I never knew I was autistic during my schooldays. Without the motor skills to master the school vaulting horse, I did know every PE class would be a brutally painful encounter. If it gave me anything, it was the discipline to keep showing up.
For the few friends I’ve known since my schooldays, two things about me stand out from then: my lack of sporting prowess and my disruptive behaviour in class. My disruptive behaviour is a story for another post.
As far as sport goes, there was my general inability on the scorching summer bitumen of the netball court and my sure-thing consistency in being the last one home from a miserably wet cross-country run. But they have been forever surpassed by my bruising encounters with the battle-scarred wooden vaulting horse. The dependability of my ineptness is the stuff of legend among a tiny group of people.
Welcome to hell, aka Catholic school girls’ toilets
The ordeal of fronting up to PE started before the double period, when I had to follow my class into the girls’ toilets to change into our school’s hideously thick and scratchy polyester gym dress, complete with unmissable bright red holy cross logo on the left chest.
Our Catholic educators evidently designed the girls’ toilets to give us a foretaste of the hell awaiting us if we didn’t repent our sins. They had the unforgettable bouquet that was stench of old plumbing and sanitary disposal unit overlain by haze of Alpine Menthol Fresh and Impulse Mysterious Musk. The girl who ruled them was, appropriately enough, built like a brick shithouse. She was tall, broad, leering, and athletic in the brutally competitive way that is the opposite of sportsmanship.
Like all bullies, the toilet tormentor’s special gift was identifying and persecuting those who didn’t share her dubious qualities. Both her words and physical presence inflicted pain. Once she’d selected you as her victim, one of her most effective MOs was to time her attack to the moment you were in the undefendable position of being halfway changed into your gym gear. She would turn fickle adolescent friends against you and leave you a pariah, at least for the interminable duration of PE. No doubt it was the only thing she ever excelled at.
The only time in my life I didn’t want to be at the front of the line
The actual lesson – by the loosest definition of the term – consisted of all the girls and boys lining up against opposite walls of a draughty shed, taking it in turns to demonstrate their mastery of the vaulting horse. Any instruction we received from our burly and balding PE teacher consisted of the type of bellowed commands and abuse any Aussie Rules coach would have been proud to exhibit on Grand Final Day. In a tacit confirmation that it was an activity only for young bodies gifted with typically developing motor skills, he never demonstrated the technique of vaulting himself. The horror of what we were supposed to do came upon me in increments during my first class.
Several times per lesson I would find myself at the front of the line, whence I had to somehow coordinate the disparate actions of running, leaping onto a trampoline the size of a postage stamp, and flying gracefully to the top of the horse. I only ever made it so far as to crash, decidedly ungracefully, into the damnable apparatus that was surely descended from a medieval torture device.
I never could work out why people called a bunch of old boxes a horse when it seemed to be just a badly designed pyramid. Its very presence mocked my affection for the real kinds of horses.
Why PE was a early and brutal life lesson
I’m interested in adult neurodivergence, so why bring up schooldays long past? I think I’ve finally figured out the life lesson vaulting taught me, even if I still can’t find a single reason it should have been a mandatory part of the curriculum. That is: being autistic means the accursed vaulting horse never goes away. It’s not a challenge; it’s a barrier.
It’s there in every job interview where I’ve crashed out because I didn’t understand the subtext in the questions. It’s in every office job where I’ve crashed physically and mentally at the end of each day because sensory accessibility is a foreign concept to most building designers. And it’s in every supermarket where my brain has crashed like the Windows blue screen of death because of the lights, noise, and people who drive their trolleys as badly as their cars.
Likewise, the toilet tormenter never went away either. I’ve met her in every toxic workmate and manager whose version of feminism has been ableist, exclusionary, and gender normative. Schoolyard bullying never ends. It just turns into sophisticated and unprovable forms of discrimination.
How I learned to shut down and show up
If the ritual humiliation of a Catholic school PE class gave me anything though, it was the ability to shut down to endure the intolerable. Over the years it morphed into the discipline of showing up well past the point my brain and body were screaming that it was impossible. As if there was ever an alternative.
But I’ve also learned that if you can find the vaulting horse that was built for you, it is possible to land on the top. And that all you want to do while you’re up there is give a big ‘fuck you’ to everyone who stood by while you crashed.
Image credit: Archives New Zealand (1971) via Flickr. Lytton High School gymnastics team practicing in the school gym. Gisborne, Auckland Province. Photographer: G. Hutchinson. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.