This guest post is by Nathan Johnson, a young man with autism who attends Washington University in Saint Louis. Nathan 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 one tranquil afternoon in my early childhood, I met a man whom I had never seen before. In fact, neither had any of my immediate family. He had a medium complexion with a courteous smile. My mother, at the age of thirty seven, met her hispanic father for the first time. It was this very afternoon which appears to be an enlightenment to an entirely new pursuit in physics and mathematics. This was when, albeit subtly, I discovered that I was not who I once thought I was.
It appears that life can be generalized to a fairly simple dichotomy: we are or we are not. Equivalently, “somos o no somos”. In the philosophical sense, one can say that this is equivalent to the transcendental interpretation of ontology, in the sense that the very state of our being can be expressed as a bifurcation of separate, contradictory, truths. As with any other conscious species, we interpret objective physical concepts with active neural networking and merely materialistic mechanisms such as sight, hearing, olfaction, and with endocrinological associations between objects and the subjective dimensions of our being. However, what distinguishes humanity is the degrees of freedom for which we may act, adapt, and understand our life progress. Considering my inherent characteristics of autism, I have frequently been given the impression that I simply am not competent to perform certain necessary tasks (which is true for many things). However, I have not always acknowledged that these deficiencies are necessary indicators of other faculties which I had not fully discovered. Understanding that I had some hispanic background, I realized an intrinsic motivation to develop an understanding of Spanish and Latin, which was an extension of my ability to manipulate affixes and the limited etymology with which I was familiar.
As I became more cognizant of my ability to acquire these subjects, I derived an ambition to study other, initially elementary, subjects beginning in March of my seventh grade year, which included biology, geometry, and trigonometry, and a couple of years of algebra which I finished within a period of four months, by virtue of a mathematical aptitude which I had, earlier in my life, essentially neglected (I was told I was able to perform mental multiplication by the age of three). As I explored the primitive concepts of calculus during the summer between my seventh and eighth grade year, I found that it was arguably among the most simple subjects I have encountered, requiring little mathematical prowess and conceptually quite trivial. I continued to study Calculus I, II, and III thoroughly during my eighth grade year, and took the AP Calculus examination to obtain a score of five (and believed to have gotten nearly a perfect score). In addition, also during my eighth grade year, I studied Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, and AP Chemistry because I was curious about its myriad applications. During my sleep, I enjoyed the thought of mentally manipulating convolution integrals, reciting the periodic table and the hybridization phenomena occurring in each constituent element, and thinking through theorems involving Jordan Canonical forms of generalized eigenvectors.
After finishing my eighth grade year, I decided that I might as well begin a study of physics (which resulted in essentially being my largest source of ambition for learning). Over that summer, I was able to study an entire first year physics course along with calculus-based physical chemistry and organic chemistry, which would lead to my study of AP Physics C (for which I easily received a five in both Mechanics and Electricity and Magnetism) and of Physics III, Quantum Physics I, Quantum Physics II, and Special Relativity through MIT Opencourseware during my freshman year of high school. During the summer, I, very fortunately, availed myself of Schoolhouse.world (from the recommendation of others) where I was given the opportunity to meet other people with similar interests of the intent to learn for learning’s sake.
I have since met with both professors and some students at Washington University in Saint Louis and at UChicago. Furthermore, I have been researching, for the last few months, the subjects of quantum computing, quantum information, and condensed matter physics along with its experimental implementations through WashU, and I would like to continue doing so throughout my education. Therefore, I must conclude that somos o no somos is a theme which frequently recurs in life. And, specifically in my life, I have noticed that my social abnormalities are a ready indicator of the fact of what I may become and may not become, but also simply the fact that I am.
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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.
