If I had been diagnosed as a child, AND if my education had been handled properly, AND if my stepfathers had been prevented from bullying me...
Then it would've been a good thing.
But, frankly, the way AS is handled in the schools nowadays practically gives the poor Aspie youngster a "ret*d" label--despite that, by definition, he has a normal IQ at the very least.
I might have easily been taught that my "disability" meant that I could do nothing, and was responsible for nothing, and was simply a drain on the world's resources. My stepfathers (there were two of them) tried to instill this in me enough as it is; and had I been diagnosed with AS, they might have had more material for belittling, and I less reason to doubt their discouraging pronouncements.
As it was, I grew up believing that I was eccentric, not like other children, but very intelligent--all of which was true. But I also grew up without any knowledge of things that came easily to other children, from personal hygiene to sleep-over etiquette.
Had I been given an education which helped me to use the strengths I had, while educating me in the subtleties of social interaction, impulse control, and the maintaining of one's attention without hyperfocusing.... I might have been better off.
But to wish for an education exactly suited to someone with my eccentric nature and nontypical mind is to wish for a utopia that exists for very few people.
I will be satisfied with what I had--a childhood without the stigma of a "disability"--in the knowledge that, except for the abuse by the aforementioned stepfathers, it was probably the best I could have hoped for.
24 Jul 2006, 3:44 pm
