You stopped performing for rooms that were not built for you. And then you walked into one anyway and remembered how far society still has to go.
A teacher came up after a speaking engagement and told me he genuinely could not understand how school could leave a mark that serious. He was not being dismissive. School worked for his brain. It was a good place for him. He had no frame of reference for what the other version felt like from the inside.
That gap, between the person the container was built for and the different thinker who had to survive it anyway, is still everywhere. In workplaces, in relationships, in rooms where you are the only one who knows what masking actually costs.
You were never the wrong fit. They just did not have a system advanced enough for the way your brain actually works. They used what they had. None of it ever fit right.
This Short is part of a larger conversation about school environments, IEPs, and what it actually costs different thinkers to never just get to be a kid. Watch the full video here: https://youtube.com/shorts/mJLPqlMLzsc
Transcription:
I get to just be authentically me all the time and so I forget sometimes that I’m even in environments that I should probably mask and make people more comfortable, and, and I don’t care much anymore.
I am reminded though, from time to time, of how far we have come and also how far we have yet to go as a society in embracing our different thinkers and as supporting and engaging them. So what brought this to the forefront and what really hit me hard was a combination of two things. One was a conversation I had recently after doing a speaking engagement where a gentleman came up and asked me very calmly, uh, he was a teacher and he said, “You know, I, I know I’ve seen these students.”
He goes, “I just– as you’re speaking and talking about how school was very traumatic for you and left an imprint on you in a very negative way,” he’s like, “I don’t, I just don’t quite get that, like that has not been my experience.” Obviously, he thrived in school very well, very gift- I could tell he was gifted and smart, and school worked with his brain, so he flourished.
It was a great place for him. And so we talked for a while, and I’ll come back to him because I came across a document, it’s fabulous. It is from Decoding Dyslexia, great website. Each state has their own particular website. This one came from the Decoding Dyslexia Minnesota.