As a person who has always seen the world a bit differently, my formative years were riddled with curiosity, creative mishaps, and misunderstandings.
I often wondered if I belonged. My fears felt particularly clear when the words, “lacks common sense,” appeared on my third-grade report card, and later, in the sixth grade, when a psychiatrist and counselor gave me a diagnosis of “Asperger’s Syndrome”—a now outdated term.
I read this as a deficit. Something wrong with me. As I read about “Asperger’s Syndrome,” the information available at the time only furthered my low self-worth. Learning about the now-debunked concepts of “mind-blindness” and a lack of empathy among those with Autism left me feeling incomplete.
