I'd like to see how common this issue is within the autistic community.

To be clear here, there was talk about me being autistic as a child but as far as I can tell nothing was officially done.

I was identified as an extraordinarily "gifted" child in math from an early age, to the point that it was a huge motivator to have me skip grades. Math was easy for me, it was intuitive, and I didn't show my work at all because... why would I? I solved it in my head. I'd even correct my teachers often.

Fast forward to high school. Same deal, I got through classes super easily. Geometry particularly was too easy to the point that I'd started being a troublemaker. Teacher had me do math credits by exam so I could take calculus earlier. Except that's when everything came crashing down. From the very first day, I had no flipping clue what the teacher was trying to teach us. Nothing at all made sense, and the word problems were exceedingly difficult. I just couldn't figure out how the word problems matched with the equations I was supposed to be applying. I failed calculus. Thus set off a string of failed math classes throughout high school and college. Similar things happened with physics classes. Extremely soul destroying stuff.

So today I remembered how hard the word problems were for me, so I tried to do one of the AP test questions. It gives the height of the light pole, and the height and speed of the person walking away from it, and asks you to calculate the rate at which the person's shadow is lengthening. I would have skipped this question in high school and college because I couldn't understand what I was supposed to do. But I tried anyway, and these were my first thoughts: "How the hell am I supposed to calculate this, light doesn't work this way! The problem doesn't even tell me how big the light pole's lightbulb is, so I can't figure out where the light is emanating from." Then it dawned on me that I was supposed to assume that the light casting the shadow was coming from the exact height given for the light pole itself.

I now realize that I couldn't understand the perfect world that math and physics problems are set in, where light poles only emanate light in a controlled manner from its very top. No wonder I couldn't understand physics problems! I thought way too literally, and I could not figure out how anything was going to happen if I didn't have other information, or thought that the real world was too unpredictable to be able to determine anything with such accuracy.

The kicker is that I don't normally have such literal thinking when it comes to reading books! There are many aspects of my life when I do have literal thinking, but never did I (or anyone around me for that matter) think that a reason why I was having issues in math/physics could be this.

Note: of course this isn't the only reason why I failed math/physics. Lots of issues happened, including not being able to understand math when it didn't have an immediate application in my life, and I couldn't understand why solving these problems mattered. Plenty was wrong, but no one bothered to sit down and figure out why I was struggling, even though I had clearly been a very good math student prior to this.

So, did you experience this too?

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