Ms. Que BanhWhen you were young & in elementary school, do you remember what subjects that you struggled with the most & why?
I'm just curious about this. Also, please indicate if you're ND or NT - when responding. Thank you.
Quasit@PhoenixSerenity
Math was always hard for me. But what I HATED was gym class. I still remember the gym teacher. She would divide the class into two teams to play against each other, and she ALWAYS put all the good athletes together on one team. The "losers" team always got crushed.
I, of course, was always put on the loser team (I'm the kid who was always picked last when kids were picking who was going to be on their team). One day after we got crushed by the good athletes, the gym teacher started yelling at us for being so bad at sports.
I lost my temper.
"Of COURSE the score is always lopsided!" I screamed. "You always put all the GOOD athletes on one team!"
"Oh, and you think *you* could do better?" she sneered.
"Yes!" I answered.
For some reason she decided to show me up. She told me to divide the class into teams. So I did, as fairly as I could. Then we played a game between the two teams.
The final score differed by ONE point between the two teams.
She never said a damned word to me again.
Gym teachers are scum.
@Quasit I was ostracized from gym classes. It was very noticeable & made me feel like an even bigger outcast.
@PhoenixSerenity
Everyone ostracized me, too. I was beaten up several times a day, every day. Back then teachers didn't do a damned thing about bullies. If I'd had access to a gun, I'd have brought it to school.
I read all the time - in class, by myself during lunch in the cafeteria, and during recess huddled as far out of sight as I could get. But they always got me at recess. Hunting me down was one of the favorite pastimes of the many bullies at my school.
In retrospect, it's amazing that I'm not a lot more damaged than I am!
@Quasit I was beaten up a lot in elementary school days too, until I lost my shit & fought back. I broke a school window during my public freak out too, after knocking down the bully who had been terrorizing me(and others) for 2 years.
@PhoenixSerenity I fought back two times, but I wasn't any good at all. I tended to go blind, somehow. The beatings finally stopped when I decided that I wasn't going to give a damn any more. I wasn't going to cringe and hide. I told the bullies to go ahead and do whatever they were going to do; I didn't give a shit.
That was in my first year of high school, as I recall. I was never beaten up again.
Well, except by my ex-wife. But that's a different story.
sport of sacred spherical cowsOnce during a melt-down, where myself "spazzed out", my vision was reduced to black and white. That would be the time myself got kicked out of a Quaker elementary school.
@beadsland @Quasit I had a full out, autistic meltdown but didn't know what it was when it first happened to me. I was really young & unaware of my ND brain at the time.
Yeah, this was early grade school, so had no context for understanding what was happening either.
Personally, would love to be able to say my meltdown (plural? no idea, recall* too little of childhood to say for certain) was due to autism, as that would indicate being part of a group of folk with common experiences.
But the more myself am educated about the lived experiences of autistic folk, the more clear it becomes that my neurospicy brain ain't fit that designation.
*Probably only recall that event because of the trauma afterward of being told that would not be coming back to the Quaker school. Though, of course, don't recall being told. Only the fact that being told happened.
@beadsland @Quasit I remember my full out meltdown experience like it happened yesterday. It started on the tetherball court where the longtime school bully called me a "gook chimp" & then threw a soccer ball at my head. I tried to ignore him & kept playing tetherball. He wouldn't stop bullying me. Called me a "Chink gimp" & kicked me. I lost it at that point. I started screaming at him in mixed English & Teochew. I hit him with my crutches & kicked him in the belly & balls, when he was down. I took soccer ball & punched him in face with it. I ripped his shoes off & put one into his mouth. I smashed one big school window, right after & screamed : Will you teachers listen to me, NOW?!?!
It was a dramatic day.
Cannot imagine myself having enough awareness of my own or the bodies of others to make such a coordinated assault.
The closest comparison would be late teens. Was living in group foster home by then. Felt a rage building up for days, and wanted to just sit in the basement and fume. But the counselors had promised the other kids they'd all get a day at the mall. Told them that would not be a good idea to bring me along, but they weren't going to spare a counselor to babysit just me.
Sat on the edge of the lower level fountain at the mall, fuming. Some of the other kids stood on the upper level and started chucking pennies at me. Tore off chasing one of them (a girl that myself was quite close to, but she was the only one still present by the time myself got up the stairs), finally catching them at the other end of the mall, where the staff at Footlocker (in their referee uniforms) had to pull me off.
1/2
@beadsland @Quasit My full meltdown was nowhere close to a coordinated assault & neither was the bully's attack on me. I was just fed up & that day, the bully hit my tolerance limit. I went completely savage on the schoolyard grounds. Nothing coordinated. I was in full out meltdown, retaliation mode & I had to be pulled into school by 4 full grown adults. I was tiny but full of adrenaline & pure rage - it took all 4 of them to fully contain me, while I was screaming at them - THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT! YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED HIM LAST YEAR! YOU MADE ME FIGHT BACK! YOU'RE USELESS ADULTS!
Coordinated as in bodily coordination, not conspiracy.
You targeted specific body parts (belly, balls, face, your own foot to remove a shoe, his mouth). To my dyspraxic brain, that's more coordinated than even trying to dance.
In any physical altercation myself have been involved in, it's all just a discombobulated blur of limbs with me flailing hopelessly, maybe managing to hit something solid, without taking in what it might have been, by sheer accident.
The idea of being able to process the movement of my own body, let alone the position of someone else's, during an episode of rage... 404. Tilt. Does not compute.
@beadsland @Quasit I'm physically disabled so I tend to target able bodied bullies where it will help me gain more power in an unfair physical fight. It's just basic defense instinct, for me.
You are blessed with instincts that ought be cherished, as such instincts, despite what that term implies, are not evenly distributed.
It took me a year (six months? too long ago to remember exact duration) of daily reciting to myself that the next time my mother struck me, she'd get a swipe in return, to actually have enough presence of mind to respond the next time it happened.
Her boy toy spent the next hour shouting and punching and kicking me with his steel-tip work boots, on the back porch (so it's not like the cop family that lived in the next row-home over, let alone the rest of the neighborhood, didn't hear what was going on), as myself lay there huddled up defensively, before they then committed me to a psychiatric hospital, for still refusing to apologize for defending myself.
@beadsland @Quasit I think my instincts come via intergenerational war trauma survivor genes. All of us have different natural instincts, depending on our various ancestral backgrounds.
I believe one of my closest childhood friends from age 7-14, who lived in same low income housing complex, suffered from similar domestic childhood abuses as you had & her neurology changed due to repeated abuses & not being able to obtain the help she needed to escape from that brutal environment. A lot of what you've shared about the abuses you'd suffered in childhood, sounded eerily familiar to what my childhood friend had shared with me. Her cognitive dissonance was high in teens, for pure survival.
@PhoenixSerenity @beadsland I'll admit that I often wonder about the effect of war trauma and genocide on descendents of the survivors. As I've mentioned before, all four of my grandparents were child or teen survivors of the first genocide of the 20th century; they saw many of their relatives killed. A million and a half of my people were deliberately killed in a campaign of extermination.
I'm not sure how to explain this, but I believe that there's a deep grief among my people. I feel it myself. I hear it in our music, particularly our religious music.
Racial memory? I find it difficult to believe in it. More likely it's just a matter of knowledge that was passed down the generations, plus the aftereffects of the natural PTSD and depression of the actual survivors.
But still, I wonder. I look in the mirror, and I see sadness in my eyes.
Epigenetics may also play a role.
Research has shown that famine in one generation impacts metabolism in generations after. There's no reason to believe other forms of trauma would be any different in that regard.
@beadsland @PhoenixSerenity
That's very interesting, because my people were referred to as "the starving" in the West for decades! Mothers in America would tell their children to clean their plates because there were starving children in my ancestral country.
That's very interesting, because my people were referred to as "the starving" in the West for decades! Mothers in America would tell their children to clean their plates because there were starving children in my ancestral country.
@Quasit @beadsland My Mom tells us to never waste food to this very day. Her family suffered from famine & starvation over generations of war & then losing their food crops & 3/4 of their wild foods/medicines to foreign invader attacks. I remember my matriarch Grandma showing me photos of people who had starved to death in the village & also shown spot where over 100 of our villagers were buried after starving to death.