#whoever made up this stupid metric im hereby coming for your kneecaps

[neuro-il-logical]

ok so i hear a lot of people talking about different tism symptoms, how they affect life, and how misleading the discription of some of them are (i.e. literal thinking, rigid rule following, etc.) and one of them really stuck out to me.

the one i've seen a lot of people talking about how neurodivergent people see a list of to-do things and neurotypicals see a pie. they take a piece of pie and no one expects them to complete the actual fucking list in its entirety.

i feel like this kimda sorta relates to something i foumd out about recently about my school days.

ar reading levels. holy shit. i genuinelt fucking thought that once you had a range of levels you could read, you were only allowed to read within that godforsaken range. i abhored it. i wanted to read books from like fifth fucking grade and beyond im third grade and i thought i couldn't because those stupid books weren't within the bounds of my reading level range. and that range was so goddamned small that i couldn't find anything in that range that peaked my interest.

i started homeschooling in high school. ninth fucking grade. i learned that i didn't have to abide by the reading range i was assigned in seventh-eighth grade. i wasted so much fucking time abiding by my reading range that when i came up to my librarian, bemoaning not being able to check out a book i wanted because it was outside my ar level, and she told me that the ar levels were nothing but

motherfucking guidelines

and that i was allowed and goddamned encouraged to read whatever the kentucky chicken fried fuck i pleased...

well.

i've cried over this years later. i'm twenty motherfucking years old and this still pisses me the fuck off. i actively held myself back from branching out and reading harder books because of a stupid reading range that no one told me was just a guideline until too late.