She can’t read yet
So I didn’t technically learn to read until I was seven years old. When I say technically, I distinctly remember that I could actually read, but the process of my brain sending the words to my mouth to speak was difficult and I all but refused to do it until I felt comfortable with it. The feeling of teachers telling me that I had to do it out loud was aggravating, especially when they didn’t believe that I was actually reading. They thought I was pretending because I didn’t want to be embarrassed when I just didn’t want to because it was too hard to make it work.
Sitting in meetings about my nonprogress was futile, considering that I really was reading, just not the way they wanted me to, which upset me immensely. In hindsight, if I was able to explain back then that I could read, it probably could have been figured out sooner that it wasn’t a reading problem, but a speech problem. You see, I remember these meetings and the non-progress I was making in kindergarten and first grade, but I do not remember my mother getting the Aspergers diagnosis. The kicker is that it was never brought up in front of me, so I had no idea that it was even possible that my quirks were all
there as symptoms of something that I could work to overcome.
As soon as my brain began sending the signals to read out loud, I was doing it. Slow at first, but they quickly realized that I really could read, I just didn’t like to do it out loud. It was a well-known fact that by the age of four I had the vocabulary of an adult, using antagonizing correctly in a sentence as well as instinctually knowing what words meant. The problem was that I would speak so fast at times that the words would come out in the wrong order. Even as an adult, I find that I have to hand write anything that needs to be well thought out before I type it because my hands can move as quickly as my mind, which in turn makes things come out in the wrong order. When I am editing a book, I must let the computer read it back to me because my mind reads the information so fast that sentences are read as a whole and I miss the errors within the text, whether it’s a missing letter or a grammatical error that I can only spot when I hear it.
By the age of thirteen I was devouring 400-page books in a couple days and then by sixteen it would only take a few hours. Now, with audiobooks so readily available, I have an eBook playing between eight and ten hours a day…. It’s calming for me. A rule I made for myself a few years ago was this; if I have enough time to relax and read a book, then that time should be spent writing. I can listen to the books I love while doing other things that I have to do as an adult.
When I was 35, I began working with adults on the spectrum with a focus on keeping them living independently and saw so many of my own issues in the lives of those I was helping. Two of the staff members brought up the fact that I was hired because I have lived through it and my brain did a deep dive into why they would say something like that. After a few days of muttering, “are you kidding” and “how in the world did I not figure this out years ago?” I began asking questions and even my husband looked at me and chuckled. He had told me a decade earlier (we had a 9 year break between the first time we were together and our recent marriage at the time) that he thought I had Aspergers. On the flip side of this, I didn’t know what Aspergers was and didn’t see it as a compliment as most would assume.
One of the people I questioned about this revelation was my biological mother (I no longer speak to her, however that is another story all together) she confirmed that I did get an Aspergers diagnosis at six years old and then went further to say that knowing that fact would not have made a difference in my life. The long, drawn-out ranting that she went on about after this equated to something akin to “that diagnosis is just an excuse that intelligent people use to skirt around their bad behavior.” After a few conversations around it and lining up a lot of the timeline that I had never considered before, I found out that she gave up custody of me shortly after the diagnosis. This was right around the time that she was expecting me to lie about the things that were happening in her home. She must have come to the realization that I couldn’t lie with conviction to save myself. If I ever gather up the courage it takes to write about that time in my life, it will definitely have a big trigger warning posted on it.
I am a savant artist. I can see someone create something and replicate the technique without batting an eyelash. The problem with this lies with the hyperfocus involved which takes my focus from the world around me. I absorb everything that is happening around me as I am in the zone, yet it is almost as if I am underwater, it can sometimes take fifteen minutes to answer a question my husband has asked me at times because I am just too zoned into something. He knows and understands me so well that he fully anticipates that if I am snapped out of that zone, I will be cranky for a little bit before regulation can kick in (I thank everything that I don’t become tearful, and emotion driven when it happens anymore). So, when he needs me quickly, he also has this innate ability (pretty sure its intentional) to make a few loud noises, which makes my brain go “danger! Upset person around me!” due to my past experiences and I will snap out of it. When I snap out of it in this way, I am a little off kilter, yet I can be present much faster.
As a child and teenager, there were countless times per day that I was snapped out of that zone by an adult figure who only knew what they needed and that was my immediate undivided attention. That is something that was hard for me and took a lot of effort. Not only can I not maintain eye contact for long, but I need something to look at or do while I am focusing. My teachers all knew that my notebook would have every word spoken written in my notes, not only the notes themselves, along with beautiful scrollwork in the margins.
The absurd notion that I stop being emotional on demand when they were intentionally distracting me from something important was ghastly, yet almost always landed me in trouble when I couldn’t stop. My grounding wasn’t the go-to-your-room kind either. It was forced to sit in a living room with kids going haywire all the while SpongeBob is blasting on the TV, and I am not allowed to escape. This was true torture for me, and it was all in the guise of “you need to spend less time in your room. It’s like you hate your own family.” The fact that grounding for me consisted of the removal of reading and sitting in my bedroom to escape the chaos is still upsetting to me (that would be like telling my daughter that she can’t go hug her favorite chicken, Patern). And all the while they had my school records and knew that I was diagnosed with Aspergers several years prior.
But Alas, Aspergers was just an excuse to allow bad behavior in smart people. If I did anything they deemed bad behavior, they took my quiet and anything else I loved to do, such as reading, creating artwork or writing. Those were the things that were taken away from me on a regular basis. I always found it comical that I was such a horrible teenager, yet the only thing they could ground me from was books, music and my bedroom…. Hmm. That means, I had no friends, no reason to sneak out of the house, nothing that a neurotypical teenager would get grounded from would work on me. I worked, read, slept and got good grades… yet my mouth (for example, correcting someone grammatically or specifying a time that was asked about) would get me in trouble without any input from my mind.
At one point I was even told that I wasn’t allowed to keep a journal. This was because I would write everything down. EVERYTHING. Including all the things that I was doing to be punished and what was taken from me when I was punished. My journals started going missing, with the insistence that I was only writing lies in them. My only question to my dad was “No one is supposed to read someone’s journal…. Why would I lie to myself about what is happening?” Yup, I got grounded even longer for that one. It was my aunt who told me to keep writing and not to leave it anywhere. Always keep it on me and it won’t be read by anyone else so that is what I did.
I stopped journaling when I was with my daughter’s father because he called it a ‘hate book’. I never understood it, but he wasn’t the best of people anyways, so I was better off not putting my thoughts on paper when he was around. I learned how easy it is to be manipulated by people in that relationship and thank everything that I was able to get away from it.
My love for reading everything I could find in the fantasy fiction genre, turned into a love for writing and further, led me to write my first book when I was 16 … in my head. I put the first 100 pages on paper when I was 21 and then I burned it because it sounded too much like another book I had read. In hindsight, it wasn’t the same as all the others, it just wasn’t the me I wanted to share. The main character was stuck in a tower for half the novel with no one knowing that she existed…. Sounds familiar. I think I wanted to keep that part of me to myself.
Then, in 2021, I wrote 140,000 words in a month. Able to be a mom with the use of an alarm clock sitting on my desk to ensure I was coming out of my hyperfocus on a regular basis and taking breaks, I could not believe the book that was just falling out of my head onto the screen in front of me. That month was transitioned into the first 1.5 books out of the Knightvale Trilogy.
The time that I wasn’t sitting in front of my computer, I was handwriting the dialogue that would end up in my book for the chapters. For some reason, that is how I write. In pieces. I know my entire storyline as well as what problems emerge and are solved in every chapter before I begin writing. It keeps me on point. From there, I write the dialogue by hand, so I am slowed down by the process of handwriting a scene. Knowing exactly what is said allows me to know exactly what the characters know versus what the reader knows. It goes on and on, every chapter taking about 10 hours to compile then finish. Anyone who has read my book so far has given me props on the clear speed at which the novel progresses as well as my use of the active present voice throughout. Now I just need to figure out amazon kindle’s software to make reading it on the devices an easier time.
