A New Adventure, Part One: Setting the Stage

    Hey there! It's good to see you again; come have a seat by the fire and let's have a little chat.

    No, don't worry, Hats, Boots, and Chocolate isn't going anywhere. :) I may not update the blogs as often as I used to, but I promise we're still around!

    Today, I really want to talk about some of the experiences I've been having the last year or so.

    Some time ago that was more than a year ago (it's really nonspecific, I know, and I'm sorry about that), my mom was talking with my sister-in-law, and my sister-in-law mentioned that she thought I might have Asperger's syndrome. I didn't know about this at the time, and didn't find out about the conversation until a little while later, when I was talking with my mom on the way to Irish dance class--this is the reason I'm unsure on the time frame, because I quit Irish dance a year ago (for reasons I'll get into eventually), but for a solid year before that, I was driving myself to Irish dance, so my mom wasn't in the car. I also have a notoriously spotty memory for the exact timing of past events, which makes it even more challenging.

    But at some point, my mom mentioned this idea from my sister-in-law that perhaps the reason I struggled so much to make friends wherever I went, be it at church, at karate classes, at Irish dance classes, or when taking school classes, was because there was something different about my brain that made it so I didn't have a filter to know when to stop talking.

    I laughed the idea off a bit at first. I mean, it kind of made sense, sure. But I didn't know a lot about Asperger's syndrome, and anyway, it didn't really affect my life.

    And then I started to struggle in dance, in almost exactly the same way I'd struggled with karate a few years before.

    I initially started karate because my older brother wanted to learn it, and my mom thought, "Hey, this would be a great way to give them bonding time, Elia needs an extracurricular activity to get her out of her imagination sometimes, and I don't know what else to do with her." So off to karate I went.

    The problem was, I struggled in karate from the start. It took me forever to learn new katas and sets, I was completely unable to defend myself in sparring matches, and it felt like no matter how hard I tried, I was always only barely keeping up with my brother.

    Ironically enough, when we both earned our black belts and our school shut down, I was the one to go on to try learning at another school, while my brother moved on with his life.

    I guess I thought that at another school, things would be different. Maybe I would struggle less with a different teacher--and maybe I would have, had my new sensei had better classroom management. I love the man dearly; he's a great guy. But he had too many students at too many different levels, and he hadn't figured out how to teach each student the kata they needed to learn for their level. In my six months there, I learned the start of about four different katas, all from levels a bit above or a bit below mine. I still don't know what kata I was supposed to be learning, because as far as I know we never touched it in class.

    Frustrated by how little I was learning, I quit.

    Now, three years after quitting in karate, I was struggling in dance. Only this time, it was a lot more obvious what the problem was.

    I wasn't learning the dances the same way my peers were. Where they could watch the dance once, maybe twice if it was tricky, and pick up the general flow of it, I needed someone to walk me through each step in order six or seven times in a row before I started to feel confident enough to practice on my own.

    This wouldn't have been a problem, necessarily, if it weren't for the fact that at the beginning of the school year, my class was combined with the class a level above us, so we were now abruptly twice the size we had been before. All of a sudden, there were so many kids to manage and teach that none of the teachers ever had time to walk me through the steps the way they had before. And I'd never struggled before--in fact, I'd say that I was comfortably in the top three dancers in my original class. I guess they figured I could handle it, and had I been any other kid, they would have been right.

    But now here I was at the end of the school year. We'd been taught a whole bunch of extremely challenging steps--several new reel steps, new hornpipe steps, new treble jig steps, new slip jig steps. I learned the early ones well--I still remember most of the new reel third step I was taught in October and November that year, and some of the new hornpipe second step. But as the year wore on, the steps proliferated somehow, and all of a sudden I was left with ten-ish new steps I was supposed to be learning, of which I only knew bits and pieces because I'd never gotten solid on how it all went together.

    After months of struggling to keep up, I was exhausted and frustrated. I needed something to change, and this time I had a better understanding of my brain and I knew what was going on.

    I approached my teacher and asked her if I could move to the adult class. "I'm really struggling because it seems like no one has the time to teach me the way my brain needs to be taught. I need more one-on-one instruction to figure this out, and this class is so big that I'm not getting that anymore."

    I thought it was going well, until it wasn't. My teacher didn't exactly laugh in my face, but that was about how it felt when she told me that the adult class would be no better. "There are too many people at too many different levels. There won't be any more time for you there; in fact, it will probably be worse. Stay in this class."

    So I tried. I gave it my best shot. Maybe now that my teacher knew I was struggling, she'd find a way to take some extra time for me.

    That didn't happen, and once again, I grew so frustrated with how little I was learning that I quit.*

    

    *(I've since learned that that teacher was growing burned out with teaching--to which I say, "Fair!" because she had a lot of rowdy kids in her classes, along with a couple kids at home--and quit a few months later; nowadays, my cousins who dance at the school report that there have been a lot of changes to how the classes are taught. As a result, one of my cousins and a friend of hers now teach the adult class, and as someone who has struggled to learn before, she has told me that she knows better how my brain works and would be more than happy to teach me--in essence, the adult class now has the potential to be very good for me. Unfortunately, I'm still a bit scarred from the events that led to me quitting, and I haven't built up the courage to go back and try again yet.)

You can read Part Two here!