A mind-bendingly difficult thing from my past that i’m coming to terms with:

I might have been screened for and possibly diagnosed with autism back in grade school, or some sort of gifted + autistic, although that was before “doubly exceptional aspie” was a thing (early 1970s).

I went through the Very-Concerned-Teacher-to-shrink-to-non-staff-specialist gauntlet for a while. I definitely was being assessed for cross-gender behavior; pattern matching games and a “mind in the eyes” test was part of that.

That’s mostly sorted for me now, or sorted enough that I’m slowly moving from being floored by it to acceptance and integration of what happened.

What’s still too raw to talk about in much detail: realizing that writing and music was the communication vector that might have kept me from getting aggressively ABA’d or institutionalized in some way or another, right at the moment when modern “child autism” was starting to be acted upon (as in, ABAing autistic children). So, it’s a toss-up as to what would’ve happened, had I not lucked into writing and music as “ok, well, you’re ‘creative and sensitive'” as a result. Things went from “You’re a problem. *sounds alarm*” to “You’re innately talented, so of course you’re that way”, quickly, come fifth grade (homeroom teacher) and seventh grade, partially. I never was labeled as “gifted” within the school system, but writing and later, music was how I found my way to forms of support that were actually supportive, rather than more aggressive interventions, both informally and formally.

It also was a way to express myself creatively in a classroom setting, rather than *stacks small stones away from the other kids* or *runs into the closet, overwhelmed*. In other words, I was “learning how to behave”, so the early negative reinforcement machinations of ABA-like things wound themselves down. This unfortunately did *nothing* to stop students themselves from aggressing against me, but it did change the classroom dynamics, including the times where I was flunking out, in a class where I had tested beyond grade level or otherwise was capable of doing the work. The right-wing “take” on this is to attribute this to laziness, but…well, no, actually.

Same goes for my family — if my parents were presented with a diagnosis of autism, or as was starting to get phased out, schizophrenia as a clinical “who even knows” place-holder for autism (this all happened in the early 1970s), it’s very possible that my parents took one look at the school system and attempted to intervene on their own instead, because that was my family, back then. (This was before my father’s drinking, and the subsequent bullying and aggression kicked in.)

So when my active interest in spinning and stacking games shifted to reading the dictionary and their encyclopedia set, then once encouraged, to writing and music, it was tolerated, and accepted, both in my family and at school. “Narrowly escaping a worse fate” is my best guess and operative assumption, for now.

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