Neurodiverse Dissonance
I attended a small liberal arts college and studied studio art. Although I took many classes outside my major, I was drawn to art because my dyslexia did not hold me back. Art was the best way for me to study at the level and depth I wanted to because reading and writing did not slow me down or get in my way of expressing my learning and understanding. I worked very hard (80 or 90 hours per week) and was the top student in my class (my advisor told me this in confidence). I dove deep into my thesis. I went through many drafts of the work and the idea. Initially, my focus was self-doubt (ha!) By the spring, I realized that the work was really about my experience of neurodiverse dissonance (of course, I didn’t have the language to describe it in those terms at the time). I was attempting to capture the feeling of dissonance—the sudden and unexpected inability to understand or perform. One moment, I would feel like I understood what I was learning in class or that I could express my learning, and the floor would fall out from under me. I just couldn’t do what I was being asked of me. The feeling was sickening and electric. Like mysterious forces had zapped me, hell-bent on holding me back from my potential, it seemed like every time I was about to feel competent; I would be smacked upside the head and shown my place. In art, though, I didn’t feel that way. I could just do the work, and nothing got in my way.
Looking back, it’s striking to me that I was already wrestling with this idea of neurodiverse dissonance by visually trying to capture its feeling. After two semesters of getting the highest marks of the art students in all my art classes, I failed the oral defense of my thesis. It was the most academic aspect of the whole program. I had lulled myself into a sense of confidence and had not prepared for the academic nature of oral defense. I was the only senior to fail. I remember waking up that morning thinking I might win an award. It was devastating. At my school, you were given a second chance at the oral defense. I regrouped and prepared as needed for the academic nature of the defense, and I passed with flying colors.
The irony, of course, is that I experienced the most profound neurodiverse dissonance of my entire school experience while defending a visual representation of neurodiverse dissonance. They had all the seniors gather in a hallway and called us in one by one to tell us if we had passed or not. I went first. I remember my advisor asking me how I thought it went. I said something like, “There were some tough questions, but I thought it went alright.” She just looked at me and said, “You failed.” I still get a shiver up my spine, recalling that moment. Shocked, I walked out into the hallway and had to face all of my peers. They looked at me, expecting celebration, but made a thumbs-down motion, grabbed my backpack, walked out the door, and didn’t stop walking for about ten miles. Later, I learned that they were terrified that if I had failed, they must have also failed. But no, just me.
I only recently discovered the language of your neurodiverse story, but I have dedicated my entire career to helping other neurodiverse folks understand their stories so they can avoid dissonance as much as possible. It’s unavoidable, of course, but if you know your story, you can at least understand dissonance when it happens, which takes the sting out of it at least a little.
