Running Away

Running Away

Life is full of ups and downs, I think we can all agree on that. One of my highest highs, lead to one of my lowest lows (though I didn't know it at the time). Sixth grade was the worst year of my life. One of the big reasons for this was because as I have alluded to before, sixth grade was when the bullying got really bad.

As a result, my parents started looking for a new school. They found out about HLC, and learned that they were having an ice cream social. When the day came, mom told me that we were going to check out a new school. I was a bit worried about the change at first, but I was able to connect with the other students a lot faster than I had ever connected with anyone. When we got in the car after the ice cream social, I told my parents I had never met anyone like me...until that day. I knew that I wanted to go to school at HLC.

The only real requirement for enrollment was, to be on the spectrum. At this point however, I had not been diagnosed, but my parents strongly suspected. So I was evaluated by a psychiatrist who works for the school, and she said that we would find out the results soon. About a week later I slept over at my cousins house. In the morning, my Aunt Melissa got a call from my mom telling her that I indeed had autism. I started running around, screaming like a banshee. Little did I know what had actually happened.

Getting diagnosed did help. I went to HLC, made some new friends, my self-esteem skyrocketed, and my grades went up. But something changed about me almost immediately. HLC, as I think I have mentioned before, was mostly for kids lower on the spectrum than I am. Unfortunately, I didn’t really understand what the word spectrum meant for most of my time at HLC. I just thought everyone with autism had to act the same way- so I became more stereotypically autistic.

Despite that however, I still managed to stay true to myself. When everything with the HLC talent show and Ryan went down (see Weird is a side affect) , I started to "run away" from the school. At least that’s what I thought I was running away from. What was actually happening was I was distancing myself from autism itself (the stereotypes, and more importantly the parts that were actually part of me).

I wasn’t ready to open up about my autism throughout high school. I felt like people would think of me as stupid, or inadequate. That’s not what it’s supposed to be like. You’re not supposed to look at your peers and think that they are better than you. The unfortunate thing about this is I had a really good reason to think I had to do that. For my whole life before HLC I was bullied, and that was before I was even diagnosed. What kind of torture could people inflict now that what was “wrong with me” had a name? People, we need to stop treating people with autism, like they are the stupid. If not, they are going to start running away from autism, and by extension, themselves. Because let's be real, even when you are running away from something, you're also running to something. Give your friends and loved ones something to run to.

Have a greattastic day

J. Mitchell Ulibarri