When she takes off the mask

When I was a kid, I grew up around mostly neurotypical people. It wasn't until my mom became a special education assistant that I met my first neurodivergent friend. He was one of the students with autism that was in the classroom with my mom. I remember inviting him to birthday parties and hanging out in the summertime and having fun and just, being. We had this weird connection that I couldn't really place except to say that the way he looked at the world around him was similar to the way I did, in small ways. More subtle. Why is that?

Well, for one, I am a woman, and women tend to have different types of behaviors than men, women have also historically not been considered to be able to have autism or ADHD, as both were seen as a male disorder up until the mid 90s. Even though that's when I had started elementary school, most teachers were not recommending kids to get tested.

My biggest struggle in 5th grade was math. Somewhere between 4th and 5th grade, I started to feel lost in certain areas. I noticed and my family also noticed very early on that I loved to write and had this sort of natural ability for story telling. The thing is, they also teased me incessantly about it my whole life because of the way I would pace around my room a lot and speak these stories out loud, which actually deterred me from pursuing goals and from wanting to be myself because people in my own family were teasing me and calling me "weird".

It taught me to mask my symptoms because if I didn't, people would think I was weird or crazy. The unfortunate thing is I believed that lie, you know? I have been masking pretty much my entire life. That means there are certain things I just do naturally now that I don't even realize is masking. Like, for instance, for some reason I always raise my eyebrows a little when I smile, and it favors the right side of my face. I have no clue why, and that could be a medical thing, but I also think it's the extra effort of my muscles that I'm using to make sure people know that I am happy.

Most of the time when I am just walking around doing stuff, I have what we call RBF, or "resting bitch face". People always think I'm angry or about to cry. I have to explain to them that no, that's just what my face looks like when I am very hyper-focused and relaxed. The funny thing is people don't realize that means I'm comfortable in my environment. When I'm uncomfortable, you can tell because I tap my feet and shake my legs and fidget a lot and look around and daydream and wander. If I'm somewhere comfortable and familiar, I will go right into "work mode" and my RBF comes in strong. Anyway, I got sidetracked for a second. I was telling you a story about me in 5th grade.

Well, when it came to multiplication and division, I sucked. I more than sucked, I had like no way to memorize numbers. At all. My brain wouldn't let me remember certain things and it was so annoying. I had to get a tutor and she kept going through the flashcards with me and I would just freeze up and then start panicking. It was terrible. What made it worse was my parents didn't really take it seriously and thought I was just being defiant or something by continuing to struggle with math into middle school. By the time I got to the end of 8th grade year, my math teacher was having a sit down discussion with my parents and I about how math is the only class I'm failing and if it weren't for that, they would be holding me back. I was so mortified, and I always felt so ashamed and intimidated whenever I walked into a math class after that. So, I began to believe that there must be something wrong with me and I must be really bad at math.

When I got to high school, I was put in the lowest math which was basically the 8th grade algebra class with 9th slapped over it. I ended up making a very good friend in that class, and somehow her and I became the "geniuses" of our class. Thing is, our teacher, who was a P.E. coach as well (I just feel like it's interesting to point out because what math teacher wants to also teach P.E. and vice versa? lol). ANYWAY, --ADHD brain, remember? Anyway, her and I seriously RAN that class.

The teacher handed us the material and we just started writing our answers up on the board and explaining to the other kids how we figured it out. It was super empowering and it made me feel important and valued. By the end of that year, the teacher had recommended both of us for honors math the following year, which of course my parents took with a lot of skepticism. They asked me if that was what I really wanted. 10th grade math was honors geometry, so I didn't even realize how different it was going to be. I begged my parents because for once I wanted to look like an intelligent girl.

I was lucky to have such a patient teacher, and I ended up passing the class with a C. Despite that, it taught me a lesson. It taught me that when other people supported me, motivated me, believed in me, things made more sense, and I excelled. The idea "you're bad at math because you're a woman" started to fade and disappear out of my mind for a while, and it felt nice. After that, I had plenty of very difficult struggles with math, and I still do to this day. I had no idea what dyscalculia was. I had no clue. Now, it is more known that women with autism seem to have better scores in reading and writing, and struggle more in areas of math and science. This also matches up to the general statistics of the time, but I think it's worth noting here. Dyslexia was a much more common disorder, whereas dyscalculia had never been properly understood or studied.

When I went off to college, I decided for my general first math course to take statistics, because I hadn't been able to get to that in high school and I figured, hell, maybe I'll be better at THIS type of math. At first, no. I was so confused. My professor was this erratic and neurodivergent man who came into class and faced the board the whole time basically, but he talked out loud as he was doing the problems on the board. You had to pay very much attention to him to get what was going on, but once you did, you couldn't stop listening! It was a cool thing to see. One day in class, a light bulb just went off in my head, randomly. Something clicked, and I don't know exactly what, but the rest of the semester, I got As and Bs. I was super proud of myself. It was a small victory, and I didn't really tell anyone about it, but it made me feel proud for once and that I could finally understand something I thought I couldn't.

Okay I said I wasn't going to do this, but, as you know, I tend to have thoughts that just randomly come crashing through when I'm writing and typing so it can get a bit overwhelming. I want to take you back to 5th grade again, just for a second. When I was in 5th grade, we started learning more about science and history, and science was super intriguing to me. To give you an idea, I had a closet full of astrology books as well as a very random childrens book about the life of Louis Pasteur. (I have no clue why but I loved reading that book.) My brother, sister, and I always helped out the librarian at our elementary school in the summertime, upon the suggestion of my mom, because she was friends with the librarian and because she wanted to teach us that we needed to volunteer and help.

Those summers were honestly my favorite times. The library was so nice, especially on rainy days because the school was a 1960s style outdoor campus, so we could open the door and feel the cool summer rain and smell the leaves and the trees. I used to love helping organize books and then getting to sit down and read for a while. At the end, she would let us take home any of the discarded books we wanted. So, one year, I noticed a ton of books about space and astrology and I took them all home. I sat in my closet (don't know why, I just liked to sit in my closet sometimes because, it's me we are talking about here). Anyway, I had a stack of those books that was in danger of toppling over on top of me every time I went into my closet, and yet I risked it anyway. I had the books collapse on me a few times. Just a few. Haha. I would sit in there for hours and read those books and look at the pictures. I remember one year after the Scholastic Book Fair at school I convinced my mom to get me a subscription to National Geographic and some other magazine I can't remember the name of, but it was awesome. I got to see the world and a lot of the things I didn't learn in school I could see there. I felt kind of isolated a lot growing up, so I began to flip through those magazines and imagine myself there in those far and distant places, traveling and discovering something cool.

One day in 5th grade, our teacher had an article for us to read in science, and it was about the possibility of being able to live on Mars. This was around 1999. I remember looking at the pictures in the article and imagining and thinking what that would be like. How amazing and wonderful and cool! Then a few weeks later we had some people from NASA visit our school and that was like the coolest shit ever to me. I was so interested in it. Thing is, nobody noticed I was, and I was too afraid to speak, mostly at the thought of being seen as stupid. Eventually, those silly thoughts about Anne Marie becoming some brainy, curious person that could study science or math and do more than just sing and write and dance faded away. I was told college was the only way, and if you are poor, you have to take out federal loans. I was pushed into deciding my future when I wasn't ready, because I hadn't explored everything I could. I didn't have that time to discover myself. So when I went off to college, those poor beautiful National Geographic magazines that I had gotten for at least a year or two went into trash bags. I wish I hadn't thrown them away. I wish I hadn't left behind those discarded books that got me so interested in something that I never had the chance to further explore.

This is typical with a lot of the experiences of other neurodivergent girls in my generation. Nobody noticed our struggles, nobody listened to us, or what we needed, or what we wanted. We faded into the background and shrugged off. "Oh, she'll be fine. She'll figure it out." It was and never has it been that simple, but that's what was expected of me. To accept that "I'll figure it out and I'll be fine". I knew I wasn't fine. I knew there was something I needed more answers from. Even as I entered college and young adulthood, a lot was either kind of decided for me, or I was pushed into in order to be "like everyone else". The thing is, I'm not like everyone else. I'm me. I'm Anne Marie, and for the first time in a very long time, I'm completely comfortable being myself.