I didn’t quite know how out of place I was until high school.
Maybe this sounds like a common experience. The transition from adolescence to adulthood usually takes place during those high school years, and the traumas involved in existing as a teen in the modern age are numerous. High school is rife with tumultuous emotions, interpersonal relationships, and the pressure of self-definition. (To say nothing of puberty.)
I have something a bit different to share, even with all that in mind.
In episode two, I talked about the odd grade schools I attended. To elaborate on them in detail would probably take about three years, but the essential facts are these: those schools were small, diverse, year-round, and focused on humanity and science. And they taught through grade ten, which for most would have been sophomore year in high school.
For my final two years of high school, I attended the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Such a school required applications and auditions to get into, similar to many colleges.
I was unperturbed by this. People had been telling me my whole life that I was an artist, so I couldn’t fathom a reason why I wouldn’t be admitted. I puttered through my audition projects with idle curiosity, and, lo and behold, I was accepted into the Visual Arts class of 2012. Something I ran into recently described this attitude as “lucky girl syndrome”, and I haven’t quite decided yet what I think about that.
Arts high school was incredibly weird, but not for the reasons one might guess. I was floored by the number of white girls at this school. There were a number of wonderful exceptions, naturally, but I still remember being shocked by the blatant majority. I wondered why there weren’t more boys, weren’t more people of color. I have some hunches, now that privilege is an open discussion, but at the time it was absolutely unexpected to me.
The stories they told, though.
I remember sitting at one of the long grey lunch tables (the front-most one by the window, through which our dormitory and the fountain in the pond were visible) watching my friend Kaitlyn carefully spread smooth, even amounts of peanut butter and jelly on her sandwich bread, when it dawned on me that the stereotypical high school experiences you see on TV do, indeed, actually exist.
A great majority of the people surrounding me knew what bullying was and had often been the victim of it themselves. There were kids who really did form cliques based on sports teams, and made a habit of shoving other kids into lockers.
Why, I still don’t know; this is my remaining ignorance. But, their first-hand accounts were the first non-fictional source to tell me high school really did look like that. Overcrowded, segregated, and entirely unpleasant for the quiet artsy types. Sensitive types. The talented weird ones.
I suddenly felt awkward among them. These people were bonding over experiences I’d never had and never wanted to. I pitied them, but I didn’t know how to express my condolences for the world they’d come from. There were kids who were so very grateful to be at an art school, where their creativity was supported and appreciated. And all I had thought about my place there was that it had seemed like the correct and logical next place to be.
Now I think it may come across as entitlement, yes, but I didn’t think of it in a framework of being more deserving or superior to anyone else. The pattern was not based on ego. I just thought… I’m an artist (people had always told me this) and I have to go to school (this is a common requirement). Therefore, it simply, plainly would not have made any sense to be anywhere else but art school. So, art school it was.
If it had been ego which informed my high school trajectory, it’s possible that I would not have ended up at Perpich. It quickly became apparent that I was not the best artist there. My friend Kaitlyn, who I’d just mentioned, was a beautifully skilled painter and portrait artist. (Hi, Kaitlyn! I hope you don’t mind the mention.) I could list other names of other classmates whose work I was delighted and intimidated by. It was a great place to learn and admire and simply exist, because I was, myself, just… average.
Sort of.
I still stuck out like a sore thumb sometimes, because other “Vis kids” as we called ourselves seemed to be notoriously bad at spelling and math, two things I was actually very good at doing. I’d always been second-fiddle in academics at my other schools (just enough behind the really “smart” kids to be frustrated by it) and really good at art. At Perpich it flip-flopped, almost. Compared to a lot of the other student body, I was suddenly so-so at art and… really brainy?
I don’t think there were many in my class who would have looked to my artwork for inspiration. On the other hand, I realized (only within the last month or two) that a glance of genuine adoration has been directed at me, and I didn’t have any idea–despite there being photographic evidence that I had been looking them directly in the face while it was happening. So… who knows?
Much of my isolation might have been a self-imposed accident, because I just don’t know how to read people. I barely knew how to read myself, so it would have been very difficult to communicate my differences or concerns.
Nevertheless, I was different. And there was no greater judgment of this fact than the literal panel of judges who criticized my work, while I sat by in horrified silence.
It was just prior to my final semester at the Perpich Arts High School, when my Visual Arts class was assigned the task of writing a grant proposal. It was not a huge affair, I thought. Each of us had to dream up an independent art project and plead our case for the chance to earn $100 toward the completion of our proposed creations. Only a small handful of students would win the grant, and they would use upcoming art class time to complete their projects.
I did not actually want the grant. I didn’t have any meaningful plans for any great work of art, and, honestly, there were classes I wanted to take that the grant project would have interfered with. Things I wanted to learn that I might not have thought about on my own.
But the writing of the grant proposal was mandatory, so I quick made something up that I wouldn’t mind doing if I did win for some reason.
The next step of the grant-writing exercise was for each of us to observe a panel of judges while they critiqued our portfolios of past work and discussed the viability of our proposed projects. We were told that we shouldn’t interrupt or argue with the judges during this time. We were meant only to observe the process.
The library was set up like a small, dark auditorium. A screen had been pulled down for projection and just aside that screen was a table, where three judges spread out their papers. Chairs were lined up in rows to face the ordeal. There I sat, in the middle of this wooden audience, next to my painting teacher.
A series of photos were displayed on the screen, documenting my past works. A summary of the last year and a half of my life, my thoughts, my art. There, a tri-color block print depicting the silhouettes of a group of people charging through a midnight forest. There, a self portrait with yarn hair, made of fabric and stuffing, with an embroidered face. (Doll-making counts as art, in my book.)
I didn’t fault them their evaluation of my grant project. What I’d proposed to do was spend the $100 budget on fabric and screen printing tools to produce some embellished pants for myself. It wasn’t exactly a deep or philosophical idea, and the judges had seen it for the cop-out it really was. That was all fine.
What wasn’t fine was when one of them said, “I think we should discuss what is art and what is craft.”
This was the first time I had heard any kind of distinction between the two. Art and Craft, to my mind, were conjoined twins. But suddenly these judges were dissecting them, prying them apart and telling one of them that it was lesser, despite its genetic makeup being utterly identical. They didn’t outright say that the idea of “craft” was inferior, but I felt the implications deeply.
Seventeen years of being called an artist, and then, at a critical moment, just a few months from graduating, at a time when I was trying to figure out my college ambitions and life trajectories, a few people who I viewed as important figures of authority (You would think anyone qualified to judge arts and dole out funding would know their shit.) were saying that what I did was not art.
I remember glancing over at my painting teacher, and back to my portfolio on display. I was in those things I had made. My thoughts and feelings and ideas were laced into those creations, but the judges were implying that what I’d “crafted” was hollow and devoid of meaning. It was just… stuff.
And I’d been told I wasn’t supposed to interject in this conversation. I couldn’t ask for clarification. But if there was any time in my young life that I’d needed clarity, wanted desperately for second opinions, it was then.
I told my friends about what the judges had said. I told anyone I thought would listen. Following what I thought were the conventions of conversation, I presented the scenario with scorn and silently searched for some kind of reaction. Something that would reassure me those judges were wrong. But I didn’t find anything convincing. The seeds of doubt had been sown. My work was empty, average, unremarkable… nothing. So, was I?
In one way, I had succeeded in exactly what I’d set out to do. I did not receive the grant, and therefore was able to take the other classes I’d wanted in my final semester.
But I’d also stopped looking at arts colleges. I’d already been unsure of what I really wanted to do, or where to explore next, and then it was like my safety net had been pulled out from under me. My fall-back skill wasn’t really valid anymore. So I was hurt, and confused, and I had a very hard time making sense of the feedback I’d received and knowing what to do with it. That was the beginning of the end; I’d been troubled before, I’d had a hard time with changes and transitions before, but this one felt different. This one was the fork in the road where I had truly lost myself.
I would fumble through the next few years, aimless in my goals and pining for a restorative sort of validation I couldn’t identify. I would become bitter, frightened, depressed, and I would make less and less art.
It baffles me to think that all this was over a decade ago. I can still feel it like I’m there, and it still frustrates me.
I get upset with myself often for being impressionable. I used to call myself a copy-machine, because I knew full-well that anything I had made was a collage of other things I had seen. I never really knew if that act of splicing and molding was true creativity, or if it really took a spark of genius to make something truly unique. (But that’s ingenuity, and ingenuity is artistic. They go hand-in-hand.)
I was hanging on the words of people who insisted I was talented, that I was an artist, because they pushed back the looming doubt that I was merely an instrument of regurgitation: a pestle used to grind other people’s ideas together into a bland sort of paste.
When I told my husband, Rick, that I enjoyed playing Clerics in D&D (we play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons at home), he told me that, in truth, I was more of a Paladin (think of the term “righteous fury” and you’ll about have it), but that I liked the versatility of Clerics because I was tired of feeling like a blunt instrument. Somehow, Rick always knows the truth of a person. I believe that. And, for a beat, the world had paused. I am tired of being a blunt instrument. I am tired of being used. Somehow, I’ve perceived a life of freedom, but all the while I’ve been plagued by confusion and others’ expectations, like I’ve been hemmed in by an invisible fence but I’m never sure quite where it’s buried.
When these people, these three strange adults, decreed that I made crafts and implied that crafting was unworthy, it was like they had removed a long-buried spike in my chest, one that had been plunged into my heart long ago–and I had tried to heal around it, to ignore its presence–and sometimes, that’s how you survive a pierced artery. You’re more likely to bleed out if the offending object is removed from the opening. But they’d gone and ripped it out of me. All my doubts came pouring out of me like sand from a shattered hourglass until there was nothing left but empty despair.
I’m mixing my metaphors.
The wound was too deep to patch, and in my panic all I could do was try to hide the blood and wonder why no one noticed all my clothes stained red.
This is what it feels like. This is the pain of being let down.
And not understanding why. And not knowing what to do about it.
And yeah, I probably learned that pretty late compared to a lot of kids.
Nevertheless, it happened.
I’m going to skip past the era of my life that I call “the Bad Time” for right now, and give you all a recent update on my diagnostic assessments. As I’ve said before, I’m currently self-diagnosed. This is for a number of reasons, but most prevalent is that the evaluations where I live, in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, are being wait-listed for up to three years. I’ve been on that wait-list for about a year already, at this point, so for me it might be another year and a half. Regardless, that is a long time to wait for any kind of diagnosis.
So I tried to cheat, kind of. I found out through someone in the neurodivergent sphere of instagram that a private practitioner was offering assessments for the presumably low fee of $80, and they were going to be able to schedule people through this past December. I thought, This is great! I’ve been in the process of applying for disability income, it would be great if I could add an official diagnosis to that application now. This seems… efficient.
So, I got myself on this person’s schedule. They are within the US, but not in my state, so we met virtually. That was fine. But I was immediately a little bit skeptical, because the way they finally explained the autism assessment they were offering seemed… not wrong, but not intensive enough to really dig into the nuances of autism. Especially as an adult, and as a being whose genetic blueprint includes two X chromosomes.
All of the questions were self-reported, for one thing, and there were a lot of them. These could have been sent to me in advance. I could have answered them privately and sent them back. It was not the kind of assessment that necessitated a physical presence or an allotted amount of time.
And that was it. There was no written component, there were no visual or object tests, no impromptu storytelling, or anything like that. It was basically a case of… are you awkward? Yes or no?
AND, they had specifically stated when we started the test that any answers based on your masked self, your self that has been trained to fit in, or to pass as a neurotypical person, would skew the results.
And I didn’t think that I was to the point where I was… like, if I was that confident, about exactly how I’d functioned throughout my life, I would not be seeking a diagnosis. I would not need confirmation. If you’re that self-aware, that you can distinctly identify the differences between…. I don’t have the answers? I don’t have the answers. So, a self reported test like this, while useful, needs more context.
Regardless, I responded to the questions in such a way that, by the end, I was thinking, “Wow, this has to be conclusive. I sound like an absolute nut, compared to neurotypical standards.”
I was told that I would get my results back in about three days. Maybe a little longer, because there was a weekend in there. But, apparently, things happened, as they often do, and I got my results back three weeks later.
When I did, I was so anxious to read it! I had just gotten through writing the first part of this episode, about my rotten experience of those art school judges, and I was still processing the re-lived experience of that, so it probably wasn’t the best time.
The results were inconclusive. They didn’t confirm autism, but they also didn’t deny autism.
The diagnosis I was given was an “Unspecified Intellectual Disability”.
Okay. It does have disability right there in the name. Which might be useful for my disability income application. I didn’t really take offense to that. But what did get under my skin was the use of the adjective “Intellectual” preceding “Disability”.
Just like the artist thing, people have been telling me my whole life how “smart” I am. How “wise”. How I “have a good head on my shoulders”–whatever that means. That one was a very recent example; even more recent than the intellectual disability outcome of the aforementioned assessment.
I turned right around from that thought, and I looked up the assessment that was used (on the paperwork, I found out it was called MIGDAS), and I took an IQ test online. What I found out in the first few seconds of my search was that there is a MIGDAS-2, so, to say nothing of the content or effectiveness of the test, the version I was administered seemed to be out of date. That was enough for me to feel vindicated that something was not accurate about this test, and it wasn’t just my self-reported answers.
Oh, and my IQ test? Came back 145, which claims to be in the top 2% of human beings. I am good at taking tests. I even realized, the moment I answered the first question, that I very well could have cheated the timer count by pre-emptively reading all of the questions and supposing the answers before the timer even started and gotten an even higher mark, but I concluded in the next couple seconds that it wasn’t really in the spirit of the test to do that, so I just kept going. And still ended up with a really high intelligence quotient. So. “intellectual” disability my ass.
I have to keep something. If it wasn’t art, it at least has to be smarts. Those are the two halves of my core identity. I am the Renaissance, and, having learned from my past upheavals, I really need to defend that, or I just will not know what’s left. And that’s not going to be good for anyone.
Am I autistic? Who knows. I can still go in for the other evaluations two years from now and see what happens there. I hope you’re all still keeping track of me by then, and we can celebrate together, but until then I’ll just keep being ornery… and quietly verbose.
I did an interview recently for NeuroTribe magazine, which is an online publication (I’ll have a link to that in the episode description). I had the opportunity to be featured in NeuroTribe’s very first podcast episode, which was terrifying but great. And… after getting this result back on my neurodevelopmental differences, I had to go back and listen to my own advice. Miraculously, that episode aired just a day or two before that diagnostic paperwork came in. And if I hadn’t said it there, I think I might have lost track of it in the moment. In my frustration.
Even if you’re not officially diagnosed–with whatever–if by some instance the so-called professionals, the supposed hierarchy of the situation, if that top level doesn’t get it… Ultimately, philosophically if you will, it doesn’t matter. Because if you are searching, at all. If you are doing the work of asking questions, and learning about other people, and other experiences, and trying to improve. If you are opening your eyes, and you are finding the world around you. If it is opening up, and letting you in, and sparkling somehow in a manner you didn’t know was possible, and you’re excited to contribute to that world. If you are connecting with people, and helping people, and trying to understand it all… it doesn’t matter what you’re called. Or what they’re called. I’m here to tell you: We. Are. All. Human.
We are living beings.
And that’s the bottom line.
Music for this podcast episode includes: “What does Love mean?” by Solar Flight, and “Chasing Daylight” by Scott Buckley.
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