Turning the Key: 1990-2000

Boynton Middle School served as a magnet school for students from Greenville, New Ipswich, and Mason. When I began attending in 1991, I was completely in mainstream classes. I was still unable to focus very well, and my grades tended to be just above passing during fifth grade. To rectify the problem for the next year, I was put into special classes designed to lower the amount of students to one teacher. During sixth and seventh grades, I was in these classes for most of the school day, along with other kids who all tended to have similar learning disabilities. If my parents and school officials felt I had strengths in certain subjects, I would attend the regular classes.

Due to social incidents on the regular bus during my time in elementary school, I was assigned to the special needs bus throughout my time in the school. Apart from the stigmata the "short bus" carried with it, I also came to be extremely sensitive to the way my peers would tease the other special needs students, and tended to stand up for them. Tensions began to bubble up because of my attitude towards the teasing, and the amounts of fights and other incidents I got involved in grew. I would become known among my peers for my tantrums and shouting matches with other students and teachers, a mark that would end up following me until I graduated high school.

The problems started right off when, in fifth grade my special education liaison decided to approach my episodes with time-outs with, as I noted in the introduction, disasterous effects. With both the liaison from fifth grade and the teacher who took over for the next two years, their first method failing led to them getting frustrated with me, and my own frustration escalating with them. It would get nigh on cataclysmic, and I can't look back on the incidents without shame for my behavior.

When I speak of my temper back then, I don't automatically pile all of it onto the Asperger's Syndrome. I believe when you speak of temper and AS, the true villain is that you're frustrated and trying to explain it. First, what sets you off is not necessarily what others would understand as worthy of being irritated over. Second, there's a communication barrier between someone with an ASD and the rest of the world. Someone would ask me what was wrong. I'd explain. They wouldn't understand, either what I was talking about or why that was worth the blood pressure. My frustration would increase.

Whenever I made friends in school, we would always end up in an argument because I would inevitably get into some type of misunderstanding with them. Often I took good natured ribbing as outright teasing, always distrustful and suspicious of anyone's intentions. The genuine teasing at school continued to grow as the friends who once would have defended me began to join in. By 1994, when I was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, one doctor also expressed concerns that with all of the teasing I could also have been exibiting signs of post-traumatic stress.

Eighth grade came with continued bullying, but I still view it as a turning point. Due in no small part to that year's liaison and the one-on-one aide who helped me out in classes, I was beginning to confront my own behavior. It was the first year all of my classes were entirely mainstream, and also the point at which my parents began to take me out of regular therapy sessions, feeling that they had served all they could at that time. By then, doctors had settled on either PDD or Asperger's for my diagnosis. Outbursts were mostly over classwork and missing homework, though they were still intense when they happened. At the same time, some of my conflicts with other kids began to die down, though I still did not make many friends.

In high school, I began riding the regular bus again, though I continued to experience major issues with the other students on the trips. While my school life improved, the effect was almost completely cancelled with the teasing and outright physical violence on the bus. I endured through ninth grade, since I could hitch a ride with my sister most days, and I expected to get my license and be able to drive myself to school soon. I was confident in this, because when my parents and the driver's education teacher took me to learn to drive, they gave me positive feedback, but I continued to fail written tests. By eleventh grade, I still wasn't driving, and my sister had graduated, so I was pretty much riding full-time on the bus.

My social and especially academic troubles within school itself died down gradually over the four years of high school. I faced maybe one constantly physical bully, as well as the cliques within the school. The former had his regular gang of accomplices, whom I made sure to keep clear of until he graduated. I was mostly able to cope with cliques and felt very little desire to be popular. Following a tumultuous adjustment to the new school, I went through the rest of my time with little trouble. By my final year, most of the times I was teased I tended to outright ignore it. If the other students did want to get on my nerves, they found that making fun of special needs students would easily set me off.

Trying to handle situations in my Freshman year, the school had a one-on-one aide accompany me to a conference room and try to ask me what problems I was having. The method, while not just sitting me at a desk and telling me to calm down, had little effect. I would still spend a good hour during an incident, often loudly shouting and getting angry all over again when asked to think of how I could have handled the issue. At sixteen, I still had a tendency to even start crying out of frustration. In the following years, someone thought up the idea to have me sit down in relative privacy when something happened, and write down what went on, why it got me angry, and how I thought it could have been handled.

I felt I was certainly improving as time went on in high school, between the efforts from the special education department and my regular teachers. While I remained part of the out crowd, I began to notice some of the kids with whom I'd always been at odds in the past tended to be indifferent or outright polite around me. That "mortal enemies" sometimes even came to my defense more often began to encourage me socially, and I began making more friends. I was able to attend my Junior and Senior Prom's with one of my friends, and would end up working with another towards the end of high school.

I didn't seem to have much trouble by my last year; my SAT's were excellent, my college search was going smoothly, and I was beginning to feel I had finally gotten myself on the way to a great future.

Page 6

Into The World Beyond: 2000-Present

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