The first time I realized how incompatible my autism was with higher education, I was 18 and I had just forgotten to log into my first online exam. It was during the second confinement. My mother reminded me on the thread.
Throughout my cinema degree in Toulouse, the situation repeated itself. I was never aware of deadlines, I forgot to take exams, I couldn’t keep up with class. How can you sit on a bench for four hours listening to someone talk, even without being neuroatypical?
When I was in high school, everything was easier, on a human scale. My teachers knew my disability, they supported me and had my mother’s number if necessary. When I arrived at university, I felt like I was changing worlds. I had no friends, the teachers didn’t know me, everything was bigger. Changing scale makes personalized support more difficult to implement.
I was diagnosed with “high intellectual potential” at 6 years old and “autistic with Asperger’s” at 13, after a suicide attempt which triggered psychiatric follow-up. Until then, I was considered precocious by my pediatric neurologist, but not different. In college, he wanted to send me to a special class for atypical people, in a private college. My mother refused, it would have isolated me from others. In my local college, I was lucky to have friends, good grades, and things went well with the teachers. All my life, my mother made sure that I studied without being ostracized by neurotypical people.
Difficulties interacting
My autism results in difficulty interacting with others and understanding social situations. I can’t spontaneously recognize someone’s anxiety, boredom or fear. If I don’t make a conscious effort to read faces and recognize emotions, I do not see them. To remedy this, I constantly make rankings and lists in my head. I put my friends in boxes, I relate their behaviors to past experiences to know how to react.
For example, I invented a “social mask theory” for how to behave around people who want to impress or cajole me. I match their attitudes to the four seasons. The mask of winter refers to haughty people: you should not ask them too many questions. But all this is not instinctive and tires me enormously.
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