice exceptional problems

[neurodiversitysci]

Hi there! I was labeled as gifted in kindergarten, but not diagnosed with dyspraxia and adhd until high school. Im struggling with feeling like im not “disabled enough” to have my diagnosis, because I am smart and do well in school. My doctor said he’s never seen anyone with an iq as high and a processing score as low as mine, and I without a doubt have pretty bad adhd. But because I am gifted, I don’t really struggle in school and I feel like my accommodations are cheating.

Hi there! Just saw your ask. Your profile sounds a lot like mine, maybe even more extreme.

It sounds like ADHD isn't affecting your grades. That's great!

A reframe could be helpful. Accommodations don't have to he formal. They can be as simple as choising a seat in a classroom where you can best focus, or doodling on your notes to better understand what you hear. It could be asking for what you need person to person, like asking a teacher to put spoken instructions in writing (write them on the board, or email...). You are responsible for your brain and you can take care of it in small ways, without harming anyone else or "cheating." :)

Question: do your disabilities affect you subtly in school?

* is it affecting your work habits, or how long it takes you to get the work done?

* is it making you exhausted?

*Do you often make small, random calculation errors in math even though you understand the concepts and the process? Do you have difficulty noticing them?

* Do you have trouble remembering what's due, or details of the instructions, or when and how to turn it in?

* Do you go down research rabbit holes?

* Do you have no idea how to "do the minimum" or even what the minimum would look like?

If so, your disability is affecting you academically. It may not cause you serious problems until college or later, but it's worth understanding.

Or, maybe you're lucky, and your disabilities affect you in other areas of life rather than school? If so, you may not need any services from your school. Awesome.

A processing disability is, literally, a nonverbal learning disability. Unfortunately, United States schools aren't legally required to accommodate that, so they usually don't. To my knowledge, schools take the attitude, "if it doesn't affect your classwork, only your life, we don't gaf, that's your family's problem." If you live elsewhere, I hope your education system is more helpful.

When you get to college, disability services will expect you to somehow know exactly what you need and give them a list. So, it's worth learning what works for you now. I didn't use disability services in undergrad. Ideally, you'll never have to... But if you do, you won't be the first bright person to do so.

Accommodations are not a great model for dealing with disabilities. They create unnecessary shame.

TL;DR, I want you to know that your disabilities are real and it's worth learning how they affect you what you can do for yourself and what help if any you might need from others. Even if you never use any formal services. It's a life skill that will probably benefit you forever :)

[theawkdork]

The struggle of being twice exceptional

As an intellectually gifted individual with ADHD (along with major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, complex PTSD, and an eating disorder), it is often deeply painful and frustrating to navigate academic / work environments.  As a whole, our world fails to understand neurodivergence, and this only worsens when you add a seemingly conflicting combination of traits into the mix.  The thing is, giftedness and disability don’t cancel out. In fact, this combination brings about a unique set of obstacles that the average person - for whatever reason - cannot fathom. You’re one or the other; you’re “lucky” or “unlucky” in the neurological world.  People are so quick to judge. Most days, you struggle to get anything done, but knowing your potential to accomplish several days’, even weeks’ worth of work in a day, people easily project upon you this idea that you’re weak-willed, ungrateful / privileged, directionless, even immature. Your initiative goes unnoticed, because the efforts and difficulty of trying (but often failing) to simply start work is seen as less valid than conventional efforts, such as actively working for hours but nonetheless accomplishing little. That, or your initiative is noticed but you’re scorned for struggling to follow through. So basically, whether you fail or succeed, neither is given the same sympathy or respect that a neurotypical person would receive.  When you fail, people will often either over-emphasize and harshly criticize the weaknesses of the disability (dismissing giftedness) or, on the other hand, forget it altogether and attribute it to character defects given the gifted traits (dismissing disability). When you succeed, people will often hate you for being able to accomplish great things with seemingly little effort (dismissing disability) or, more rarely, actually see your attempts to at least start working and then attribute it to mere attentiveness rather than genuine talent (dismissing intelligence). It’s annoying as hell. Wake the fuck up, people. How many times do we have to beat to death the idea that we don’t live in a purely black-and-white world?

[neurodiversitysci]

Dear fandom hivemind,

You know that quote where Sherlock explains what it's like to have a mind that never shuts up, churns through input at hyperspeed, and also hates him as similar to a rocket ship that is prevented from taking off, so it's tearing itself apart on the tarmac?

~~It's a little more relatable, when I'm not depressed, than I'd like to admit.~~

What's the exact wording? Having trouble finding it...

Thanks!

[neurodiversitysci]

Twice-Exceptional Problems

When things that are hard for most people come easily to you, but you struggle with things most people find second nature:

People make a fuss over you when you do things that come relatively naturally to you.  That makes it hard to take compliments.

People take it for granted when you put forth monumental effort to do things you find almost impossible--and heap scorn on you if you do badly. So you become afraid to do badly and be "found out."

And then they wonder why you have impostor syndrome and a skewed sense of self.

[neurodiversitysci]

An Autistic Kitten meme that explains my entire life. Meme text: “Competent at things that people think you can’t do. Can’t do basic life things that people expect you to know.”

[neurodiversitysci]

Well, that explains a lot...

I recently discovered, mixed in with a bunch of drawings and writing from my childhood, a standardized test I took when I was eight years old. I didn’t even know I had taken any tests at that age, but there it was, a copy of the Weschler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT-I)--the test of academic skills that complements the better-known Wechsler IQ test.

One small detail at the end of the report blew my mind...and explained a lot about my life.

Not only was there a significant difference between my reading and math composite scores, but only one half of one percent of the reference population had at least that great a gap. Now, keep in mind that math isn’t even my weakest skill. If anything, it’s one of my strongest weaknesses. So it’s no surprise people don’t know what to make of the giant gaps in my skill set, because they’ve probably never met anyone as lopsided. They’ve never had reason to learn that such unevenness is even possible. 

5/14/17

[neurodiversitysci]

ADHD and Out of Sync

A lot of the problems that come with ADHD have to do with time. People with ADHD often struggle with time management and regularly find themselves running late. So are people with ADHD just generally out of sync? According to one paper published recently...

Neil Peterson writes:

“A lot of the problems that come with ADHD have to do with time. ...[a]  paper’s author conducted a series of interviews with people who had ADHD and concluded that many of them experienced ADHD as ‘a state of desynchronization and arrhythmia.’...

This idea that being “out of sync” with the world around you is a big part of the ADHD experience certainly rings true with me...Sometimes we get impatient and do things too fast, other times we lose track of time and do things late. Too fast or too slow, the result is similar: struggling to “find the beat” and get back in rhythm with the world around us.” 

I share this experience of being out of sync, and my general inconsistency of functioning and the extreme gap between my strengths and weaknesses probably makes it worse. I’m not only out of sync with the world around me, but also out of sync with myself.

[neurodiversitysci]

I was reading this and it struck a chord. 

My parents aren’t narcissists, and they love me unconditionally. 

But when I was a child, they were emotionally immature, unprepared for some of the responsibilities of being a parent. In some ways, as I got older, I could see it, and resented it.

you begin seeing them for who they really are

a terrified child, who happened to be a parent

Later on, my peers either made fun of me or shunned me. I made friends with other “weird kids” in middle school and high school. My middle school friends were my lifeline for years. But by high school, I felt so beaten down that it took me over a year to realize I had made any friends there.

I learned that to live you need a job, and to get and keep jobs you need connections, which means you need people to like you, which means you need to either be normal or be so IMPRESSIVE that people forgive you for not being normal. I put constant pressure on myself to be the best student, the best researcher, the best friend. I learned that most people don’t want a partner who is too needy or too difficult. One person confirmed that by breaking up with me because my physical and mental health problems were too much to bear. I came to believe that to survive, I needed others’ approval, and my adult life has revolved around seeking it.

And so, many of these experiences of children of narcissistic parents ring true, for very different reasons.

to believe the whole universe’s calamities are your making

to believe you have to constantly prove that you are worthy of love

to seek approval from anyone and everyone

to deny your mistakes, weaknesses and vulnerabilities 

feeling angry, unheard, unseen

And so I’m learning to ask for help, to be honest with myself and others, and to give love all the time, not just when I feel in need of it myself.

The piece doesn’t say

“to remain a child yourself”

But to make every choice based on how others will judge you and not what you need and value is childish. I don’t want to have the emotions of a child in the body of an adult. My parents needed to raise a child to grow up. I don’t want to have children and even if I did, I’d want to be grown up and prepared to raise them beforehand.

If only growing up emotionally were the sort of thing where you could set concrete goals, check them off a list, and measure your progress over time.