Halloween Blog #1:Under The Mask
When you're growing up with autism there are a lot of things you don't understand. You don't really understand how to make friends, and by extension, you don't understand why you don't have any. School, in and of itself, can be hard- typically you're really good in one subject and then you're lost and everything else. You understand you're different, but you don't understand why people look at those differences and exclude you from group activities.
When you finally start to figure out that the only answer for why people are excluding you is because you are different, you try to act like everyone else. In other words, you pretend that you are a different person. Eventually, you lose who you are.
I have always loved making up stories. Not only because I'm really good at it, but when I was younger it gave me a second escape from who I am. I can pretend that the characters I invented were me. As an extension to that, I was obsessed with television, movies, video games, etc...because it was easy for me to insert myself into those stories, I didn't have to create the story myself.
I have always loved Halloween. It was the one day of the year that I could actually physically become one of the characters that I looked up to. That, and of course, the untamable sugar addiction that all children are born with. But as I got older while I still enjoyed it, it started to feel a little unfair. Halloween is the one night of the year where everyone was wearing a mask and pretending to be someone else. For them, it was a game, but for me, it was my life.
Now, these feelings didn't ruin Halloween for me, but they definitely changed the way I looked at it. A night that I used to embrace, now was excluding me too. So if you know someone with autism, don't exclude them. Try to get to know them better. Try to look under the mask and see who they really are!
Have Greattastic Halloween
J. Mitchie Ulibarri
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