The hierarchy habit: how school taught me to hate myself – The #1 habit that almost killed me (and how I finally broke it) – Why I stopped comparing my Neurodivergent brain to a Neurotypical one
One of the worst habits I had before learning I was Autistic and eventually about my ADHD, was comparing myself to other people, especially those whose minds were unlike my own.
We live in a society built upon many social constructs of hierarchies – hierarchies based on race, religion, age, beauty standards, orientation, sex, gender, health, disability status, and neuro-normativity.
These hierarchies are enforced everywhere we look, programmed into us from a young age, in school, organized sports, and eventually corporate ladders, forcing us to rank ourselves against one another, using each other as rungs to climb over.
We’re taught to compete and to measure our success against our peers. If we’re not “keeping up“ or falling “low in the ranks,” it is a failure.
Pep rallies and school rivalries indoctrinate young people into an “us-versus-them“ mindset early on.
At the same time, our report cards rank us against one another with averages, and awards (perfect attendance, honor roll, first place, second place, third place) given to “top performers“ encourage competition and often reward those with the most privilege.
Now, before anyone who was proud to have “perfect attendance“ or for getting on the “honor roll“ gets mad at me for calling these awards “privileged“ and says, “It’s not privilege, but hard work, because I worked hard to earn those awards,“ I need you to understand that your peers who didn’t earn recognition were likely working very hard as well, possibly even harder than you, but many, instead of praised and awarded, earned punishments and scorn for giving the same (possibly more) effort.
Perfect attendance, for example, is an award that I could never earn because I had a stress-induced chronic illness when I was growing up (largely due to not having my sensory needs met, which triggered a storm of neurological distress manifesting in my head and stomach due to my overstimulated nervous system).
I was not privileged with good health when I was younger.
I was often sick, with migraines, vertigo, stomach aches, nausea, and vomiting, without any understanding of the cause.
I got sick so often that in multiple school years, I missed more than my “allowed“ sick days and still had to go to school once my allotted days each year were used up.
Because my sickness was not contagious, I often had to go to school sick.
I was forced to spend days vomiting at school, sometimes in a trash can in front of my peers as “punishment“ for a sickness I couldn’t control, which my teachers were convinced I was making up to get out of class.
My experience of not being allowed to miss school, even when I was extremely ill, taught me that it didn’t matter how I felt (even if I was so sick I could barely walk straight, and always had to know where the nearest bathroom or trash can was), I still had to find a way to show up and act engaged. Still, sometimes my sickness was so bad I couldn’t do it, and I missed class.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. I was trying very hard, pushing myself and my body past its breaking point, but I still failed.
In addition to having perfect attendance awards, some schools gave awards for being on time/never being late.
Awards for not being tardy never made sense to me (and still don’t) because being late or not, especially in the younger grades, is something beyond most kids’ control.
Kids can’t force their parents to get them to school on time, control traffic, or ensure the school bus always makes it for drop-off before the late bell rings.
While late buses are excused (because the school runs them), if a kid’s parents don’t care about getting them to school on time or are unable to do so, they may be punished for being late, even if the lateness is beyond their control.
Now let’s talk about the honor roll.
I was never an honor roll student, because my personal Autistic experience means my skills are not, and never have been, “well-rounded“. Instead, I have what is known as a “spiky abilities profile.”
My spiky skills profile means my skills are strong in a few specific, narrow fields, and I often struggle in areas others take for granted as “easy“.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve adapted and found ways to compensate for many of my weaknesses, but when I was younger, my struggles were much more pronounced.
My brain is specialized (like a surgical specialist rather than a generalist doctor), but the school privileged students with more general skills and honored them by favoring those with more evenly distributed skills. These “well-rounded“ kids were often the ones who managed to snag spots on the “all A’s“ or “all B’s“ honor rolls.
In school, I excelled in reading and writing, scored far above everyone else in my class, and was at the top of my grade in reading, but struggled greatly in math, science, and history, which I was expected to study despite my interests and skills lying elsewhere.
I could force myself to read what they wanted me to read, but if what I was reading didn’t catch my attention, my brain didn’t process or store any of the information. However, because my reading scores were high, those high marks in one skill were used as “evidence“ of my “laziness“ in all other areas when I struggled.
I did my best, and I tried my hardest, but over and over again I was told it wasn’t enough, pushed to “try harder“ and told how great I could be if I would only apply myself… but my best was all I had to give.
We were also graded on handwriting and our ability to “work neatly“ – skills that, even now, I never mastered.
My handwriting, to this day, is still messy and hard to read.
Writing by hand has always been physically painful, and to write legibly, I must write excruciatingly slowly.
My brain is also zippy and fast, with limited working memory, which meant that if I wrote slowly enough for my handwriting to be legible, I would often forget what I was trying to write before I could finish writing down my thoughts.
As an adult, I rarely write by hand, instead opting to type whenever possible because I can type very fast, faster than most people, and fast enough to keep up with the speed of my racing thoughts.
The rest of this post is available on Patreon and Substack.
This post was written with the assistance of Focused Space (a sponsor of the Neurodivergent Rebel blog).
What is Focused Space?
Focused Space is an ADHD-focused, Neurodiversity affirming, goal‑setting, and online co‑working / body‑doubling platform designed to help people prioritize, stay motivated, and bust through procrastination (and it is something I believe in and personally use every day).
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I get requests (that I mostly ignore) to do brand partnerships all the time, because I don’t want to partner with products unless I actually find them useful and high-quality. I also want to work with brands whose owners and processes align with my personal standards and ethics.
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