This guest post is by Tegan Mauldin, a young woman who was diagnosed with Asperger’s at 10 and currently attends Carroll College. Tegan is applying for the Spring 2023 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.
Autism is not a big, scary monster that is hiding in your head. It is not a fog surrounding your outlook on life. And it is definitely not your identity.
When I was young, I never recognized that I was different. I never noticed the odd behaviors I had, or the sensory issues I struggled with. All I knew is that if anything was wrong, I lost control of myself. So I tried to never let anything go wrong.
Unfortunately, that is not how life works. And as I got older I noticed more and more that was “wrong” with me. I could not effectively tell others how I was feeling, and I was not able to read how they were feeling either. I felt like a human alien that did not have a place to call home.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in the fourth grade. While it was nice to finally have a solid reason behind my actions, I now had a label. A label that screamed “DIFFERENT”. A label that I took as my identity. I was no longer just Tegan. I was Tegan, the girl that is different. Tegan, the girl who needs extra help. Tegan, the girl with the scary autism monster living inside her skull. At least, that is how I saw it.
At first, I used my diagnosis as a way to help educate others. I would go to speech therapy, where I learned about different facial expressions and body language, then my teachers would teach my classmates about how I needed their help and how they could help me. It was neat getting to see my classmates grow alongside me in this journey, and while the diagnosis still hung over me, I started to feel less and less alone with it.
In junior high, I started learning the skill of self-advocating. This was one of the hardest things I had to learn, because I had started telling myself that I needed to work everything out all by myself so I would not put that pressure on a teacher. It took some time to get over that fear, and it has been a skill that has stuck with me since. There have been times where I needed more time on an assignment, not because I was putting it off or because I just did not want to do it, but because I could not understand what I was supposed to do and just needed extra help. Time and time again, my teachers gave me the space I needed to do my best work, all because they wanted me to succeed. They did not see me as a burden, but as a student who wanted to do the best they could. And I wanted to show them that their patience did not go to waste.
However, throughout high school I began to see my autism as a sign that I was broken. I could almost imagine the big, looming shadow of the “autism monster” in my head, destroying the natural skills that I should have had inside of me and making it almost impossible to read and understand other human beings. I did not see my diagnosis as something that was just something I had to live with, but something I had to fight. And every day, I was losing. It was not going away, as much as I willed it to. It was gaining more ground, standing over me and trying to take every last of my identity away. And I wanted it to stop, but that comes with acceptance.
Acceptance does not mean that we give up and decide that our autism is our only defining feature, or the only thing that matters. Acceptance, to me, means that I am a human that has different challenges. We all have certain things in our lives that we face every day, and mine is different from others, but not a greater problem. And when I saw this, that big, scary monster was not so big and scary anymore. Instead, it became a signal to others that my brain works a little differently, but I am still a person with thoughts, feelings, and desires, and not a broken robot. Autism is not a fog that clouds everything in life, but it is more like the water that everything grows from. Without the understanding of where my thoughts and feelings come from, I would never grow as a person. And I definitely would not be the person I am today if I did not have Asperger’s. Autism is not a big, scary monster living inside your head. It is the super cool filter that no one else gets to look through but you.
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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.
