Academic Resistance: Perspectives From a Former Gifted Kid

POSITIONALITY: I’m a third year Politcal Studies major and Philosophy minor who is heavily involved in the Queen’s community, especially via the Queens University Liberal Association. I’m a white, cisgender, bisexual and disabled woman. I’m incredibly passionate about human rights, justice, international relations, and the study of morals and ethics. It’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute a personal piece to a journal like PGEP.

I’ve been feeling the seismic shift in the world since the start of the pandemic – the external shift, the global shift, and my internal shift. It feels like those eerie moments after you hear a thud in the dark, when there’s no sound except your own breathing. I’ve been sitting in the dark, waiting for the next thud, since 2020. One thud sounded the night I watched my first patient in the nursing home I worked at die in front of me. The next thud landed when I was assaulted. The final one landed last month, when I was diagnosed with Autism. All along, someone in the background has been urging me to ignore the thuds and go back to sleep – or in this case, school. I’ve recently decided that going back to sleep and ignoring the sounds in the dark is no longer something I can do. Long before the thuds began, and my decline into a steep academic drop started, I thought I knew myself, and that I knew how to learn. In high school, I was captain of the cheer team, with a 97% average (or some other number that screams “overachiever”). I played lead flute in the band. I never had to study, and I always aced my exams. I had very few friends, and my hobbies were strange to say the least (I still go to the rug-hooking class I took back then), but I never questioned it. As it turns out, my classmates had completely left me in the dust. I realized this, rather harshly, during my first

year of university. I had experience doing all kinds of chores, but somehow, they never got finished, despite my mile long to-do lists. I knew how to make expert small talk, but struggled to really identify with people, and felt as if I were constantly missing this enormous blaring sign that everyone else saw, one saying “Do X to make people like you.” I threw myself into school, something I had always been good at. But slowly, I started to fail for the very first time. I know now that it was because I needed academic accommodations for undiagnosed Autism, but in first year I felt as if I were failing some future version of myself with every single grade. The Bs very quickly became Cs. The further I threw myself into school, the less time I felt I had to do anything else, and the days I did anything else I couldn’t manage school. Life very quickly became a game of “Do I do laundry or do I go to class?” That’s when I should have realized something was wrong. In second year, when I left residence, my executive functioning got worse at a spectacular rate. My high school partner and I broke up, I witnessed people die at my job, I was assaulted in the apartment I was living in, and I ended up living alone in a three-bedroom rental for most of the year. I stopped being able to do dishes or laundry at all, and at school I felt so much pressure I couldn’t breathe. I regularly forgot to eat food or drink water – sometimes going a full day without a glass. My GPA dropped from a respectable 3.5 to a 2.7 in less than a year, and no one noticed I was drowning – including me. It felt like everything was too loud and bright all the time, and because of my summer job all I could think about was the people around me dying. I couldn’t shower at my own apartment and used to drive to friends’ houses to do so, inexplicably showing up with a lie about my plumbing not working, or my heat being off. When I was in class, I was unmotivated, silent, and wearing the same clothes I had been wearing for days. I eventually stopped going. Before I had normally dressed nicely for class – even putting on makeup at least once a week – and had spoke at every opportunity. The difference should have been alarming. The extreme drop in grades, change in appearance, and lack of enthusiasm for life should have been noticed by someone. Especially when it was coming from a person who took (and is learning how to again) so much

joy from learning. Unfortunately, I was extraordinarily good at hiding it. The laundry machine was always broken, I had always just finished hosting a messy get-together, I was pulling all-nighters, I didn’t like the professor… the excuses were believable, and I delivered them like a trained actress. Throughout all of this, an all-consuming need to excel like I had in high school was slowly killing me. I needed to be academically validated because I felt socially and emotionally useless, and I refused to get help because I thought no one else around me needed it. I found it difficult to communicate to professors and peers that I needed extensions because of mental health, that I couldn’t be reached past 5 PM because otherwise I would obsess over the work, and so on. I never set the boundaries and so they were constantly being stepped across. I felt that, as a student, it was my responsibility to always be on top of my work, and to always prioritize school over all else. I did not want to disappoint my past self, let down my future self, and look weak to the professors that I respected so much. My life is certainly not all better – I have a long way to go in developing my executive functioning, and I probably will never have a solid grasp on how to make friends. However, I’ve decided this semester that I will no longer force an academic narrative that requires me to ignore the personal struggles I am facing. This isn’t to say that I don’t go to class or study. I mean, rather, that I am no longer forcing my life to form around my academics. When I feel sick, I ask the professor or a peer what we did in class, and I take the time to feel better instead of plowing ahead. When I am confused, I ask all the questions I have (even though part of me screams not to), and I ask them until I understand. When I am struggling, I tell people. When my laundry needs to be done, I set aside the amount of time it takes me to do it without guilting myself over wasted study time. I am still afraid to fail, don’t get me wrong, but I no longer feel as if my entire life revolves around each and every grade I get. It took me three years and an inexplicable amount of heartache, trauma, and searching to discover that I had no idea what learning and success really were – I only knew to measure them in percentages. I still don’t know what they look like, only that I feel better when I go to class be-

cause I care about what I am learning instead of going because I want an A. Grades are still important, but I have so much more to offer the world and Queen’s than an A in Political Theory, and realizing this – as obvious as it may sound - has changed my life. To me, resistance is taking your future and present into your own hands. It is advocating for yourself and your needs regardless of the societal narrative that infiltrates and examines our every move. It is setting hard boundaries in academic and work life, and it is enforcing those boundaries. Resistance is a deeply personal act, one that is interpreted and shaped and implemented in a way so specific that no one else could ever recreate it exactly. To resist academically is to take everything pushing against you and push back harder. It is telling professors that you need accommodations, and ensuring those needs are met. It is telling classmates you will not respond to texts about school after 5 PM. It is asking for help, and communicating that you are struggling. The act of academic resistance is to resist our internal narrative that says we must always do it alone, that we must always be the best. There is power in being the worst every now and again. University is far too often a competition to be the best and know the most. I know far too many people who have sacrificed sleep, health, mental wellbeing, and happiness for a grade, and that must change before this next generation of leaders is too burned out to be curious once they are released into this world. Resist the urge to go back to bed and ignore the thuds - you will sleep better if you investigate them first.