It took me several attempts to write this, because I wasn’t really all that sure about what to say or where to start. I wasn’t sure if I even really wanted to talk about this.

A couple years after I was born, I acted like the weirdest kid ever (i.e: hiding under the living room rug half the time when company came over and not understanding social etiquette at all, among a lot of other things). I don’t remember a lot from how I acted as a young child, but what I do remember makes me cringe and flush. Thanks, younger version of me. You’re my perpetual embarrassment.

I remember being in second grade and struggling with math, and getting frustrated with it because this had never happened to me before. My teacher at the time eventually had another student come and help me. It was excruciatingly embarrassing. I couldn't explain why I was having such a hard time. I had no words for what was going on and even if I did, it was like my brain had shut off.

This is what pretty much continued for all of elementary school. I’d severely struggle with math and not understand why, my mom would start helping a ton at home, we’d fight about it while getting most or all of it done, and I still wouldn’t be able to replicate what I was supposed to have learned. I didn’t understand boundaries or how to navigate social situations (okay, not quite true -- any situation that required me to talk to people outside of my immediate family or small friend group was intimidating, scary, and something I strived to avoid).

I think it was around this time that my mom took me to get tested. I wasn’t developing the same way other kids were. The first diagnosis I got said that I had ADD. The second one said I had Asperger’s. And the third one said I had NLD (Non-verbal Learning Disorder). I guess three times really is the charm, because that diagnosis hit the mark with why I was struggling.

In a nutshell, people with NLD have “normal language skills but below average math skills and difficulty solving visual puzzles. Because many of these kids also show difficulty understanding social cues” (x). If you have this, then you already know it’s a brain-based condition (x, x, x). My brain is literally the reason for why I’m cringe-worthy in social situations.

In all seriousness, though, this is around where I got confused about what to say. I honestly don’t know what to say about NLD, because I know that what goes on in my brain doesn’t go on in other peoples’ brains. So it feels like the large majority of the world doesn’t have the same reality I do. The way I view things could be drastically different from how a neurotypical person is viewing it, and I have no idea. I only know my reality, and my reality makes sense to me, but what if it doesn’t to everybody else?

I used to try explaining having this learning disability to others by saying it’s like everybody is on a radio frequency. I’m on the AM frequency listening to weird classical music and podcasts, and everybody else is on the FM frequency listening to Elle King basically saying she brings all the guys to the yard with her milkshake in her song “Ex’s & Oh’s.” I’m pretty sure it didn’t make sense, or I just wasn’t explaining it correctly, so I stopped using it as an example of how I see the world.

I’ve heard that a lot of people with NLD have really high verbal and reading skills (for whatever reason). That was true for me. I remember getting tested again in tenth grade over a lot of different skills and whatnot -- I can’t remember why. It may have been to prove that I wasn’t faking NLD or some such thing. When I got my results, it said my math skills were equivalent to a ninth grader’s and my English skills were equivalent to a college freshman.

In middle school, I was taught by a specialist during school at specific times so that social etiquette and reading body language and tone of voice would come easier to me. I hated those sessions with a burning passion. To me, it was another reminder that there were things I was supposed to somehow know, but didn’t. I didn’t know that I self-isolated so much, and when I did, I didn’t see the problem. There was a reason why I was a loner. My reasoning was that if I had NLD, then what was the point of having friends? I could never properly interact with them. I would have a motormouth about my special interest subjects, and remain silent on pretty much everything else.

Being in high school and having NLD was absolutely awful. It was the worst experience of my life. I can’t begin to express how much self-loathing I felt about the fact that I was a year behind in math. While all my classmates were taking Algebra 1 or honors math in ninth grade, I was in Intro to Algebra with four other people, all of them guys. In tenth grade, I was in Algebra 1 with a room full of ninth grades. It was pretty much the same story in eleventh and twelfth grade, when I had Geometry and Algebra 2 respectively. Actually, Geometry was so difficult for me that I couldn’t even handle the CP class, but it’s the one I was in because there wasn’t an easier class for me to take (it just wasn’t an option because the class didn’t exist).

I had never felt like such a freak, and would always duck my head and walk out of the room as quickly as was humanly possible. I didn’t want people who knew me to see me in a class full of people a year younger than me, and wonder what I was doing in there. Everybody else in my grade was understanding math. They were where they were supposed to be, and I wasn’t. They could handle classes like pre-calculus or AP Statistics. Most of the time, I couldn’t even understand Algebra 2. Being in a math class -- any math class -- made me feel like I was spending forty-five minutes a day snorting deep fried crack, which probably resulted in me taking a very extended (and metaphorical) psychedelic drug trip for the entire year.

When I was diagnosed with NLD, it was in fifth grade and I was placed onto an IEP. An IEP is an Individualized Education Plan and is essentially a written document that’s designed to meet a student’s specific and individualized needs if one qualifies for an IEP. For me, that meant that I got math support, 50% extended time on tests, clarification as needed on test problems, and read-aloud (one of the people who were trained to work with us could read something if we weren’t able to process it).

As much as I liked to say that I wasn’t ashamed about having NLD, I was. When I would go to Intervention, I’d duck into the hallway and pretend like I was checking my phone or act like I needed to go to the water fountain. Sometimes I’d walk halfway confidently, like I was going to the guidance office. Then I’d carefully double-back and go inside the room, acting as if I’d walked past by mistake or had been at the water fountain. Going back out was somewhat easier, as I was one of the first in the hallways most of the time and didn’t worry about people seeing where I was coming from.

I did learn, though. I learned a lot. Life was a lot easier because of my middle school specialist. Despite that, though, I still stood by what I believed. Besides that, though, it was eighth grade. The friends you had right now -- or lack thereof -- was set in stone unless you were a newcomer. The cliques were set and I had no friends.

The thing that sucked about being a loner in high school was that even other losers had friends. The smart people might have been nerds, but they were also social. Some of them were marching band and made friends that way. Others would join chess club or the academic team in high school, and find friends that way. The only thing I did was join the GSA and Latin Club. It was what I was interested in -- but even though I was actually in a few things, I still had no friends. It turned out that having a group of friends/clique transferred into teams and clubs as well.

This was what else made me feel isolated and made me long to get rid of my NLD. In middle school, I’d read the “Uglies”series by Scott Westerfeld. In the first and second book, Tally (the protagonist) talked about these pills that could make you undergo a mental transformation. Instead of being this superficial, perpetually happy, stupid Pretty, all you had to do was take a pill to make yourself think normally again. That was what I wanted, so badly I felt like I was going to combust internally. I wanted a pill that would make me neurotypical.

Sometimes I would desperately seek out things in the media to help me understand and make me feel less alone about the fact that I had NLD. But in everything I found, I couldn’t find one person or character to relate to. Sometimes I cried about that, stupid as it might sound. But you have to understand: even in fiction I didn’t seem to exist. Nobody talked about NLD; it made me wonder if it was a taboo subject. Why could people talk so easily and freely about something like sex, but there were no conversations being held about my disorder? How come people didn't know about what I had? It made me feel even more ashamed about my diagnosis.

I know now that this is wrong, but at the time, I ended up unconsciously creating this hierarchy in my head. Autism was the top disorder, the desired disorder, because everybody knew what it was. They had some idea about what it was like. Asperger's was my next best bet because it was on the autism spectrum and was also closer to what I had. I disowned my NLD because it was unfavorable. Nobody knew about it and I didn't know how to explain it. I didn't want to have NLD; I wanted a more recognizable disorder. So, I would tell people that I had autism or Asperger's. Those were my coveted disorders. I could have used the opportunities that arose in high school to educate people about NLD, but I didn't. I wanted to shun what I had and embrace what I didn't because that was the easy way out. It required no effort on my part to educate others and required no additional sense of shame and self-loathing to admit I had a disorder because autism and Asperger's are so widely accepted and understood.

Around the middle of junior year, I discovered this singer named Porcelain Black. I was reeled in by her brash confidence. She didn’t care about what other people thought of her and seemed to do whatever she wanted. Porcelain Black was everything I idolized and longed to be: beautiful, confident, ambitious, unique, captivating, bold. While I scoured the internet to learn as much as was humanly possible to know about her, I came across this video where she was talking about the behind-the-scenes of her music video ‘This Is What Rock N Roll Looks Like’. I remember she said, “You’ve got to embrace who you are, and never be ashamed of who you are. It’s important to be creative, it’s important to be different.” I burst into tears. That was the first time I felt like my existence had been validated.

It didn’t matter that everybody in my life had told me it was okay that I had NLD, because those same people were neurotypical. At the end of the day, I resented them for saying it because they were absolutely never going to experience how debilitating this disorder can be. Porcelain saying that came at a time when I was ready and desperate to be validated. She was clearly not your typical adult. She wasn’t like me, and I don’t think she was talking about learning disabilities when she said that (in my own opinion), but hearing that was what I needed. For once I could forget the massive amount of nights, evenings, and early mornings that I’d sat in my room, hands flapping while I cried or intensified my self-loathing because I hated something I couldn’t control. That was what helped me to start acknowledging and accepting that a pill wouldn’t make my learning disability go away. I was going to have NLD for the rest of my life and that was something I needed to start accepting instead of being revolted over.

There’s a quote I read somewhere about how you’re going to live with yourself for your entire life. It had never made sense to me until my junior year, when it finally sunk in. If I really wanted to, I could avoid anybody I wanted by any means necessary. But the one person I wouldn’t be able to escape was myself. In order to move forward in my life and thrive and evolve as a person, accepting my NLD was going to be a crucial step. I didn’t have to like that step, but it did need to happen.

For the longest time, I’d trained myself to blend in with other people and do whatever I needed to do to seem neurotypical. It was important to me that I didn’t present as someone with a disorder, so I bent over backwards to hide my giveaways (aka symptoms) of NLD. To this day, when I’ve told people I have NLD, they’ll respond with something along the lines of, “Really? I never would have guessed -- you never seemed like you did.”

I don’t know if people said that just to be nice/make me feel at ease, but that’s the thing. You don’t have to “seem like the type” to have something. I worked so hard to seem normal that maybe it is paying off. Maybe people aren’t paying attention to me in critical detail like I always thought they were (hello, crippling self-consciousness, high self-doubt and low self-esteem. Thanks for adding to the anxiety that comes with having NLD). It doesn’t erase the fact that just because my NLD doesn’t present in obvious doesn’t mean it suddenly doesn’t exist. It still does. I just figured out how to live with it.