This guest post is by Andrew Robbins, a young man who was diagnosed with autism at the age of 5 and intends to attend Digipen Institute of Technology. Andrew 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.
During elementary and middle school, I was bullied a lot. Although it was mostly because of my Autism and niche interests, I was mostly oblivious enough to avoid feeling deeply adverse effects from it. Regardless, the bullying combined with a chaotic home life ended up with me wanting to find a way to escape reality for long hours. I was about 7 years old when I realized that I could create a whole world in my head, and that changed everything. This was revolutionary for me because I could make up my world with my little people in it where everyone was nice to me, and I didn’t have to worry about feeling broken in the eyes of society because of my Autism. As I grew, I realized that a world where everyone is nice and there’s no conflict doesn’t make for an entertaining daydream, which is part of the reason I got into tabletop role-playing games.
These games, Dungeons and Dragons in particular, where I made characters and pretended to be them, were what I’d been searching for. They allowed me to pretend to be someone that could hold a conversation or be a “normal” person for once, and that inspired me as nothing else had. I got into art because of the game, and now I want to make it my career. I made a few friends, although I think they were mostly putting up with me for the games, but hey, I take what I can get! I also decided that if these full-grown adults with years of experience could make a game like this through tweaking and fine-tuning spanning four literal decades, then I, a 15-year-old (at the time) Autistic middle school student, could probably do it in just a few months. So I ended up doing that, not seeing the logical fallacy in my reasoning.
I can’t honestly express how big a part of my life the game I created was. It took me four years to complete a final draft, and in that time, I felt that I had a purpose. The experience in making my own game taught me a lot of things about networking, balancing, scheduling, writing long-form, and editing; the effects of which I’m still enjoying to this day. It helped me feel in control when I felt that I had none. It gave me a creative outlet to fully express myself. Sure, I hit a few bumps in the road, such as a big drop in motivation around the second year of the writing process and a full rewrite of the rules because I didn’t personally like how they turned out, but I managed to create something I’m so incredibly proud of. Commissioning art, figuring out how to self-publish something, and formatting the book were all difficult and time-consuming, but I wouldn’t trade the time I spent doing that because of all that I learned.
The journey of starting this project, and all the bumps that got me this far, might have been unpleasant, but they helped shape me into the person I am today. Before this, I don’t remember what I did with all my ideas, save for the various notebooks filled and forgot about. There are too many people in the world that forget or discard their ideas because someone else has done something similar before them, but it’s worth the effort every time, and I learned that just a little bit of effort can bring your dreams to life in a major way.
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.
