Think of an event in a person’s life. Accomplishing a milestone, receiving the best gift or award that others could get from an important event, or any unique moment that others might imply to be a once-of-a-lifetime moment. But that very person who’s receiving such a gift is known to be a person with a disability that nobody expected them to have. I dealt with such a perspective when receiving my first national award. This significant moment happened in High School. Just the many trips, classes, and people I’d met, and what I could experience helped me shape the person I’ve become. I believe that such a moment wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for my disability.

Ever since birth, I have been on the Autism Spectrum, which is known to be a disability for people to have developmental issues from experiencing academic and social queues. It’s something that others find difficult to view me as, considering that I’m more different than my younger self. Living a life as a non-verbal person growing up prevented me from being on the same level as people around me my age, which led to amounts of discouragement with the people around me.

In my adolescent years, I had to endure such difficult moments of discrimination with the schools and classmates I had to attend and talk with. It got up to the point that I fell into a depression from the lack of support and a massive amount of verbal bullying from my peers. No one cared for me, nobody even bothered to ask if I was all right, nor do people ever learn to have respect for others. I felt like I was in no way safe from the place where I was supposed to be safe for me to receive my education. With the immense amount of bullying, I became a shut-in, refusing to leave the comforts of my bedroom. I woke up in fear of the world, having regrets about who I was as a person because, cause from everyone’s perspective on me, it was this insignificant child who didn’t deserve any help in life, who was just too weird to even deal with. Being bullied is one thing, but having no voice to project my real feelings, it felt like my lips were super-glued together. Endlessly crying my heart out from the amounts of lash attacks that just overlapped with my emotions, almost to the point that I could’ve snapped.

Fortunately, enough, I was able to leave that hell when I graduated. My academics, talking practice, and self-discovery greatly improved once I attended High School. One of the many perks of having siblings would be to gain a perspective on their life before it’s your turn to do the same events. The best decision for me was to attend my older sister’s high school, and there were many teachers, students, and groups I met and connected well because of her. One of these such groups was a Community Service program called buildOn. Being able to experience the buildOn community has helped me to begin using my voice, and understand the person I want to become, a selfless individual who wants everyone to also experience and enjoy doing community service as well.

I’d done Community Service throughout the years of high school. Between meeting many people, and developing skills, I became this figure for my school, that wouldn’t be quiet over their favorite subject, but people prefer to hear and talk to. My voice and my self-worth grew drastically with the time spent with buildOn. Being that I attended service for a while, I became a student leader, or a Youth Ambassador for my school’s buildOn. I even created the student leader graph for my school duringmy final year. One of the most amazing phone calls I received was from the Program Director, to whom I was nominated and Won the National Award from buildOn named Jim Parke Constructive Leadership.

I realized that at this moment, I would attend the Gala, but not as a mere student simply going, but going on stage to perform my speech, along with meeting up with the many people who I met in the duration of doing Service with buildOn. Being able to be on stage and speak to a giant event-sized number of people helped my inner child to see that my fears and my issues were no longer there and that I had grown into the person that I chose and grew up to become. Maturing is realizing that the main choices one would make depend on that person directly, while anyone else can support, but can’t shape the person. It took me a while to understand my self-worth and come up with the conclusion, that I’m not in that dark space no more