Hihi Teacher, could you recognise me?

As a child I was frequently a problem. I was told off a lot (for talking mostly), kept after class, lost my breaks.

I struggled, because I didn’t have inhibitions in the same way other children did. 🤷‍♀️

🧠 That sentence does not convey the deeper truth of what I experienced though, because:

1. Inhibition is a behavioural, instinctual process for the most part. Something our brains and neurological development ‘do’ for us.

2. I could see other children’s behaviour gradually change from free play - to ‘behaving’ in the classroom, and other spaces, and perhaps most importantly - in relationships.

3. So, I was constantly trying to work out - what they ‘knew’-  what they had been told, that I hadn’t heard or understood somehow.
(I actually wondered about that for decades in the end - but there is no answer to that wondering - because others do not know something that I don’t.)

4. I always had intellectual understanding of expectations - I even spent a lot of time trying to get others to stick to ‘rules’!

5. It’s not our reasoning that controls 90% plus of our behaviour (see and constantly loop from number 1!), yet the adults kept telling me I needed to be more clever about my ‘choices’.


By the time I was a teenager, for the largest part I gave up trying to understand this - to ‘get it right’ like others.  I was only coming into school with my makeup bag, my stereo, cigarettes. No books.


And that was if I came in at all.

I didn’t do homework.

I didn’t do written schoolwork.

I was pretty constantly ‘on report’.

I’d even started drinking in the mornings before school some days.

All because of this ⬇️

My neurodivergence had flown beneath the radar.

💡 Because nobody recognised that I had Dyspraxia and ADHD at least.

(And the external criticism I was constantly under likely affected my dopamine production to boot - more about that in another post!).

So, I turned - or that ‘pushed’ me - into risky behaviours that eventually ended up threatening my life - and still now, (like most poorly managed ADHD) have shortened my life.

🗣️“Sure Julia, but that was the 70s!”

Not all that much in that area has changed since, unfortunately. 😓

Girls are still drastically under recognised, under supported, and underdiagnosed with neurodivergence such as dyspraxia, ADHD and Autism.

The sooner more effort is put into recognising us, embracing us, and making empowering neuroinclusive decisions in the classroom, the sooner we can avoid others living with the life-long impacts of that.


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