But I have to tell about a school (non-residential) I visited last week. The class I was observing had one teacher and 2 aides. The students were 18 – 22 years old — a transitional class. I was feeling so comfortable there and I realized it was because everyone was treated with respect. I didn’t even realize how much I was dreading the visit until I noticed that I was relaxed and enjoying myself with these interesting people, who were all (staff and students) being themselves without repercussion.

Sadly, I guess my unexpected feelings there underline the rarity of such settings. It was such a pleasure for me, and a good reminder of how things can be.

As I was anorexic (restricting type), she decided that I must be rigidly perfectionistic. Once, before the group started, I began to rearrange the books on the shelf so that their spines were all an equal distance away from the edge. I was doing it without really thinking about it – I was caught up in a daydream. The group facilitator saw this as evidence of my obsessive streak. If something like that happened to me today, I would just point out that plenty of people play with things or fidget when they’re lost in thought. I was too perplexed at the time to point that out. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

I wonder if part of the problem (aside from the whole “pathologization of neurological differences” thing, which probably does play a bigger role) might be that some people just have trouble grasping the concept that not everyone has identical interests. For example, when I was a teenager at summer camp once, I happened to mention to someone (an adult) that I had been reading a book earlier. And the reaction was really strong pity and sympathy that I had been so “bored.”

This left me entirely confused until I found out that the person apparently saw reading as something to do only when you were so thoroughly bored and entirely lacking in more interesting to do that you had no choice but to read. They simply couldn’t conceive of reading as an activity that a person would WANT to do and actually SET ASIDE TIME FOR and even greatly MISS if we were deprived of the option to pursue it. The person was flabbergasted to learn that I *enjoyed* reading. I was flabergasted to see how flabergasted they were that some people in the world do actually enjoy it!

The difference here, of course, is that there is not as much pathologization in an ordinary summer camp as there is inside certain institutions. The latter setting allows more room for the people in charge to pathologize any behavior that they don’t understand. So if they can’t understand how a person (any person, inside or outside the institution, with or without a diagnostic label) can actually enjoy writing in a journal or reading a book, or ignore the television when it is on, and if they’re already primed to see the people around them in pathologizing ways, then maybe that’s a contributing factor to how some people end up pathologizing ordinary behaviors.