This guest post is by Samantha Moore, a young woman on the autism spectrum who was accepted into Ursinus College. Samantha 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.
I hope you can support my nonprofit like I’m trying to support these students with scholarship aid for college. Learn more on how you can help our cause with a small donation (just asking for $3 today, equal to your daily cup of coffee) here.
I had always been a child with an active imagination – didn’t always love sports, but I definitely tried to. When I was, I think 6 years old, my mother had me playing for my school’s soccer team at North Penn, and all I wanted to do was pick flowers. I would probably play along for a few minutes and then would distract by who or what was on the sidelines, or the other parents cheering us on. Needless to say, I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, around a year later.
I grew up a few miles outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I had always loved growing up in the suburbs. It was just the right amount of city and country for me. I loved the ice cream, and looking at all of the farm animals, and picking pumpkins with my mom. Everything about it just felt like home to me.
My mom started noticing signs of abnormal behavior when I was about 10 years old, behavior well beyond ADHD. I had always been a friendly kid. I liked interacting with other people, but I would get too close too fast. When it got to the point when I was getting too friendly with my teachers, it became clear what was going on. The depression and timidness began a little before high school, by about a year and a half. I had just started realizing how little I understood how to interact with new people. In 6th and 7th grade I had befriended someone who shall not be named. Looking back on it she probably had some sort of bipolar disorder or narcissistic behavioral disorder. She would constantly drag me into trouble, get upset at me when I didn’t do what she wanted me to do, and constantly manipulated me. When I finally got away, I felt like I became less extroverted. I would be open and talkative and laugh and joke when I was around my real friends, but when I was by myself, being happy with my life slowly grew more and more difficult. It was like this new introverted behavior slowly made me realize how upsetting my life before had been.
“No one really wanted to be friends with me because I was too weird”; those were all words that would all start to swarm around in my mind from the time I was 13. So, I started creating stories in my head, where I was the hero, I had a boyfriend who adored me, sometimes I had superpowers, sometimes I was best friends with some of my favorite nonfiction characters. That internal world became my safe space for years.
At age 15, I was officially and clinically diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, or High Functioning Asperger’s – which may make more sense now that I’m older – but at 15 years old, it didn’t tell me anything. My entire life, I had all of these strange behaviors that I thought were normal until school began to get more complicated. I didn’t know how to be myself, or how to talk to people or make friends. I would talk to myself all the time like any of my other classmates would speak to their peers in the hall, but when I was with someone else, other than maybe a select few people, I would shut down. In the classroom, when everyone else was laughing and talking and throwing bottles from the cafeteria across the room, I would sit quietly at my desk and draw in my sketchbook. All I wanted was to be able to act like everyone else my own age, to speak with people, make new friends, but it literally felt like there was something within me physically holding me back from doing so, and it made me feel so lonely.
When I began college in the Fall of 2018 however, things started getting better; I met the love of my life and started making more friends, sought new hobbies and passions, and actually was able to better understand myself. More recently I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, after struggling with them for almost 10 years now, and now I’m finally getting treatment for them. Winter of 2020, after months and years of thinking, I decided that I wanted to study to become a therapist. I realized that having someone to talk to who knew and understood what I was dealing with and could help me to better understand what part of them caused me to behave the way I did, would have helped me out a lot. I want to be that person for those who are struggling the same as I did because I know that no one should have to deal with any of this on their own.
Follow my journey on Facebook, my Facebook Fan Page, Tiktok, Youtube & Instagram,
My name is Kerry Magro, a professional speaker and best-selling author who is also on the autism spectrum that started the nonprofit KFM Making a Difference in 2011 to help students with autism receive scholarship aid to pursue a 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.
