Back to school blues
School trauma lasts a lifetime for autistic people
Brace yourself for the social media barrage of school photos of happy, smiling, excited children looking forward to a new academic year! And please spare a thought for the late diagnosed autistics. We are still recovering from this most re-traumatising time of our lives.
Every year without fail, in the final week of August, I can feel my back-to-school September panic burning from within my very core. In England, the Antiques Roadshow theme tune was the soundtrack to the onset of my Sunday evening dread. (Is this still on TV? I bet my 1980s childhood toys are considered antiques already!) This effect was a thousandfold on the final Sunday of the summer school holidays.
September is a too large, stiff, scratchy navy blue polyester school uniform. Isn’t she cute? She’ll soon grow into it.
The bulky, starched waistband digging in to my sore little tummy, irritated by the stitched-down concertinaed pleats. It doesn’t hurt. She’ll get over it.
A new classroom. Flickering lights… Scraping chairs… When am I allowed to go to the toilet? Oops, too late.
A new teacher. “Look at me when I’m speaking to you!”
Worst of all, the same mean classmates. I want to run away.
School was not a safe place for me to be myself when I was a child. The price of socially masking - day in, day out - was high. It was exhausting, and cost me a happy childhood. Evening meltdowns, school phobia, crippling stomach pains. Anxiety attacks. Bullying. Truancy.
When you look like everyone else, you are expected to behave like everyone else. The younger I was, the wider the emotional and social developmental gap seemed to be between my classmates and I. I couldn’t play their childish games, and they didn’t want me to. My characteristic “skills” were better appreciated by my peers the older we all got.
My auditory processing differences were problematic in classrooms, because the noise levels were distressing. But, in high school, those differences became my social currency. When everyone else wanted to know the lyrics to songs in the UK Top 40 they came to me, as I had them all memorised!
When my peers all stopped watching children’s TV shows and matured in line with their typical development, they finally showed interest in the British sitcoms and stand up comedies that I had been appreciating, and memorising, from infancy.
Autistic children are on a different neurodevelopmental trajectory from our peers. Our development is asynchronous, and looks more like a scattergraph at any given time. This persists into adulthood. We understand concepts way beyond the average peer in childhood, but miss out on knowing everyday things that are apparently common sense.
Asynchronicity is part of our lifelong neurodivergent presentation. I am currently spiralling on a downward trajectory, a tornado of autistic perimenopausal regression, if you will. Knowing that this is normal for many midlife neurodivergent women is enough to keep me sane. But it is not enough to keep me calm and cool. The Rage and hot flushes have returned, and I am working with my doctor to increase my oestrogen levels. The GnRH Analogue implant I had two and a half weeks ago wasn’t the instant miracle cure I had hoped it would be. At least, not yet.
My memories of school are sketchy, repressing the experience has been my life’s work. As I recall from one particular day in class, around nine years old, we were all called to the carpet for register. A familiar script: “Here, Miss”, we all said as our names were called one by one. Often, this was the only vocalisation I made that day, as I remember it.
Register complete, back to the scary randomness of the typical schoolday. My teacher named some children randomly to stand up, myself included. I don’t remember there being any context, and she wasn’t smiling so it can’t have been good news. A surprise, a shock! My worst nightmare. The atmosphere was tense, everyone was looking at me, awaiting the next topic with which to ridicule me. I was a constant target, but what was going to be fired at me this time?
“You all need to work harder to get your work finished before playtime,” my teacher told us. Nothing new there, all my school reports read “Must try harder”. Such quotes are used retrospectively by psychiatrists as supporting evidence in a later in life ADHD diagnosis.
My teacher, completely out of context told us all to “Pull your socks up.” I obliged, always compliant, although somewhat confused. Why was nobody else pulling up their socks like she had instructed? Everyone else knew what I didn't, that pulling up one’s socks is a (frankly, ridiculous) idiotic idiom for making more of an effort. I had taken it literally. That was it - extra fuel to add to the fire of my persistent bullying.
My cheeks were inflamed from embarrassment and chronic shame. The red hot heat of shame spread from the top of my red head, down my face, all the way down my neck and chest. I burned from shame, and I hadn’t done anything wrong.
The teacher laughed at me, along with everyone else. I couldn’t cry, the mask mustn't crack. These simple miscommunications are easily laughed off by people for whom it is the exception, not the norm.
As I write this now I am burning again, this time from hot flushes rather than shame. I am dressed minimally, considering it’s the last day of Winter here in Aotearoa New Zealand, trying to take in the cool air and release the intense internal heat. It’s not helping.
As my body temperature soars, my cognition and functioning are regressing again. I have been this low before. Earlier in my autistic perimenopause the burning hot flushes felt like I was being burnt alive at the stake, like a redhead accused of being a witch in centuries past. Redheads have always been unfairly slandered and targeted. We have great strength and resolve because of it, but it is unfair that we should have to.
The fact that I ended up as a qualified primary teacher is a reflection of my masking skills, which were effective enough to fool even myself into thinking I could cope within the education system! I couldn't, neither as a student nor as an educator. I’m now a late diagnosed PDA autistic ADHD former teacher who homeschools/unschools my own children. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I know lots of teachers who have left professional teaching, never to return, and who also keep their own children out of the education system.
I suspect some of them are also autistic, and Professor Tony Attwood would agree with me, if the last few seconds of this video (and the screenshot of his presentation, below) are anything to go by! Fun fact: I self-diagnosed after watching this video.
So please take extra care of your young autistics and neurospicy littlies as they endure the dread of another impending school year. It is unfortunate that it’s timed with the onset of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, with progressively fewer hours of daylight to buffer the internal gloom. The energy required of them to mask at school may impact on their evenings and free time.
It is frustrating that some of us are parenting our hormonal pubescent children, and meeting their rage and despair with our own. A cruel trick of nature! But we will surely all come through these simultaneous transitions somehow. We just need to feel comfortable surviving at this stage, and scroll past the photos of the happy children in their itchy school uniforms. The best years of my life, they were not. Scroll past the toxic positivity and the false perception that everyone is thriving but us, everyone is dealing with their own issues. We just need to remember to take off our masks now so they don’t suffocate us.
And on that cheerful note, I would love to know if my experience of school sounds anything like yours did? And please share any tips on managing these hot flushes because I just want a hysterectomy now, please and thank you… 😜 💕
Yes antiques roadshow is still on, yes I absolutely still had that Sunday feeling for a long time. I hated school, I didn't fit, it was overwhelming, I was bullied, it was hideous. I had a few wonderful teachers and later on some lovely friends but even the bits I liked were overwhelming.
I home educated my two from the start, initially because I knew my eldest was too young at 4 to go, so we started with the idea of doing it for a year... Then it continued, best thing I've ever done. My children thrived. I could have written this piece, so many parallels!!
I’m sorry your school experiences were so traumatic. Neither of my children thrived in school, which is why my younger son was home educated.
I probably had almost an opposite experience of school. I coped reasonably well in primary school, but struggled more and more in secondary school. In primary school I liked the routine, and the calm, and I liked wearing a school uniform (especially as it was optional in primary school). Somehow, in my primary schools, there were lots of opportunities for me to randomly wander around and stim, and I think that helped.
I hated the lack of routine in the summer and so September brought, and still brings, a huge sense of relief, as my mental health is usually not good by the end of August. It happens every year, and every year it surprises me. You’d think I’d learn!
No tips for the hot flushes, except to say they suck and I’m sorry you are going through them.