Asperger's/PDD

Public schools failed me from seventh grade on. I quit high school for college. Clueless, klutzy, queerbait Hunter got tired of the torture, got tired of struggling to be invisible for fear someone would beat him up or vandalize his stuff.

One of my friends in college was admitted directly to a PhD program without any high school or college but both her parents were scientists working in very remote places. She had the ultimate "home schooling" experience. Her parents and their colleagues were digging up the knowledge that would eventually be watered down and mangled beyond recognition in high school textbooks by publishers who didn't want to offend the dim-bulb fundamentalist politicians who paid them.

But even kids who are not so brilliant as my rocket-scientist autistic spectrum grandpa, kids like me, and kids who can't find any way to "fit in" deserve a place that's safe.

Sometimes home school, private school, or something else entirely are the only options.

I've got people in my family tree who were never fully functional in "normal society."

It's not even a disability except as seen by enforcers of the "normal." My insane grandma had a job and good retirement benefits. She was a welder. She knew hot metal. She could make and put shoes on a horse. She got along well with cattle, horses, dogs, and cats, the nastiest biting kicking mules on earth, but not so much people. But in the desperate times of World War Two she was hired to work in the shipyards and she worked until she retired. She was extremely odd, eccentric, but productive in the business of ship building.

She wouldn't have had that opportunity today. She'd have been just another bag lady found dead behind the supermarket.



I think every human makes our society stronger whether or not they are "productive" by current economic standards. You are human, you are here, welcome to this world. We gift you freely with the tools to be the very best you can be, and however it turns out we will always love you.