Boarding school? Smart, verbal kid with borderline NVLD (not diagnosable) issues

stanwshura
Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:51:55 +0000

Your son sounds like a very resourceful person, and you as well sound very open-minded, dedicated and very fortunately for your son, curious and committed.

I just wanted to get that out. I am impressed and for some reason even a little touched by the story you’ve told so far, and think that just maybe he’s gonna do just fine.

I am a little bothered by what seems to be an “in limbo” diagnosis for him. I personally feel that that may more reflect a design flaw of parts of his assessment, or perhaps a mistake on the part of the test administrator or the person who analyzed your son’s performance, than it does a true picture of the significance of both his strengths AND his difficulties. I am of course a lay-person, and so am in no-way qualified to make such a claim or accusation with any influential credibility. It’s just an impression, and an admittedly biased one.

I, myself, am 37 years old, work in “severe” special ed and, in the interest of full disclosure, suffer myself from what is very likely N(V)LD, anxiety (frequently severe), and OCD. I’ve absolutely “run the gamut” as a patient/client of the medical/mental health arenas but for perhaps the “most exteme” consequences such as being an “involuntary inpatient” and of course any criminal behavior.

As you may already get, I am very verbose. I am also an extra-ordiinary “hair-splitter” - I am very literal. I’ve learned over the years to try and stop and think twice before acting on my previously unchecked interpretation of peoples’ meanings. Contrary to what seems to be recent popular belief, Rumsfeld did NOT coin the expression “didn’t know that I didn’t know”!

That has been the bane of my problem for my entire life up to hitting upon that very realization a few years back. How do you “ask for help” when you do not know that you need it? How do you ask for help for a problem you cannot explain - even as you are one of the most adept explainers there is!

The most frustrating and life- and hope-draining phenomena is to feel like you’re broken and that you’ll never, ever really reach your full potential. Back in 1994, I was having a particularly rough time. I absolutely had downright, gloves-off, “I can’t take this anymore” HAD it with a lifetime of being unable to make decisions, to negotiate what I still insist is the COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY ambiguity (laziness!!!) in typical social discourse, and of wrestling and bristling and crumbling under the ever-present faux-contradiction - sometimes (as in the case of my immediate “meat and potatoes” family" said ever so eloquently outright and out loud “how can you be so smart and so dumb!”. I’ll speak to that discrepancy a bit further down - the so-called verbal/performance differentiation in the measured IQ of folks dx’d with N(V)LD.

At any rate, I was in crisis, academically and emotionally, and couldn’t face the desperation yet again of having gone an entire marking period not having known to address - let alone HOW to address, the specific difficulties I was having. The final straw and most bitter irony was that I was about to bomb a course because I was unable to produce a written assignment! Yes, I am a long-way in my expository confidence today from where I was then, and if you think “paralyzing” is a melodramatic way to describe procrastination - and the terror that is behind its purest manifestation in which, on that horrible Sunday night in November some 14 years ago, I was perilously entangled, think again.

I was in trouble. I tore my dorm room apart (at this point it was nearing 4am), cried and yelled and cried some more, and called God out with every possible and most deliberately and brazenly irreverent and profane blasphemy I could put into words. I screamed a dare at Him (in words I won’t revisit here) to go ahead and try to send me to a hell that was worse than the one I was already in. I stomped my foot and smashed a glass and looked straight up and said “I said DO IT, you (editted)!!!”.

Then I took a piece of that glass and slashed both my wrists.

Obviously it was inevittable that I would leave college without graduating. I was granted a retro-active medical withdrawal, and that unfinished degree hangs over my head to this day.

And so do the problems that led me to fail in every possible way at that time.

And, believe it or not, I have never been hospitalized and haven’t even a formal NLD diagnosis. I do have Hydrocephalus, and have had my VP shunt since infancy. I do have an obvious gap in my verbal and performance IQs, and ever more acute the more importance is placed on time-limited tasks. Pressure of any kind is my absolute enemy, and thankfully, I’m at a point in my life where I have disclosed to my colleagues, and to some very smart professionals, the nature of my problems, and they are being very supportive. I am receiving support from the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission for issues around my inability (or difficulties) with learning or performing ANY task that isn’t precisely explained. Exxageration? I was “not rehired” a couple of years back from a summer job as a camp “activity head”, and I am convinced that that is a result of the boss finding me “obstinate” or “clueless” because I assumed, after this camp director had instructed all staff not to use the refrigerator just outside the nurse’s office, that I could still use the freezer portion on top.

No - I was NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT being “cute” or insubordinate or whatever. That is NOT in my character. It IS what I thought. Once, in second grade, the teacher asked the class “is there anybody’s paper I didn’t check?”. I raised my hand and (pathetically!!!) squeaked, almost desperately, “Mrs. Condon, I got a staaarrrrr!”

Oh, how do I remember this. The reaction really hurt.

“Do you want me to smash you?”

Similar difficulties are with me every day of my life. I still bristle when I remember my father’s reaction when, on a “practice drive” when I was on my permit, we had exited the grocery store and he paused and asked “okay, where’d ya park?”

Ugh. To this DAY I stand just outside the door of all stores (thank God for the dignity provided me by faking use of my cell phone!), and scan the parking lot from top left to bottom right until I spot my car.

Anyway, after several minutes, he “helped” by giving me a “hint” that it was next to a red van. Scan…scan…scan…scan…walk and scan…nothing. He looked at me in disgust as he led us to his car.

It was parked next to a MAROON van!!!

Et cetera.

The irony of this is that while the style and approach and tasks that are most suited to my confidence and success and completion, are those that are clearly delineated, absolutely crystal clear and verbally articulated, and unmistakably and doggedly UNAMBIGUOUS, this “black and white” approach causes some people to “miss the mark” at the diagnostic stage and thus continue to suffer.

I am glad to see that you seem to be finding something of a life that does and will work for your son, and I am touched and very definitely rooting for you and hope that things work out in a life that is absolutely STUFFED with love and fulfillment.

-stan shura