"You're Too Smart to Be Acting This Way" & The Lifelong Harm of Neuronormative Expectations: What My 'Gifted' Label Actually Cost Me - A Late-Diagnosed Autistic Perspective
My life with late-identified autism, healing from masking and forced assimilation, and learning about the neurodiversity paradigm, after being diagnosed Autistic at the age of 29.
A main theme in my upcoming book (NeuroDivergent Rebel’s The Weight of Normal) is the burden of society and other people expecting too much from us.
I also discuss how repeatedly falling short of people’s expectations and being punished or scolded for these perceived shortcomings can cause real harm, such as eroding self-esteem and creating a sense of self-abandonment and chronic inadequacy, especially for those of us who are NeuroDivergent.
The book is written from my perspective and lived experience as someone who grew up as an unidentified NeuroDivergent person (through the lens of Autism), causing many of my NeuroDivergent traits (especially my struggles) to be labeled as “behavioral problems” that needed to be extinguished.
I talk about how forced assimilation into a society that treats NeuroDivergent people like problems to be solved and is unwilling to flex to meet our needs can decimate our sense of self-worth, and I do it using my own life story as a springboard for these conversations.
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The Traumas of Not Knowing
I didn’t know I was Autistic for the first 29, almost 30, years of my life. I also didn’t know about NeuroDiversity or the variations found within human experiences of life, our minds, and the world around us.
Because of this, not knowing about myself (or the variety of experiences human minds and nervous systems can bring), I falsely believed there was one type of “good brain” and only one “good” way to be, that we should all aspire to.
Without the NeuroDiversity paradigm, I lacked the context needed to understand myself and the world around me. Without knowing where I personally fit within this paradigm, I was unable to understand myself or why people always seemed to expect more from me than I was capable of giving.
For most of my life, I compared myself to a NeuroTypical average - normative values, held and carried out by people with minds that were vastly different from my own, because that’s what society pushed me to do.
Pushing Me Until I Break
I learned to push myself past my breaking point because my best wasn’t good enough for the people around me (even though our best is literally all we can do).
In school and beyond, more was expected of me than I could give, and I was shamed so often for doing my best that I internalized the belief I—and my best—were insufficient.
Phrases like “If you would just try a little harder,” “I expected more from you, ”and “Just think what you could do if you actually applied yourself” cut me down like daggers over and over again. These words, loaded with assumptions about how hard I had tried based on what those around me could do easily, missed the fact that I had already done my best, putting in more work than many of my peers, only to have that work dismissed as laziness and lack of effort.
I was never a well-rounded student.
While every Autistic person is different, I fit the Autistic stereotype of having a spiky skills and abilities profile (being extremely gifted in some areas, like reading and writing, while struggling more than most people I know in other areas, or with things that many of my peers found simple).
For example, I taught myself to read when I was only one and a half years old, and was reading at a college level by first or second grade, but could not, for the life of me, stay still and quiet in my seat like the other kids in my class did.
I wanted so badly to “behave” and stay out of trouble in school, but I didn’t pick up on the unspoken rules of the classroom that my peers seemed to easily understand.
Often, the strengths I did have were used as “proof” that my weaknesses were not really weaknesses, but laziness and bad behavior.
Because I was good at reading, writing, and art, it was expected that I would also excel in other subjects, such as spelling, history, and math... but I didn’t.
“You’re too smart to be acting this way,” adults around me would say, as if my actions had been intended to cause trouble or annoy them.
I have a lot of feelings about the term “gifted” being used for NeuroDivergent young people.
For me, the ‘gifted’ label became a ‘got-ya’, used to deny support whenever I struggled or needed help.
Because I was perceived as “overly competent” and labeled “gifted” from a young age, I was pushed hard to force myself past my limits, because even when I was done, people around me always seemed to want more.
Eventually, I became an adult disconnected from my bodily needs.
It was as if I were running my life with my check engine light on, ignoring all signals from my body to rest or care for myself.
As a kid, I could sense hunger but learned to ignore it because school only let us eat once a day.
When I was young, I used to get the signal that I needed to go to the restroom, but I also learned to tune that out (because I got in trouble at school for asking for too many bathroom breaks).
I was systematically trained (often using shame) to ignore, check out, and disconnect myself from my body’s signals - because the needs associated with those signals were “inconvenient” to the people and systems around me.
In adulthood, I became an adult who doesn’t realize they are hungry until they are about to pass out from not eating, who intentionally dehydrates themselves so they can take fewer bathroom breaks, and who often doesn’t realize a bathroom break is necessary until it is almost too late (and the situation is urgent). This disconnection from my body’s needs is not a personal failing; it’s a lasting consequence of being asked, for years, to ignore the signals that made me human, all in pursuit of being “less of an inconvenience” to the people around me.
Because my teachers and other authority figures trained me to see my body and its needs as an inconvenience, I grew up hating my body, feeling as if it were an inconvenient thing that held me back, something to push and beat into submission.
I wore self-neglect and exhaustion like a badge of honor.
I saw my body, not something to care for, but as a burden I had been saddled with.
