Published on 12, July, 2020
Just curious about people who slipped through the net, so to speak. How did you cope with school? I developed quite good ways of hiding how much i struggled. It helped that i was in most of the bottom sets, as no one really cared back then. I was in the top set for biology, i excelled in that area. Nothing else part from sport. I hated going in every day, i was like a zombie....i literally cant remember my last year in school. Ive blanked it out completely.
Arrogant though it might sound (it's my trumpet and I'll blow it if I want to!) I excelled academically - I inevitably got the top average grades in the end-of-year exams, at an academically selective school, straight A*s at GCSE, and my definition of miserably failing my A-Levels (because I got glandular fever which turned into some kind of post-viral fatigue and I missed months of school) is getting ABB rather than AAA and thus not getting into Oxbridge.
I was crap at anything that required hand-eye co-ordination, mind you (why must autism so often come with free dyspraxia?), and good luck getting me to do anything that I considered "too easy." I also hated PE so much that I once put all my PE kit on the school bonfire... my mum was not best pleased!
Now, don't get me wrong, I like being revoltingly clever, but I tend to think that, if I wasn't, all the "quirks" - the stubborn behaviour, being a loner, the occasional meltdown, being "rude/blunt/tactless" - might have got picked up on, and I might have had an autism diagnosis rather sooner, which might have made a lot of things in my earlier adult/professional life rather easier. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but as a teacher, my autistic students are so obvious to me now that I wonder how I was missed.