Finding Heroes in the Cubing Community: Importance Of Neurodivergent Mentors For Your Child
Who are your child’s heroes?
What adults do they see as examples of what’s possible for their future?
How often do they get to see twice-exceptional adults succeed?
Growing up, I didn’t see any. When I thought of twice-exceptional autistic adults, I mostly only knew of historical figures who had passed away and were only suspected to be autistic. I couldn’t imagine what my future could look like. Despite being profoundly gifted, I had no motivation and no follow-through. I would start hobby after hobby, join club after club, and then quit at the first opportunity. I encountered barriers and had no one to guide me over them. My piano teacher didn’t have hyper-mobility and didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t want to practice because my fingers hurt, even though I was completing a level book a month. Then I discovered cubing.
Speedcubing, or solving twisty puzzles like the Rubik’s Cube, is a gold mine of twice-exceptional adults and peers. Solving the cube gave me confidence that I could do hard things. As I joined the community through virtual competitions, discussion boards, and meet-ups, I looked around and saw people like me. I met people who were going to college, exploring their passions, starting businesses, and who had support needs and challenges like mine. Everywhere I went with a cube in my hand, my people found me, and I can see why. Cubing is regulating, it’s predictable, but it’s also stimulating and challenging. It lets me focus my whole brain and body to accomplish a task. When I was preparing for the SATs, I asked the mentors I had found in the cubing community for help. They sent me their old study books and told me what accommodations had been helpful and how I could get them. Even when I stopped cubing for many years, I knew I could succeed in the challenges I was taking on because I had seen others do it first.
Max Park
This past summer, we had the North American Championships, where Max Park ⬆️, an autistic cuber, was extremely dominant. Max was unique among winners because he didn’t do on-screen interviews. He has been open about how challenging speech can be when he’s excited or experiencing big moments. His father often does interviews instead, talking about how beneficial cubing has been for Max’s social skills, confidence, fine motor skills, and more. Cubing gave Max a chance to show his strengths when people often only saw his struggles. At his second competition, he won the 6x6 event on a borrowed cube—his parents weren’t even aware he could solve one. Now, he holds the world record for that and five other events. Max isn’t alone; cubing is full of neurodivergent and twice-exceptional peers and role models like Juliette Sebastian ⬇️, a world-class solver from France, and many more.
Juliette Sebastian
Everyone deserves to feel represented and to see people that reflect their core identities succeed. One great way to find those role models is in the cubing community. This comes in addition to the benefits of confidence, socialization, fine motor skills, flexible thinking, pattern recognition, algorithmic understanding, and so much more. Although cubing wasn’t the only place I found my people, as I grew, I found them in card shops, hockey rinks, and video game servers. Cubing was the first, and maybe it’ll be the first for your child too.
Whether it’s cubing or not, my wish for every twice-exceptional child this fall is that they find a goldmine of mentors and true peers who can support them to success.
I think Young Scholars Academy is a great place to begin.
We are building our own Cubing Community here!
Check out our Cubing Club this Fall!
Young Scholars Academy Mentor
