Struck out

Dear Debriefers,

It’s my turn. I stand up and walk towards the baseball bat lying on the muddy ground. All eyes are on me. My insides are writhing and my feet are heavy as lead – for a moment, I wonder if I’ll even get there.

I pick up the bat and stare at it. Surely, it is not feasible to hit a ball so small with a stick so slim. I barely have time to ponder this before there is a shout, and a flash of white. It was the ball.

Not all is lost. I have two more attempts. As my teammates look at me hesitantly, and our rivals look at me serenely, I get into position to strike. A second ball flies in my direction, I vainly wave the bat in the air. Missing, my hope drops.

The last ball zooms by and lands on the soggy grass with a dull thud. I see our rivals are triumphant and my teammates looking at me furiously.

I’m ten years old. It’s Tuesday morning physical education class. I walk off the playing field wishing the mud would swallow me.

Schools plant the seeds of ableism in many ways. And in my experience physical education is one of the most powerful and least questioned.

Disability Debrief can commission original articles like this one thanks to reader support. With thanks to Cathy, Ilene, Kamil, Lucy and Vishal for new contributions.

The Drama of my Childhood

I have often been asked about my early years by doctors with grave faces and worried frowns. Since I was first institutionalised aged thirteen I’ve seen dozens of psychiatrists, most of whom assumed a suppressed childhood trauma and relished the chance to uncover it.

But I have always answered: no, nothing happened, it was just the regular, uneventful miserable youth, thank you. I wonder how they would react if I confided that PE - physical education, or gym as we call it in Belgium - was the true drama of my childhood.

I was a pupil with a disability who never received any support or accommodations. Back then, no none had identified me as autistic. I was seen as a shy girl with a few quirks, which everyone hoped I would grow out of. Everyone, including myself. I firmly believed it was only a matter of time before I caught up with my peers – or at least, became close enough to normal for them to accept me. I would learn, eventually. I just needed to try harder.

I was also an academically gifted child who thrived in a classroom environment. I loved learning, teachers loved me, and I idolized them back to the point of borderline obsession. While this didn’t make me cool, it protected me from all-out bullying, most of the time. Everywhere in school but PE.

A whole other game

In every memory of gym class I have a knot in the pit of my stomach. There were no books to hide behind, no interesting facts to busy my mind. Only my confused and overstimulated body in an echoey hall, full of children smirking at the opportunity to demonstrate their superiority over brainy weirdos like me.

For an autistic child, PE’s sensory experience alone can be agony. I can still see the bright lights, hear those shoes screeching on the hardwood floor, feel the balls bouncing from every direction and threatening to hit me in the head. The children, fired up like soda bursting out of a shaken can, screamed with pugnacity or delight. The teachers screamed too, although why sports instructors yell at their students, even when these are middle-aged people cycling on the spot in a gym, is a mystery to me.

Many games required no other skill than to be either very fast or highly competitive, and I was neither. For example, we often played the jeu du bérêt, or beret game. It went like this: children were divided in two groups, and each given a number. The teams sat down facing each other and a ball, rag, or hat – hence the name – was placed in the between them. When their number was called, players had to jump to their feet and snatch the hat before their adversary.

Every time, I would wait for my number to be called, petrified with apprehension. Processing the information fast enough to get moving instantly seemed like an impossible feat. I knew that by the time I stood up, it would be too late. I had already lost.

The Social Battlefield

Secondary school started off with an exceptional event: an entire day of nothing but sports. I dreaded it all summer. Thoughts of missed balls and lost races kept me awake at night. When I asked my parents why this special day wasn’t held in a museum, they explained that to most people museums weren’t as much fun.

It baffled me that PE was considered a suitable activity for meeting new classmates, when it had so clearly been designed to clash and cleave. For me team sports were the opposite of a bonding opportunity. I experienced them as an intensely social battlefield requiring me to coordinate with others, decipher intentions lacking in sense, and fight with an aggressiveness I was unable to fake.

I didn’t feel belonging, but rather a strong desire to run away. If there is such a thing as sports pitch camaraderie, I am immune to it. Perhaps team spirit does not extend to those whose chance of causing defeat far outweighs that of contributing to victory.

There was nothing in the world that I wanted less than to be struggling with someone over a ball or hat. I have always preferred encounters that respect personal space over brutally physical ones. Sometimes, I cringe at the mere sight of strangers touching each other.

In school, I stayed as far away as possible from the frantic pushing, shoving and colliding other students relished, but this was a vain endeavour in PE. My boundaries were broken in every lesson.

The border of inclusion

If gym was so terrifying, it wasn’t simply because I found it unpleasant and was no good at it. It was because I knew we weren’t just playing. Our games were the symbolic staging of something bigger and incredibly important: our place in our group. The sports pitch was where the border between the included and the excluded was being drawn.

There were countless opportunities to establish who was in and out, from team member selection to changing room body shaming, from tournament elimination to balls that get passed to some but not to others. Otherwise kept in check by school rules and family morals, inclinations to cast out or to demean were finally let loose. Rejection was not only tolerated, it was institutionalised.

My inability to perform well in PE threatened to undermine the efforts I continuously invested into fitting in. Sports are no joke to those who are clinging on to the school social ladder by their fingernails. I simply couldn’t afford to fall further down.

Thus, while some were enrolled in remedial maths, or remedial Dutch, I put myself through self-inflicted remedial gym. I took tennis lessons after school despite having no interest in tennis, and went to the swimming pool every Sunday when I would have rather watched cartoons.

One PE morning my first year of secondary school, I entered the gym hall and saw a thin white rope tied between two poles. Behind the rope was a thick landing mat. The lesson of the day was high jump.

The teacher, who had icy blue eyes and always looked like she had just eaten something very bitter, explained that we were going to jump over the rope one by one. Then, she would raise the rope by a few centimetres, and we would do it once again. But only those of us who had managed to jump would proceed to the next round. The ones who stumbled would follow the rest of the lesson from the sidelines.

My heart pounded as I waited for the inevitable moment where, in front of everyone, I would crash. I remember the first student to fall – a short, scrawny girl who wasn’t any more popular than I. She went to stand the side under the teacher’s disapproving gaze.

On and on we went, as the rope went up and up. We watched our classmates jump or fall, one by one, dutifully executing the script of a purge. By the end of the class, no one was left with any doubt about where they ranked in the school hierarchy.

The Adult you Grow up to Be

Perhaps the only useful lesson of PE was preparing us for the ableist world that lay ahead. Our athletic capabilities were seen to expose the essence of our character, and by extension, the kind of adult we would grow up to be. A strong and combative one? A leader? A productive worker? Or a burden to others?

Instructors were on the lookout for signs of idleness and frailty, ready to nip them the bud. Lousy gym performance was problematic since it suggested a reluctance to engage in effortful activity.

Every year in primary school, my class went away on sports-themed school trip. It was, I suppose, intended as an opportunity to have fun. The trips made me so anxious that, while they took place in June, I started losing sleep over them in January.

Our destination in fifth grade was a sailing camp on a lake in Wallonia, where I learnt that sailing was impossibly difficult, and that wet clothes were a torture. One afternoon, the sun finally came out while I was on a boat with the sailing instructor and couple of classmates. The feeling of my trousers slowly drying filled me with hope and relief. But no sooner had I joyfully exclaimed “My trousers are dry!” than the teacher dipped his huge hand into the lake and, with a laugh, splashed water all over me.

I froze, while everything inside me fell apart. It might have been just a bit of water, and he likely hoped I would toughen up. But these few drops crushed me: not just for their unbearable wetness but also for what I guessed them to mean. I was wrong to care so much about my physical comfort. My craving for dryness, though perfectly reasonable in my eyes, actually revealed an essence of weakness inside me. It was a fundamental defect I should work hard to stifle before it was too late.

Victims of PE

Under a cover of motor skills, healthy life habits and team spirit, school sports were a formidable instrument of normalisation. In comparing children based on speed, strength, vigour or dexterity, they provided a framework to define and measure difference. They also offered the means to condemn it.

PE marked many of us as inadequate and shamed us away from our singularities. Some of its other victims probably had, like me, undiagnosed or undisclosed disabilities. Why didn’t I approach them?

We could have sympathised; we could have formed a gang. The answer pains me: I knew that associating with them would only worsen my fate. Like any ranking system, PE not only pits winners against losers, but also losers against each other. And so I chose loneliness over downfall.

Finding a refuge from the storms

Given my own gym history it puzzles me, but some some autistic people find benefits in sports that I could never have envisioned as a child.

Florian Van Acker was one of the twenty-nine Belgian athletes to take part in the Paris Paralympics last summer. In 2016, he won the gold medal for table tennis in Rio. Like me, Van Acker is autistic.

In an interview, Van Acker made an enlightening point:

“Although it may sound strange, I also like the fact that the ball goes back and forth, always with the same effect, like a pattern it repeats”, he said. “Thanks to sport I am calmer and I have more confidence in my abilities”.

This doesn’t sound strange to me at all. Now that I can practice the physical activities of my choosing – those that do not involve any from of throwing, shouting, or grabbing – I have occasionally found soothing in certain repetitive sports. When I swim, for instance, the sound of my head moving in and out of the water is wonderfully hypnotizing.

I wasn’t always able to swim like this. I feared inhaling water and, despite watching hours of video tutorials, couldn’t figure out the right body coordination for this not to happen. The breakthrough came when I accidentally ended up in a swimming pool together with an aquagym class and its blasting music. The only refuge from the noise was under water. Out of nowhere, or rather out of necessity, I suddenly mastered breaststroke. That day, I discovered that swimming is stimming.

Stimming, or self-stimulating behaviour, is a way for autistic people to regulate their senses and emotions. Often portrayed as rocking or hand flapping, stimming can in fact take many forms and employ all of our senses. Besides rocking, rubbing my feet together and clapping my hands, I also love breaststroke and sun salutations.

In hindsight, it turns out that throwing balls, running fast and jumping high are rather useless skills in themselves. There is so much else that PE could have taught me, starting with the fact that my body isn’t just the unruly mass carrying my head. It is my friend, my home away from the storms in my mind. Instead, I’ve had to learn this the hard way.

“You’re different – you know that, right?”

As I child, I gave myself one mission: to be comme les autres, like everyone else. All I ever wanted was to blend in. I would have gladly traded my academic abilities and all my possessions for a group of friends. I buried my quirks, observed, and learned to act the expected way.

Gym class came, week after week, as a cruel reminder that normal was out of my reach. I could compensate for my lack of social skills through imitation and good marks, but in PE, my true nature was showing through and there was nothing I could do about it.

It isn’t surprising, then, that the first person to ever hint at my disability was a primary school gym teacher. A gentle and soft-spoken man with a serene kind of strength, he too was an exception of sorts.

I must have been about eleven when one day, we sat down together on a tiny wooden bench in the empty sports hall. I cannot recall what prompted this conversation, but I will always remember him telling me: “You’re different – you know that, right?”

I was taken aback – how on earth had he figured it out? Until that day, no one had ever clearly said this to my face. And also, in a way, I was relieved. He had named my difference with ease and simplicity, without cowering.  

It was the first inkling I had that not fitting in might be alright. Rather than lagging behind and needing to catch up, I might actually be moving forwards on my own, beautiful track.

With joy to never have to do PE again,

Lea

Outro

Further reading. See also Lea's essay On the Other Side of a Glass Wall, about the loneliness of life in community. Or see the Debrief library for more about disability and sport.

Find Lea on Linkedin.

Let your friends know. Sharing the newsletter is how people find it!

Help us do more. The Debrief is free thanks to reader support.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Kinanty for the illustration, and to Peter for the editing and for helping work through my ideas.

I am grateful to the readers and organisations who, by supporting the Debrief, make it possible to share stories like this one.

I also want to thank my parents who were always on my side and did everything they could, including getting into a cold swimming pool every Sunday morning, to make PE less awful for me.