When I was a toddler, I was diagnosed as an autistic. In the many years that have passed since then, I’ve always dismissed that judgement as a misdiagnosis. Now I am not so sure.
It was true:
- That I didn’t speak complete sentences until I was nearly five.
- That I was obsessively reading at college-level by the age of 10.
- I never had any trouble with dyslexia but, I seemed utterly clueless about simple arithmetic until well into junior high school.
- That I didn’t really understand how to tell time with analog clock faces until I was twelve.
- That I had the hardest time learning how to make change because some non-decimal units didn’t fit into the pattern I had constructed in my head.
- That I had to go a speech therapist throughout the ages of six to thirteen because of a persistent lisp (both with S and TH sounds.) and stuttering.
- And of course I was very shy, overly sensitive and easy to hoodwink.
But perhaps I am imposing order on something–my life–that has none. Self-diagnosis is always suspect. Then again I’ve always been very frustrated with the way I have been very intelligent in some ways and very stupid in others.