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Does My Autism Make Me Seem Smarter?
In my first Medium post, “So…Here I Am: Receiving My ADHD & ASD Diagnoses,” I wrote about some of my classmates’ misconceptions,
“My classmates regarded me as the smartest kid in class. They held some stereotypes about the depth of my intelligence. In hindsight, I think that it was mostly because I always had my head in a book, learned a ton and was able to string this eclectic information in a way that perhaps made me appear smarter than I was (red flag). I bought into the stereotypes and thought that I was fucking brilliant.”
When I graduated from 8th grade and entered into prep school, I learned that this image wasn’t so true. In my school, there were even brighter kids that knew even more than me but they, also, knew how to use that information. This was a massive blow to my ego, as I bought into that label of “the smart kid.” It’s no exaggeration to say that it took me about two years for my ego to recover.
Prior to my diagnosis, I, once, talked to the parent of an autistic child. Their child was able to impressively absorb all kinds of obscure information. I remember mentioning something about how “smart” that their child was. The parent said something that really stuck with me and only made sense after I, later, started learning about autism. They admitted that, while the child was able to absorb large amounts on…
