I was about eleven years old when the people around me started talking about driving. Comments like “Only five more years until you can get your drivers license” or “watch out, she’ll be driving before you know it” quickly became a fact of everyday life. When I was fifteen, being able to drive became a badge of honor. I remember telling myself, “sure I’m spending every waking hour trying to keep up in school for now, but once I get the hang of this stuff it won’t take me so long and I’ll have at least a few minutes every day to practice driving.” Over the next few years, however, every bit of brain power that I had was devoted to trying to get into college. Though my standardized test scores were certainly less than ideal, I sacrificed my social life (and in many ways my personal wellbeing) in order to practice for my college auditions, hoping that an impressive audition would help the music schools to overlook an embarrassingly poor performance on the SAT and ACT math sections. By the beginning of my senior year, I still had yet to so much as touch a steering wheel let alone enroll in driving classes. Because I still had no idea why my brain seemed to work so differently than those of my peers, I started telling everyone who asked (and that was a LOT of people) that I was just too focused on my music studies to be able to think about driving. Though this was true, there were also other obstacles that were more directly related to my undiagnosed learning disability. Though people who know that I’m a music major may find this surprising, dyscalculia is known to affect an individual’s ability to learn a musical instrument. While I had a lot working in my favor (starting my music education at a young age, having parents who could help me with my music studies, being exposed to musical concepts in my daily life, etc.) I also realize now that many of my unexplained technical challenges with violin could likely be attributed in part to my learning disability. As a result, learning music took me significantly longer than many of my peers, meaning that I had to devote huge amounts of time and energy every day in order to stay on track with my personal goals, leaving little (if any) time for the driving lessons that everyone seemed so invested in me having. By this point, I had also now realized that driving was going to be a huge challenge for me. Despite being unaware that my learning disability severely affected my spacial navigation skills as well as my ability to calculate and understand numerical concepts such as distance and speed, I did know that wasn’t even confident in my ability to steer a grocery cart let alone a car. Unfortunately, I had no way to explain this to the people around me and as it became increasingly clear that driving was not only viewed as a life skill that many people found it helpful to attain, but as a rite of passage that carries more cultural significance than anyone would realize until you’re twenty-two years old and wondering if you’ve “failed” at adulthood simply because you don’t know how to drive a car.
When I was eighteen and finally did enroll in driving classes, I got off to a very rough start. Between my learning disability and undiagnosed anxiety disorder, it was nearly impossible for me to understand the instructions I was being given in my driving classes and keep all of them in my mind. Because dyscalculia severely affects depth perception, spacial relations, and ability to conceptualize distance, time, and speed, you can imagine the challenges that driving a car would present. When I began college, I once again had to spend almost every possible second trying to keep up in school (thanks in part to having some professors who refused to comply with documented disability accommodations…) and had little free time left even for sleeping, let alone driving lessons. When the pandemic began and I finally had endless time to devote to driving, I was advised against this by health professionals because I was seriously struggling with a eating disorder at the time and was at risk of becoming unconscious while driving. Even so, I felt intense guilt that I wasn’t devoting every second to learning to drive and felt that I was letting down everyone in my life, despite my valid reasons to continue to put off getting my license. More recently, my physical and mental health have significantly improved and I was able to get in touch with a private driving instructor in my city who specializes in teaching people with learning disabilities. Though driving has proven to be slightly less impossible this time around, there are aspects of it that still feel like an unsolvable puzzle. Around the end of high school, not having a license had become one of my biggest insecurities and sources of self-hatred and unfortunately, this feeling stayed with me for a long time, despite my efforts to unlearn this internalized ableist judgement and promote acceptance and inclusivity for people with disabilities.
This is not intended to be a list of excuses for why I don’t have a license (we don’t automatically owe that to the rest of the world), so here’s the point I want to make: If it is a widely-accepted societal expectation that every single person will attain a specific skill by a certain age, then that social norm is inherently un-inclusive and needs to be reevaluated. This not only goes for societal beliefs about driving but also completion of high school and college, as well as other learned skills such as riding a bike or swimming. I also think that it’s important not to underestimate the power that social pressure carries, particularly when it comes to narratives surrounding independence, respect, and “success” or “failure” in relation to given cultural norms. Though someone might argue that there is no explicit rule against never getting a drivers license, the societal stigma surrounding being an adult who cannot drive is more than enough to illicit feelings of shame, inadequacy, and failure. At this point, I’ve had plenty of time to think about the cultural narratives surrounding driving as well as the arbitrarily assigned age limits relating to the social acceptability of existing as an adult without a license (insert eye-roll here). In all seriousness, however, I believe that a huge part of the stigmatization of adults who can’t drive derives from the societal association between obtaining a drivers’ license and being seen as an independent adult. There are a few problems with this, the first being that a common theme when it comes to criticisms of older teenagers without licenses is the belief that the parents are “burdened” with the responsibility of helping with transportation until the child gets their license. For one thing, this can cause overwhelming shame and guilt for teenagers without licenses who still live with their families and therefore sometimes ask for help with transportation. For another thing, I believe that even though most people probably know logically that adults who can’t drive obviously do not rely on our parents for transportation, this narrative influences the way that our society views adults without licenses and frequently shows up as inability to see adults without licenses as independent people rather than exclusively as the child of a family unit. The reality is that whether or I drive a car or rely on public transportation instead, my mode of travel has no baring on my intelligence, capability, or value as a person.
Another common question that I used to get was, “how can you be capable enough to play the violin and get good grades at a challenging university but still be unable to learn to drive?” I’ve come to learn over the years that abilities don’t fit into one universal linear pattern. While the skills required for driving might be more easily attainable for some than those required for, let’s just say, critically analyzing social narratives surrounding obtaining a drivers license, 😉 … in my case, it is very much the opposite. The main reason for this is that being a person with dyscalculia, I tend to feel very confident when it comes to skills that are primarily idea-based and much less so with skills that are strictly technique-based or require intuitive understanding of space and time. Though being an adult without a license at times feels frustrating, discouraging, and embarrassing, one thing that has come out of this difficult experience is that in my eyes, everyone who can drive might as well have superpowers. Because I see the incredible skill required by the human brain in order to successfully operate a vehicle, it is not an exaggeration to say that every time I find myself riding in a car, I am utterly in awe of what the driver can do. Complete a turn without driving into the curb? Incredible. Manage to maintain a consistent speed by intuitively knowing how much to push your foot down on each pedal because you have an internal understanding of the relationship between pressure, speed, and distance? Amazing. To me, these are some of the most underrated, highly-specialized skills a person can attain and it sometimes blows my mind that most drivers live their entire lives without ever appreciating the incredible level of expertise that they have. My point here is that though my learning disability has caused me much annoyance and difficulty in my life, living with dyscalculia has also allowed me to appreciate the amount of skill that goes into seemingly everyday tasks. I don’t say this to mean that everyone should feel bad for those who have a more difficult time with these tasks, but instead as a reminder to appreciate all of the amazing things that our minds can do, whether that be driving a car, writing an essay, cooking a meal, playing an instrument, playing a sport, or any other number of things. Regardless of which skills we have or don’t have, they are ALL worthy of admiration and celebration. I hope that we can all begin to start appreciating ourselves and others for the amazing things that we CAN do and practice universal, unconditional acceptance for the coexistence of varying kinds of ability.
Dyscalculia Community 