Published on 12, July, 2020
My daughter was diagnosed with ASC four years ago and is now in the first year of A-levels. She is very bright and a natural independent learner.
She is studying essay subjects (RS, History and Politics) and is now really struggling with the task of essay writing. She is also absorbed, perhaps too absorbed, in the subjects she is studying. She is reading 1-2 books a week on her subjects that go well beyond the syllabus. She is following her curiosity and always wants to know more. On the face of it, this seemed like positive behaviour. Now I am not so sure.
Her challenge with the essay writing is that she struggles to make sense of the essay question. Terms are not defined with sufficient clarity and she can see many ways to address the question. When she does eventually pick a path to go down, she loses her way as the questions she has grow and grow. She finds it very hard to marshal her thoughts and often gives up.
When she does manage to write something, it is very good. She is getting top marks for the work she hands in. However, the effort and emotional drain associated with doing the work makes this all unsustainable.
She is slipping behind and is growing increasingly anxious. School refusal has now become a real issue again.
The school are now worried that she won't be ready for her year end exams and would like to talk to us about support and options. I suspect they'll want us to get some external support for her. Perhaps involving medication.
I don't really know what to do for the best.
Any advice?
This is 100% autistic (and dyslexic). And one can never be 'too absorbed' in to subjects. Life is for learning and the often preferred environment for the ADHD/Autistic self is days of uninterrupted free-refills to the fountains of knowledge.
The issue here is rarely about confidence or competence. In fact, if we're not careful, we might not have a proper evaluation of what we're actually missing and find our selves too self-assured. Doubt is my best friend, then, in the classic sense of this word. A pathway to humility and greater understanding. Doubt, like a wee Jiminy Cricket, as the friendly skeptic on my shoulder keeping me in check and asking the right questions, recollecting that others might not mean what they're saying/asking.
When I was in High School, I was allowed to give an oral report. I think my English teacher saw my frustration and intellect and simply made accommodations. They were more pressed to ensure we were intaking knowledge.
The first problem is more often that we're dealing with Nebulous questions, vague socialising, deliberately created for a non-autistic or NeuroTypical wiring which doesn't quite appreciate direct and thoroughly analysed communication. Instead of feeling refreshed by a shower of knowledge, they can feel offended or even stifled. These are quite possibly profoundly opposed ways of experiencing and perceiving communication, to the degree that Autistics are often misunderstood. I cannot count how many times I'm trying to be as clear as possible and the response is from another planet.
The second issue is that Everything is indeed, Connected. We don't 'seek' patterns. They're RIGHT THERE. They're hard to ignore. A thing is so obvious, but it's apparently this due to how our Autistic or ADHD wiring works (have a look at Monotropism.org). So where do you draw the line? There is a whole ecology at play in everything. It took me several years to work out a proposal for a small idea. It's now 10 years later and turning all my notes into a grant proposal - I'm going on 6 months. I know myself well enough that I do have to put a thing down for days or a week and look at what I wrote again and adjust it so it makes sense. At 14 I simply couldn't write a sentence, but because I was intelligent, it was overlooked for whatever reason.
It can take all day to craft an email now. The problem is with using spoken/written language itself. It's a left brain function and I believe we default too much to the Right. Internally, I have this amazing clarity playing out in my imagination and perhaps can better describe with poetry. If you were at an art gallery and had to express in detail every picture to someone who was blind, how easy would this be?