This guest post is by Riley “RJ” Justice, a young woman on the autism spectrum who was diagnosed with Asperger’s at 17 years old and has been accepted into the University of Denver. RJ 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.
What do you think of when you think of autism? I used to think of the TV show ‘Atypical’ and a boy named Alex in my fifth-grade class who cried when the chairs weren’t stacked properly. Autism was other, foreign, strange. So you can imagine my shock when a psychologist gently suggested I might be autistic in my senior year of high school.
I’ve always been a little bit on the outside when it comes to school, but I attributed that to being introverted and spent much of my time making a concerted effort to connect with people despite the difficulty. It didn’t occur to me that years of meltdowns over schedule changes, crippling exhaustion after school, and obsessive interests with niche topics might be indicating something else.
But it was. I was diagnosed with autism in September of my senior year.
Life has changed drastically since then, and yet it also hasn’t changed at all. I haven’t changed. I’ve always been autistic, even when I didn’t know it, so I don’t know how to be any different. But other things have changed. I have a vocabulary that I didn’t before, like “special interests,” “stimming,” and “sensory processing disorder.” My parents don’t tell me to pull myself together anymore when they find me in my closet buried under seven blankets. But the strangest thing about this diagnosis has been trying to reconcile my previously distant view of autism with my current sense of identity.
It’s difficult to think of myself as autistic when I have only ever known me to be myself. There’s such a stigma around autism, as well as widespread preconceptions. For instance, that autism is physically visible, or that it manifests in all autistic people in the same way. This is, of course, untrue. Autism is a wide spectrum, and there’s more to it than crying over foam soap. There’s beauty in it that I never saw before.
One of those beauties is special interests. I’ve been told throughout my life that my “hyper-fixations” and “obsessions” were problematic, annoying, and wrong. The term “special interests” came to me like a sweet star falling out of the sky. These things that had been so consuming and sources of joy for me were common among other autistic people, and there was nothing wrong with them at all. My current special interest is Sweden, which was triggered by the Netflix show ‘Young Royals’, and has been an immense source of fun and learning about a country, language, and culture I never knew much about previously, especially during the stress of senior year.
In the past weeks, I’ve learned so much about myself and about the things that make me unique, as well as the ways in which I need support. An autism diagnosis changed my life for the better because I now have an explanation for all the ways my brain works. I am still learning about autism, and adjusting to making it a piece of my own identity, but it is something that has made me feel so comforted and connected with other autistic people. I can’t wait for a future of further self-discovery and connection.
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. 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.
