My Youth

 

From a young age, I have always felt different and was seen as different by most people, this was due to how I dressed and the way I acted. I did not know why I was different, and I always struggled with this feeling because I was an outcast and felt like I never fit in with people. I had difficulty making friends and was almost only able to make friends through someone else introducing me, this led to feeling lonely very often. I had struggled heavily with this until about 2^nd grade, which is when I was put into the gifted program where I was met with kids like me. The gifted program was technically a program for kids who were seen as more intelligent than kids in their grade level but when I grew up, I realized this wasn’t exactly the case. While technically this is the point of the program it ended up being a program for neurodivergent children whose brains worked faster than those in their grade level. This was a program that introduced children to similar people and thus made it easier for them to make friends when they previously struggled with that. Despite this, I still didn’t fit in completely, and the main reason was the way I expressed myself and my gender, something I would later realize was partly thanks to ASD.