This guest post is by Dario Iannantuoni, a young man on the autism spectrum who was diagnosed with autism at 10 years old and has been accepted to Marquette University. Dario is applying for the Spring 2022 Making a Difference Autism Scholarship via the nonprofit KFM Making a Difference started by me, Kerry Magro. I was nonverbal till 2.5 and diagnosed with autism at 4, and you can read more about my organization here. Autistics on Autism: Stories You Need to Hear About What Helped Them While Growing Up and Pursuing Their Dreams, our nonprofit’s new book, was released on March 29, 2022, on Amazon here for our community to enjoy featuring the stories of 100 autistic adults.
Someone whom I once trusted told me I had a disease, something of a curse or an impairment, or at least that’s how I interpreted it. It took me three months of being isolated in the remote parts of Utah at a nomadic camp with no technology, no familiar friends and faces, no bathrooms and showers, and the weight of an eighty-pound backpack on my shoulders to realize that wasn’t true. I was born with autism which meant my mind didn’t function the same way, which can for some result in some challenges.
I tend to feel anxious and overwhelmed in social situations and in unfamiliar environments. I struggle in “casual” conversation with those I don’t know – fearful of saying the wrong thing. My social challenge leads me to distractions or what I like to say, hyper-focused on interesting things with a desire to learn more. For starters, when I was younger, I enjoyed traveling on the Chicago “L” Train. I made multiple maps of the different lines where I was able to recall and write down every single stop and included the name of every street sign in my area and around my neighborhood. You would have thought my major would be in cartography. After a while, I spent endless hours designing my own board games, creating comics with characters I invented, and writing a long story made of 30 chapters and over 200 pages.
I relate to people like me and I am able to comfort those that feel uneasy in social situations or feel unaccepted by society. For example, I made friends with a girl who was always quiet and sat alone at lunch and another girl who felt anxious and had trouble getting along with others. I empathize with both of them in that I preferred solitude and silence but I didn’t always want to be alone. I’m motivated in making friends with people that feel they don’t belong. I also volunteered at my local parish to help set up dinners for the homeless and got a chance to show people my kind side, though it’s pretty difficult when you are constantly pushing against anxiety when serving lemonade, lasagna, and making small talk with unfamiliar people. A similar situation was also when I tutored a number of five-year-olds on how to do math and was able to dissect my way of calculating addition and subtraction and teach it to them in a way where they could easily learn how to do it.
Another challenge I faced in my life was when I applied for a restaurant job where I washed a number of dishes. The worst part was the dishes covered with melted cheese…I had to scrub extra hard to get it off. Unfortunately, the restaurant shut down months later. And while I no longer was obliged to scrape that annoying cheese off pans, I felt sad and lost meaning. I realized then that work gave me a sense of empowerment and that while it’s easier to avoid that hard work in the moment, it will pile up like a number of dishes and be harder to deal with unless you go forward with confidence and do it right away. That is why I like doing the difficult things…whether it’s remote isolation in the wilderness for a quarter of the year, scraping cheese off pans, tutoring five-year-olds, helping make dinner for the homeless and befriending those who seem tough to approach: because the payoff of overcoming those challenges is worth more than being stuck behind them.
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My name is Kerry Magro, a professional speaker and best-selling author who is also on the autism spectrum. I started the nonprofit KFM Making a Difference in 2011 to help students with autism receive scholarship aid to pursue post-secondary education. Help support me so I can continue to help students with autism go to college by making a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit here.
Autistics on Autism: Stories You Need to Hear About What Helped Them While Growing Up and Pursuing Their Dreams was released on March 29, 2022 on Amazon here for our community to enjoy featuring the stories of 100 autistic adults. 100% of the proceeds from this book will go back to our nonprofit to support initiatives like our autism scholarship program. In addition, this autistic adult’s essay you just read will be featured in a future volume of this book as we plan on making this into a series of books on autistic adults.
