School years

As always my experiences with neurodiversity (in particular ADHD and Autism) are mine and I don’t claim to speak for anyone else.

It’s no wonder that I didn’t get a diagnosis of ADHD/Autism when I was younger. I grew up in the age of “kids are to be seen and not heard” which in my head is translated to “adults don’t want to hear if you have an issue”. So I wouldn’t have spoken up about anything that was wrong. I remember being chatty in my first year(s) of school (ADHD), but once someone told me not to talk in class I became very, very quiet (Autism). It was agony if a classmate asked me a question because if I didn’t answer I was being rude, but if I did answer I was breaking the no talking rule. So I was able to fly under the radar and “get away” with being neurodiverse. My daughter is showing lots of neurodiverse traits (I don’t have a diagnosis for her) and I was wondering why she seems to be finding things much harder than I remember. I think some environmental things have an effect – my primary school was in an old building with big rooms, high ceilings, non-fluro lights, lots of air flow which is quite different to the situation my daughter is in. And I think there was less pressure on teachers to fit quite so much into the school year. So maybe if I was at school now I would be diagnosed earlier.

Anyway… moving on. When I was about 13 I decided what I wanted to do for a career. I wanted to be an engineer like my dad – I did Tech Drawing, Physics, Chemistry plus the other subjects I had to of course. The next year we migrated to Australia and I went to a school that didn’t do Tech Drawing and I didn’t get a high enough mark in general science (damn geology) to let me do physics or chemistry. So there went my dream of being an Engineer and I was left having no idea what to do. I was 14 and trying to navigate this new country and thinking of a new career goal was not really my top priority. Plus there were a few other subjects I wanted to do but because they didn’t line up on the timetable I wasn’t allowed to do them, so I mentally threw up my hands and said who cares! I was kinda good at computing so I ended up doing that at uni. And thankfully I was good enough at it to overcome my lack of interest 😉 Also thankfully uni had just enough structure that my ADHD was kept under control.

But then it was graduation and time to find a job. All the opportunities seemed to be pretty boring so I decided to stay at uni and do honours, and then I started a PhD. I did my honours in Artificial Intelligence and I really enjoyed that. There was still enough structure to keep me on track, but also flexibility in what I could do, and I ended up with first class honours. My PhD attempt didn’t go so great. It started off well, I had a good supervisor and I started to do some research with another professor (he was working with Nonmonotonic Logic). From the research work I ended up creating a programming language and presenting a paper at AI’92 in Hobart. That was fun. Unfortunately my PhD wasn’t so successful as there was too little structure for me to keep on track, plus my supervisor left after the first year and passed me other to another one that wanted me to do a completely different project. Of course I thought he knows best and went down that track only to find 2 years later that it was completely the wrong track. 🤦‍♀️ Withdrawing from my PhD was a hard decision to make; I was just descending into depression and my self confidence was taking a huge knock but I was also embarrassed to admit I couldn’t do it. I was starting to really loath computers as well and decided I never wanted to work with them again! (It was all very dramatic 😉)

From then to now (age 51) it’s been a really long road of studying different things, having many different jobs, and trying to figure out what I want to do for work. Turns out nothing has really stuck, but I’ll do another post about that sometime. I don’t have any regrets because I am happy where I have ended up, and even if I had been diagnosed earlier, not migrated to Australia, or gone a different direction at any of the “sliding doors” moments, who knows how things would have turned out.