I don’t exactly know how well I’d feel about writing this but here it goes …
April is Autism Awareness Month and I’m on the autistic spectrum. Life is hard for people like us. A lot of people try to fix us. You can’t fix us. The only way you can “cure” us is by being our friend.
Yes, I’m high-functioning, but I feel like I mess everything up at times. At school, I’ve sat there and cried because I feel like nobody understands me. One part of my learning disorder is being obsessed with things. Mine’s music. I’ve been judged for this before. I’ve even been mocked. I have told a few adults about this “issue” and they’ve said, “why can’t you control it?”
I’ve gotten blamed too for the situation because of me being obsessed. When I bring up anything I’m doing with guitar, I get ignored. It hurts a lot. Another important part is, I have low muscle tone. It’s everywhere and it sucks.
For the past 3½ years, I’ve been playing guitar to build up the strength in my fingers. A sad part for me is, it takes me a month (depending on the song) just to be able to do one little thing everyone else could do in about a week or two.
My organizational skills are so bad. My room is always a mess, my backpack is a mess, and my binders are not organized. It’s bad that they are so unorganized. I know there are a lot of people out there who have something worse than me and I feel so bad for them.
I’m lucky I have people that want to talk to me and want to hang out with me. I know there are some kids that are so different from everyone around them and people don’t want to talk to them because they think they’re “strange.”
I sometimes sit in school and think about my issues and then I just randomly break down and cry. I feel so different at school because nobody knows how much harder I have to work than them to get something right.
I get told (by teachers) I need to get better at asking for help, but when I do, I get judged by others around me or people say I need to do it on my own. It hurts a lot. It truly does.
I get told it’ll get better and I try so hard to believe that, but it’s gotten to the point where I don’t believe it. I wish I could believe it but I just can’t. So many people struggle every day and I’m one of those people who do struggle.
Yes, I have a great life, but I always feel like I can’t make anyone happy because of the things I can do and the things I can’t do. I get excluded a lot, but when I talk about what everyone else around me wants to talk about, I get judged.
Now that I’ve said this, tell someone who has autism, Asperger’s, anything on the spectrum, any learning disorder, or anyone who is struggling you’re proud of them. Look them in the eyes and tell them how proud you are of them because they go through so much more than you probably know, and say it from a place of compassion and love.
It will make them feel like they are important and it will make them feel like they have someone in their life who actually cares for them. We all deserve to be happy.
(Haley Holland Graves is 14 years old. She is an eighth-grader at South Bristol School. April is Autism Awareness Month.)
