When You Don't Fit In Life's Perfect Boxes

Starting from when we are very small, Societies and Governments try to place us in boxes intended to tell us who or what we are, or what we can or cannot do. From a young age, I have been very good at not fitting in those boxes.

Most Parents expect babies to crawl. I never did, instead I bum-shuffled just about everywhere until I learned to walk, a little later than average, but not enough to be worried about.

A one-year old child isn't supposed to string words together in sentences yet, even small ones.

A two-year old girl shouldn't be able to read yet, but I could, although very few people besides my parents believed it, and, so I've been told, I was often left having to prove my skill. I started with signs, like 'McDonalds', 'Westpac', 'Exit', and 'Milk', and moved on to simple books not long afterwards.

In many ways, I was significantly ahead of where I was expected to be. In quite a few others, I lag behind.

I have a condition called Hypotonia, resulting in low muscle tone. This went some way to explaining why I had walked late, and why, as a child, my fine motor skills left something to be desired, and needed a little extra help in Physical education classes.

While my reading, writing, and general English skills were high above average, nearing University levels when I was just Ten years old, I struggled in mathematics. I was also less than adept at understanding non-visual lessons and other non verbal cues.

The reason for this stems from the fact that I have a small chromosomal deletion. Other people with the same Chromosome missing are usually profoundly disabled, sometimes unable to walk or talk, or suffer countless other physical or neurological deficits. However, those people often have a full deletion, where as mine is only partial. In me, the chromosomal abnormality mostly manifests as my brain wiring itself a little differently, due to more white matter on one side than the other.

This different wiring offers the explanation for why I am exceptional in some areas, and below average in others. This, more than anything else, is what some people, a few teachers, a Principal, but mostly Doctors, struggled to understand about me. That I was gifted, and challenged, all at the same time. I did not fit easily into one box or the other. I was not one or the other, I was, and still am, both.

I was always aware that I was a little bit different. It never bothered me, and I never felt it was a problem, until I hit High School. Up until then, I had mostly muddled through on the kindness of a few special teachers, and putting greater focus into the things that I was good at than the things I was not.

However, by High School, that wasn’t quite enough. I didn't struggle, exactly, but I needed a little more time than the other kids to get things done. To make any special arrangements for me official, my School needed to secure funding. To secure funding, they just needed to tick the right box.

The problem was, there was no right box. I didn't have a named condition to write down on my funding applications, just a string of irritating but not debilitating weaknesses, weaknesses that would make completing High School difficult without some sort of extra help.

My school was brilliant, and they never gave up trying to secure the aide funding I needed. We looked into things, and tried a few boxes, none of them fitting quite right. For those few years, it felt like I was different in all the wrong ways. Although my differences had never bothered me much before, it was difficult not to feel a little disheartened by it all.

Then, just as I was about to enter my final two years of schooling, my Mother discovered that I had a mild form of Spina Bifida. This diagnosis was exactly what my School needed. We ticked a box, and my funding was secured. This seemed quite silly to me at the time, because Spina Bifida had absolutely nothing to do with why I needed the aid funding in the first place. It has so little effect on my day to day life that I spent nearly seventeen years not even knowing that I had it.

Spina Bifida was simply a box to be ticked, and in the process, helped me remember how unimportant the boxes really are.

It doesn’t matter how many boxes or don’t fit into, or how many I do. Little ticked boxes do not define me. They never will.

I am gifted in some areas, and challenged in others. My brain works differently than most. That’s just who I am.

I am different, I am special, I am perfectly, uniquely, Me, and I am happy as I am.

I don’t fit in a box, and I do not have to.