I’ve been tested for ambidexterity, amblyopia, astigmatism, auditory processing disorder, focal dystonia, and essential blepharospasm (eye twitching). I’ve been evaluated in language, learning, speech, and motor skills; tested for visual and hearing disabilities; rated on intelligence, cognition, aptitude, personality, development, and functioning. I’ve undergone Wepman’s Auditory Discrimination Test and Auditory Memory Battery, the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, the Beery Tests of Oral Comprehension, the Draw-a-Person Test, the Denckla rapid automatized naming test, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Detroit Test of Learning Aptitude, the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales tests, the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities test, the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children test, Frostig’s Developmental Test of Visual Perception, the Gray Oral Reading Tests, Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, and neuropsychological batteries including the Wide Range Achievement Test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales test, four times each.
I’ve pointed to pictures of shapes, cartoons, numbers, and letters, hoping my final answer matched what belonged in the empty grid. I’ve told them what was wrong with that picture, what was silly about it. I’ve drawn pictures and written stories. I’ve recited number sequences backward and forward. I’ve reconstructed cube patterns in the allotted time. After a while, all the patterns began to look the same.
My brain has been divided into fourths, eighths, and twelfths. I’ve been measured and sent to labs, measured and weighed against calculations, measured and assigned diagnostic codes, measured and measured and tested and compared to the standards by which measuring was held. I’ve spelled words I’d never heard, guessed their definitions. I’ve suffixed, prefixed, compounded, conjugated, diagrammed, defined, duplicated, reiterated, guessed, multiplied, divided, added, subtracted, elided, recited, confided, lied, cursed, and cried. I’ve repeated numbers, words, and rhymes. I’ve seen doctors, learning specialists, and tutors; I’ve stood on scales, languished in waiting rooms and on examination tables; I’ve raced against stopwatches; I’ve hung upright in trays affixed to the backs of doctors’ doors. I’ve sat at Formica desks and in play areas, and been surrounded by white coats, pantsuits, pearl necklaces, bifocals, year-old issues of Highlights, Cricket, WOW, and Dynamite; I’ve climbed poles, marked on boards, put together oversized puzzles, threw suction darts, sat at low worktables to draw with colored chalk; I’ve met more new receptionists in more clinics than I can recall.
I’ve filled in the blanks: Mary had a _________ lamb. Boys run; babies __________. I’ve been timed, watched, and notated.
I was confused by the tests. I couldn’t understand why adults believed that state capitals, equations, or analogies could determine why I was always afraid. I waited for someone to tell me the answers to what was inside me, but the focus was on what I didn’t know, and never on what I did. The tests didn’t care about my experience of the world; no one asked me questions they didn’t already have answers to. There was a way I was supposed to be, and I didn’t match. I was off the charts I should have been on, below the percentiles I was expected to reach, and outside the limited check boxes inside which I didn’t easily fit. There were norms, categories and particular systems too narrow to include me. There was a single standard used to evaluate everyone, and that meant there was a single standard type of person, defined by a basic human trait that I did not possess: intelligence. I did not match the person I knew I was supposed to be. I feared I was not the right kind of human.
I knew where to go, what time to be there, and the name of each doctor, but I could not tell you why I took those tests, I could not tell you how I scored, or what they were supposed to teach me, my mother, or my doctors. Until I was twenty-five years old, I could not tell you what was wrong with me.