Allowing disability and giftedness to coexist
I’ve been writing a lot lately and one of the things I wrote last week echoes what I share here. I have always felt like there are multiple parts of me that I must navigate and negotiate with in order to do anything, and I mean ANYTHING. I have to make constant deals with myself in order to tackle the demands life throws at me and I was unsupported in any of my disabilities until very recently. That means my coping mechanisms are off the charts for me to have gotten this far professionally and personally. I’m trying to unpack them and figure out where it’s over compensation and where it’s just enough. I am disabled and gifted, in that order, but for much of my life I put it the other way around and actually just ignored, bullied, projected or disowned the disabled parts of myself because of my own internalized ableism. No one could be harder on me than me.
When I had kids and saw myself reflected in them and then in their diagnoses, it was nothing short of identity breaking. I was almost coping after I had my son but that really meant heavily masking and putting too much stress on him as a toddler to maintain the illusion, and when my daughter came it just about broke me. I found therapy through the Reproductive Mental Health program here but at the time I carried a misdiagnosis of bi-polar II. They put me on mood stabilizers. I didn’t cry as frequently but I was not more stable, just less reactant. The overwhelming external stimuli landed the same but my ability to respond and process and react was dulled, slowed, like a wet blanket was over me all the time. I went off them when I was diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD. It took a long time to wean and when I started ADHD meds I cried. I couldn’t believe how much clearer the world was, how much more vibrant and less, well, dulled I felt. It was life changing. I could finally quiet my thoughts a bit. For over a decade doctors had listened to me say my head never stops and prescribed me anxiety meds. But my head never stopping was not anxiety, it was ADHD and Autism and a nervous system that had been set to vigilant my whole life. My thoughts were not worries, they are just constant, making it hard to focus and prioritize because the thoughts are intrusive and relentless. Discovering PDA and learning about my neurotype and why I had to internally negotiate so much was so helpful for me to learn how to live with myself and my children, who are just like me and not.
I am now trying to live within my own rhythms and needs and listen to my body more to help develop the interroception and proprioception I lack. My life lacks the structure that most people exist within because my brain rejects most attempts at setting up what it perceives as “demands,” or expectations, and routines fit those for me. My brain does not form habits. Every day I must find the urge and desire and time to brush my teeth. It is not just a given. There are no habits outside of latte rituals and stimming for regulatory purposes like biting my nails. I do not feel hunger or thirst and would forget to eat or drink if I didn’t set reminders. I live outside of scheduled time except for my family responsibilities. I perceive having to feed myself as a demand I don’t feel like having to do most days. My autonomy drive is bigger than my survival drive. Medical or self care appointments hardly get made and are frequently cancelled. To Do lists quickly become lists of things to avoid so they don’t get written to begin with. Sometimes my nervous system perceives loud noises or conflict as so threatening I become temporarily frozen like a toad playing dead, capable of speech but not movement until I feel safe again. Plans must live as nebulous seeds just beneath the unspoken surface until it is time to do them, otherwise I will rebel against my own desires which can become demands I can’t fulfill if I even just look forward to them. I must never expect much of myself or I end up rocking in the same spot in my kitchen for hours while biting my nails. And yet…
The gifted parts of me will not stop accomplishing and making, will seize every moment the disabled me isn’t looking to try to change the world for the better. The gifted me did well in school, studied Mandarin, lived abroad in China for years, played on the Shanghai International Ultimate Frisbee team, got my MFA in New York, taught full time, and had two kids. The gifted me cannot help but put the pieces of the bigger pattern I see together, whenever I can, always and never it feels like because of the lack of structure to my fire hydrant of creativity. Everything is a material to me. Every amount of time is a valid amount of time to work on something, sometimes several things in several rooms, at once. There are times when I feel multiple, like my brain is being stretched across disciplines and materials in a way that does not feel sustainable and I wonder about the coincidence of sharing a birthdate with Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas. And there are others when I will hyper focus on one thing for a surprise amount of time until time feels like it does not exist and I have stepped out of it entirely. My intensity is the cost of my gifts.
Autonomy at all times requires trusting the decisions in the moment instead of needing anxiety and ego to pre-determine them. I cannot predict what I will do because often, when I do try to set the agenda, I will feel a deep, inescapable pull to deviate from my own plan. That’s the PDA. To not see this as a major flaw and to learn to work with it has been life changing. I trust myself now that I understand myself and have stopped judging my disabilities and instead started listening to them as my natural limits. This inherent trust and knowledge in myself leads me to be able to see a longer term picture and narrative instead of only focusing on the short term productivity most brains are forced to think about. I frequently get lost in thoughts that span not only my own time here but history and the future. Without the constraints of needing to produce, I have been afforded a bigger picture from multiple perspectives along my meandering route. Most people only have the ability to see from their spot on the conveyer belt of success and they spend a lot of time judging their position on the belt in a way that leaves them feeling inadequate. I do not do that. I do not spend much time at all concerned with my own adequacy now, just my values and my capacity to carry them out. I’m at the point where stitching together my views for others to be able to see is becoming easier because I’ve allowed the gifted and disabled to integrate without judgement. I am at peace with who I am. I am deeply flawed, but I am also deeply good and deeply worth it.
photos from a self portrait session last year responding to the light on my bedroom wall.