Learning Disabilities: Beyond the Classroom

Dutch Door Opened to Reveal a Landscape Beyond
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This is difficult for me to write. When it comes to my learning disabilities, I can usually find a way to use humor (appropriate or not) to buffer the unpleasant feelings that arise. With this topic it's different. It's personal, it's painful past even my ability to make light of it, and I feel like maybe I'm whining.

In spite of all that, I'm writing it anyway.

I am writing because I want other people with LD to know that they're not alone in suffering the social and emotional ramifications of their condition. I'm also writing this because I want parents and teachers of learning disabled children to know that their words and actions have a lasting impact. Your impatience with a child who's struggling in school, or your denial of that very struggle, can wound a child so profoundly that she may not heal until she is an adult, if even then.

As children, those of us with learning disorders may or may not be learning our academic subjects in school. But we are always learning how to be in the world. We are learning that the world sees beyond our disability, or that it will put us in a box marked "broken". We are learning that our differences are make us unique and valuable, or that they render us useless and contemptible. We are learning that the world is peopled by the kind, trustworthy, and compassionate -- or learning that it is peopled by the impatient, the prejudiced, the cruel.

Falerian Teacher Offers His Children as Hostages Giclee Print
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I strongly believe my life would have been much happier and more productive if my learning disabilities had been identified while I was young. Unfortunately, they were not. It was bad enough that my failures went by unnoticed. What made it worse is that they were chalked up to willfulness and stubbornness, as if my struggles were a deliberate personal affront to my teachers. In effect, I was blamed and punished for my learning difficulty by my teachers, from first grade through fifth grade.

Elementary school was generally bad for me, but fourth grade was the worst year of my life. It was the year that encapsulated my academic struggles, and the year I started developing self-esteem problems in earnest.

To put it succinctly, my fourth grade teacher was emotionally abusive. Mrs. H imposed a clear hierarchy in her classroom. She had two teachers' pets, adorable, blond future cheerleaders, who could do no wrong. They were singled out for praise. Their desks were clean and orderly, their handwriting was neat and legible, they paid attention in class, their assignments were handed in punctually (and always with perfect punctuation).

The Dunce Punished
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No hierarchy is complete without the lowest rung on the ladder. Besides her Perfect Pets, Mrs H needed scapegoats to complete her social order. That's where I came in. The scapegoats were a motley collection of special ed kids, kids with behavior problems, and the smart-but-careless. We were singled out for scolding, punishment, and humiliation, always in front of the whole class.

Mrs. H took great pains to make us understand just how difficult we made her life. She had to tell us everything ten times, at least, and it still didn't sink in. We wasted her time, and the whole class's time, because we were misbehaving, not paying attention, getting the wrong answers, leaving our desks a mess, and losing our assignments. She tried to be patient, she sighed, but with students like us it was so very difficult.

Like some of the other scapegoats, I was often told that I was "too smart" to be such a bad student. In fact, Mrs. H wouldn't give me extra help on my math assignments because someone as smart as I was "shouldn't need extra help". She told me I was on my own, and "maybe that would teach me to pay attention the first time". I never for one minute believed Mrs. H thought I was smart. She just wanted me to do her boring worksheets and thought that embarrassing me in front of the rest of the class was a way to motivate me.

Palace of Depression. It's in New Jersey. Who knew?
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At home, my struggles were an almost daily subject of fights between me and my parents. Like Mrs. H, they also told me I was "too smart" to be having the problems I was. At least when they said it, I believed that they thought I was smart. All parents want to think they have smart kids, right?

But I was sure they were wrong. I wanted them to stop deluding themselves. If they would only realize that I wasn't as smart as they thought, everyone's life would be so much easier. We could stop fighting about whether I was "wasting my potential". I begged them to realize that I didn't have the potential they thought I had. I was just dumb.

My parents would then point out that I was in the gifted program. By this point I was sure that was just a fluke. I mean, smart kids don't fail math class, right? Smart kids are good at school. I wasn't good at school, so how smart could I be, really? There must have been some kind of mistake.

This line of reasoning planted the seeds for the depression that would plague me for the next two decades. Even though I began to do better in junior and high school, at the back of my mind was always the thought that I was some kind of fraud. That I wasn't really smart at all, I was somehow fooling everyone into thinking I was. When I got to college and hit my academic brick wall, my worst suspicions were confirmed, and I had a nervous breakdown.

Struggling against a learning disability you don't know you have takes a lot out of your self esteem. If your self-esteem gets low enough, it will almost inevitably end in depression.

While I was growing up, I felt that the only valuable thing about me was my intelligence, and I had serious doubts about that -- people seemed to think that I studied, and worked really hard, but the truth was that I wrote papers and took exams by the seat of my pants. I was sure that this would stop working someday, that eventually I'd face a workload so big, and assignments so complex, that I couldn't fake it anymore.

Sure enough, during my sophomore year of college, something snapped. I was getting farther and farther behind in with my workload when I started to have panic attacks, sometimes to the point of needing to leave the classroom in the middle of a lecture because I JUST NEEDED TO GET OUT OF HERE NOW. When I sat down to write a paper my hands would start to shake, my heart would pound, and I would wonder if I were going to become one of those rare nineteen-year-old stroke fatalities. I couldn't get to sleep at night, couldn't get out of bed in the morning, and I started to have thoughts of cutting myself. I felt like a fraud and a failure.

Now, depression has some genetic basis, and it certainly runs in my family. Two members of my immediate family have been diagnosed with it, and the other two probably have it but are not diagnosed. As for my extended family, well, let's just say that they were classic Irish-American alcoholics who were probably self-medicating.

The thing is, even with a genetic predisposition toward depression, you generally need something to be depressed about. Brain chemistry is a two-way street. Your mood is influenced by your brain chemistry, but your brain chemistry is also influenced by your mood. This is why some people become depressed in response to a stressful life event, while others do not. Some people carry that genetic predisposition, and the neuro-psychological response to the loss causes actual depression.

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In my case, I honestly don't think I would have had a mood disorder if things had been different. But as things were, I was under a great deal of stress as a child, which meant that my growing brain was subjected to a lot more cortisol than it would have been otherwise. Cortisol impedes neurotransmitters that are active in memory formation (possibly making my ADD worse than it had to be) as well as those neurotransmitters that create good mood. The stress in my early elementary school years was caused directly by my school experience -- by the humiliation and punishment I experienced as a result of my undiagnosed learning disabilities.

It was getting diagnosed with depression in college that got me considering the idea of learning disability. Several friends of mine told me about their own depression, and revealed to me that they had ADD, which is often co-morbid. They recognized many of their own symptoms in me. Furthermore, the class in which I was having panic attacks was Astronomy, in theory a class for non-majors that required the use of elementary algebra. I had passed that subject with a C- four years prior, but to my shock I discovered that I had forgotten literally all of it. I had wondered my whole life whether I had something like "math dyslexia", or even whether such a thing existed. I decided to find out once and for all. I got tested for LD.

Scientists Examine Results of Tests of Chemical Pigment of Flowers
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My test for learning disabilities confirmed that I had dyscalculia (math disorder), dysgraphia (writing disorder), and attention deficit disorder (inattentive type). Part of me was ecstatic. I finally had a reason, an explanation, a validation for years of feeling that something was not quite right. I expected my parents to be just at least interested, if not exactly pleased, in my LD diagnosis. I was sure that they would be as relieved as I was to learn that all those years of school hell was not my fault, or theirs, but due to factors none of us had known about.

To my shock, my news was met more or less with silence. My mother murmured something noncommittal and changed the subject. I tried to bring it up again, and again, the topic of conversation passively shifted to something else. I decided that my parents might need some time to come to terms with what I'd told them, so I backed off and resolved to try again.

A few weeks later, I broached the subject again, and my mother murmured something noncommittal and changed the subject.

Bewildered and hurt, I finally gave up, and for fourteen years I have studiously avoided mentioning my learning disabilities. Since they're kind of a major factor in my life decisions, this has been difficult; but it's much easier than coping with my parents' constant rejection of my reality.

Peter's Denial
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In a recent discussion on the Dyscalculia Forum, I found that that I am far from alone in experiencing this parental denial. In fact, it seemed to be more common than parental acceptance and support. As a group, the forum (who are mostly adults) speculated on the reasons.

Maybe our parents blame themselves in some way for "causing" the disability. Maybe, given the heritability of learning disorders, their children's diagnoses bring up painful memories of their own difficulties in school. Maybe our parents feel complicit in the suffering we experienced in school, and don't want to admit that they'd been in the wrong. Maybe our parents just want us to be "normal", and don't want to admit that we're "disabled".

Whatever their reasons for remaining in denial, it's a very common reaction for parents to have when their children are diagnosed with learning disabilities. If you're in this situation, know that you're not alone -- many, many other people with LD are going through the same thing.

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Learning disabilities are a serious problem that can affect a person's life far beyond the four walls of a classroom. The chronic stress and low self-esteem that often come with having a different brain will follow a child home from school and take up residence in the dark corners of her mind, feeding on each successive failure, growing bigger and rooting deeper with each passing year.

For some, the consequences are merely sad -- wasted talents, lost productivity, and years of mental anguish.

For others, the consequences can be as dire as desperate poverty, homelessness, or in extreme cases, suicide.

My own story continues with me spending years working through the roots of my depression, anxiety, and the related chronic illnesses I suffered. I am now a generally happy, healthy person. I wish I could make Big Money In Art (ha!), or could at least be gainfully employed in work that used my talents and intellect, but I feel that part of my life is slowly (so slowly) coming together.

• If you have LD and have lived through this story, I hope you realize that you're not alone, and that there is hope for creating a life of value to you and to others.



• If you are a parent of a child with LD, I hope you have learned to be aware of the social and emotional challenges your child might face.


• If you are a teacher, please realize the awesome power you have to shape the self-esteem of your students. What you say to them might stay with them for the rest of their lives. Make sure it's something worth keeping.
  

When I wrote to aj2008 to let her know I was featuring her lens on bullying, she wrote back to say that she had given me an Angel blessing. In honor of the advice given on her wonrderful "Squid Ettiquette" lens, I am saying my "thank yous" here. So, thank you, AJ, for my very first angel blessing!

She has also given me some great tips for improving my title and keyword use. Thanks again!

Thanks also to Stazjia for her feedback, which helped me clean up this lens.

Thanks to A_Willow, for the second Angel Blessing.

And a final huge than you to Kylyssa, who writes so beautifully about her experiences with Asperger's, the health "care" system, and homelessness. Her ability to put a human face on challenging social issues inspired me to tackle this lens.