Fastest reader in the class

A few encouraging words will change an Autistic child's life.

“Fastest reader in the class.” Miss Brinton, I suppose. Her name is etched in my brain from first grade, for she was the one who shared it with me and the entire class. And boy, was I proud. For the next entire decade, books were on the menu. I profess, no one in my life has single-handedly changed me for the better than my favorite of all time, Miss Brinton.

Things got off to a rocky start. On the first day of first grade; sounds cliche and perhaps sentimental, but I wouldn’t be so lucky on that day as I started trekking home at noon. Just like kindergarten. But Oops! I got lost, headed home the wrong way at an hour I was supposed to still be in school.

My old town is called Dixie or St. George, Utah. With a defiant and controversial southern reference, Dixie was a fitting title. That town liked conformity, and there’s a strange conformity in southern defiance. A college town and very a very small community at that time, I was soon found walking past the local college by a couple of aware students. Luckily, it had been drilled into my head how to get home from the Mormon Temple block.

Soon, I was wetting my pants at school at random times. I never have put it all together, but there was something about my focus being interrupted, that made me feel physical heat up my temples and beads of sweat on my brow. It was as if the inconvenience of being forced to use the bathroom while I was studying the 3 inch centipede crawling under that rock was an overwhelm to my senses. This was classic Oppositional Defiance (OD), and a strange force in my life. That will be a deep dive on another page.

The result was the same at every setting. Someone would notice my wet pants and my carefree way of ignoring social cues and just strutting around with stinky shorts. I would be again humiliated, but as it went on, a sort of bleeding together effect took hold. By the time I got a hold of myself the next year, there wasn’t a cell in my body that would genuinely believe anyone wanted to play with me or even wave hello.

That’s when I got my first pair of glasses. Welcome to second grade. My vision was 20/400. Now, I can’t say it was from always sitting a foot away from the TV or my obsession with books, but imagine needing to be 20 feet away to see the same as someone with normal vision can see 400 feet away. Or more simply, the big E on the vision chart was barely recognizable. By the time I was done peeing my pants at school, I had four eyes!

It was then, nerdy and alone, I sort of disappeared until I was noticed in the fifth grade. All the ampersands were marked obsessively to the right on the graph at “13” on the entire SAT test that year. It felt good to be known as ‘smart,’ but there was a furthering into obscurity and social darkness. I was proven exceptionally intelligent, but I was being often told a different message; it did not matter. A kid winning a baseball game mattered. Getting the social support of my peers? Now that would really blow my socks off.

I was getting heavily into piano lessons by that time. It was then I met my master teacher, Lu Jennings, a profoundly inspiring music teacher at the college. She was the second person to see me and later celebrate my gifts. It was a great honor to play Fantaisie Impromptu by Chopin at age 18 at her mother’s Orchid Lady celebration, an annual social elite toast to a truly refined lady and Patreon of the local arts.

In seventh grade, I took 13th place in the State of Utah at the MathCounts tournament. But silly me, why would I expect the teachers to recognize me in the school and train me to win nationals? I wasn’t approached to pursue scholarships or even upgrade my classes. Some personal effort was privately pursued while I was studying for the competition, but by that time, I slowly started not applying myself. The Algebra teacher was smart, but wouldn’t lift a finger. I, on the other hand, could do it all in my head and blurt the answer out loud in the bullet round. And yet, the entire next year, no one came and asked me to compete for the final age bracket.

Meanwhile, In eighth grade, a seemingly meaningless event took over my psyche. A very popular kid who happened to have my same first name, made an offhand comment, asking, “Now, J, why would any, and I mean any girl be interested in You?” Those words have echoed and hurt me like a hall of mirrors, for they were a further reverberation to the time my body decided no one wants what I have to offer.

That was when I started masking my weird social behavior and made being normal my religion. And as it is with religion, it was damn nearly impossible. My grades sunk into the dust of despair. A deep depression seeped in that year. I couldn’t lift my head off the desk at school. Nor at home. I was sealing my own educational fate.

Learning to accept myself has been a high adventure for the last decade. Now, at age 51, a floodgate of feelings have become available, long ago locked away in profound disuse. I strongly resisted knowing or acknowledging my Autism at first, because the masking was so complete. In my twenties, my oldest sister mentioned I might have ADHD or Autism similar to my older brother and Dad, and I nearly flipped my lid and threw a fit.

Being autistic, I had read extensively (and then some) and knew the science about Autism from the 90’s was more of a warning label and how to deal with the hazardous materials of handling an autistic child. With that attitude, it took two decades more to admit the truth to myself. Now, in my fifties, I am learning to view my mind through a whole new lens. Daily life is experienced without internal judgment, and my mental stream is appreciated on a quantom level most people will never realize. That is a great ‘New Normal.’

I share this, not as a grievance or desire for negative attention. You see, that is always the perception. I have framed houses for over 20 years. I liked the solid sense of accomplishment, and of course, the numbers and mathematics. Scribbles of Algebra equations line hundreds of stair walls in Southwestern Utah, now covered in sheetrock. They usually picked me to build the stairs because of my gifts and mathematical precision. Redoing an entire staircase is expensive. But they always kept me ‘in line.’ One guy talks politics, that’s OK but when I simply drift over to my Save the Earth Pet, “there he goes again.”

But in a way I will never fit into a construction setting. Try as I might, I behave in an Autistic fashion, blurting my honest thoughts loudly and freely, often being silenced and filed away to another location. My pet conversations do tend to manifest sooner or later (Ok, the same day.) Then in a while I will overhear them talking about their trucks and why their wives need to be nicer. Same old same old. Often it is as if allowing me the natural experience of belonging would become a beast of burden for them to maintain, so why try? And they don’t. Or maybe they do. How would I even know?

If any of our community will you make yourself vulnerable, as I have, and share a lovely awkward or beautiful experience in your Autistic journey, please add to our story. We are not alone.

Most of all, I want to thank those who welcome, build up, and really see the tiny wandering divergent child who can barely see, let alone socially comprehend, what is happening to their confidence and self care. With a little encouragement, maybe we all can have that fifteen minutes of fame, and that turning point can be the pilot light for another soul who craves that same feeling I treasured from that day my favorite teacher Miss Brinton announced, “You’re the fastest reader in the class!”