I’m sitting with feels of shock and grief, about my experience in the school system. There’s one thing that was always missing from all of these educational opportunities. One thing that was always, implicitly more important than all of the other ones combined.
How to stay regulated.
See, as it turns out, it was never going to matter how many degrees I got. It wouldn’t matter what my grades were. It wouldn’t even matter how good of a programmer I am in a software engineering role. There was always a dealbreaker waiting around the corner that would nullify any progress I made.
If I couldn’t stay regulated. If I couldn’t maintain composure, equilibrium, grace under fire. If I couldn’t roll with the punches. Then no matter how intelligent I was, how talented, how well-rounded. No matter how accurate I was. No matter how obedient I was. I was never going to be welcome in a professional environment.
I found this out the hard way on my first summer internship after my first year of university. I was doing reasonably well in my classes, and I thought I’d be able to show up and make a solid contribution. Maybe even do some original research.
Good lord, I felt like I made every cringey HR violation short of touching people inappropriately. I was utterly hated by every person in that lab, I’m sure of it. It was super awkward for them, and pretty soul-crushing for me.
Here I had worked a miracle and made it into a prestigious university program. The world is my oyster! I can learn stuff! Learn all the things!
And I worked my butt off trying to make it through that first year, through sheer exhaustion. I was struggling far more than the people around me, it seemed to me.
But as soon as I was working with people, none of the things I’d learned mattered at all. As soon as I lost the benefit of the doubt with my supervisor, I started to be scrutinized. That triggered my PDA reflex to feel threatened by the scrutiny. And I started unconsciously avoiding the work that had now become charged for me.
Eventually it became obvious I was avoiding my work, and an even more unsafe situation unfolded where I was put on a performance improvement plan. Now increasing amounts of energy were required for me to regulate my body amidst this intensified scrutiny.
The scrutiny itself therefore kicked off a feedback loop of avoidance and shame. Get on manager’s radar, feel watched. Feel watched, get drained. Get drained, performance goes down. Performance goes down, watched with more scrutiny. Feel even more watched, work becomes more charged. The more charged the work becomes, the harder it is to engage with it. And if I can’t engage with the work, I become misaligned with the organization. It’s just a matter of time until I run out of energy.
The scrutiny itself kicks off a feedback loop of avoidance and shame.
Being regulated is absolutely a requirement for doing anything in the professional world at all. So was I ever taught this skill of self-regulation?
No, because the school system was never designed to help us adapt to new and challenging experiences. It was designed to filter out those who did not meet a basic level of proficiency. It was designed to rank humans in order of skill, and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Imagine the horror of realizing that you might actually be part of the chaff. As a kid, that recognition was somewhere deep inside me. If I didn’t do well in school, my future was undefined. I would fall through the cracks, and who knows what was down there.
So I fought for dear life to succeed in the school system. All the way to a masters in theoretical physics. Physics, I posited, would teach me to do technical work, and to structure my ideas.
Imagine the horror of seeing the school separating the wheat from the chaff.
And you’re the chaff.
But the school system doesn’t reward you for being regulated. It rewards you for your objective achievements. It selects students who can display the correct metrics — grades and good behavior scores — for inclusion into the next level of school.
So I would be forgiven for assuming that being in fight-or-flight on a constant basis was normal. The goal was always to excel in the work presented to me — at all costs apparently. Apparently my very future depended on it. Nobody asked me how I was feeling inside as I did it.
The goal was always to excel in the work presented to me.
Nobody asked me how I was feeling inside as I did it.
Amongst all the pre-requisites I worked so hard to fulfill. Amongst AP calculus, AP history, 80%+ on English and math and physics and biology. Amongst music classes and theatre classes for extra credit. Chief amongst them was being regulated. Achieving, sustainably.
So now I’m learning how to be regulated, the hard way. Amidst the many facets of my life as a single dad, software engineer, and autistic human. And I can’t go to school for it. Nobody’s teaching Self Regulation 101.
That's a very good description of why we autists constantly fail to live up to our potential. The non-autistic world simply cannot understand the additional layers of pressure and stress we are under. I sometimes say -- "if only you knew what I went through just getting here ..."