This guest post is by Jaomar Laboy-Montalvo, a young man on the autism spectrum who was diagnosed with ASD at age 3 and is attending Valencia College. Jaomar 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, will be released on March 29, 2022 on Amazon here for our community to enjoy featuring the stories of 100 autistic adults.
When I was three, I was diagnosed with autism. And in those times when I was born, there wasn’t that much information around autism. However, my mom looked for the necessary help for me, so she started getting me involved with occupational, speech, and movement therapies for me.
As a child, I ran and tiptoed (instead of walking), I mostly didn’t eat, I never spoke to anyone, and I tended to panic in places without vision like supermarkets, department stores, and restaurants. I once studied in public school until I went to a private school after my first grade because it didn’t work out for me. On my first day in Carpe Diem, the school was much different than the previous one.
Instead of living in a big place where there are many students going in different classes, cafeterias, or any other things that you normally go to a public school, this school was much less than that. It’s way smaller, more linear, which I had to go to one class and stay throughout the schedule, and it had different students that you didn’t see in public schools. They were friendly, kind, and helped me with my struggling times and bad habits I take. The school makes it look like it is not like any other school that I know of.
At the age of thirteen, I went to Beyond Expectations in the seventh grade, and the school was much more interesting than expected. Not only that I see some familiar faces (from Carpe Diem) and work on a higher grade, it was also the time when I started seeing my new self which led me to trying to make new friends. It made me feel that this is where I truly wanted to socialize with someone that I can relate with; whether we talk about our daily life, films and shows, make jokes, hangouts, and many other things. This lasted until 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread throughout the areas. Everyone had to stay at home for quarantine and had to do online classes at Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or even Google Duos.
This became a major problem considering that since I was finishing high school, I also had to go to college. This made me socialize less often and can’t normally go to places. Even though I still take online classes and therapies at home, I couldn’t meet any of my friends later on. In addition, we also had to move out to Orlando in 2021. After a few months, I had to wait for college just to help out with packing as well as finding the college.
Once we moved out we had to say our goodbyes to our friends and cousins and travel to Orlando. Now that we’re living in an apartment, I got accepted to Valencia College and will start taking classes in May, giving me enough time to set out for supplies.
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 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, will be 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.
