Chloé Hayden

When I say autism, what's the first thing that comes to your head?

For many of us, it will be what Hollywood, what news articles, and what stereotyped ideologies have taught us

We think of Sheldon Cooper.

We think of Rain Man.

We think of What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

Maybe for you guys, more recently, we think of manic pixie dream girl autism.

We think of TikTok autism.

We think of Quinny from Heartbreak High autism.

We see autism through a lens that has falsely been taught to us rather than viewing it for what it really is.

Growing up, I was so confident that I had crash-landed on this planet from my own alien planet.

I know from as young as four that I wasn't like the kids around me.

I knew it when at kindergarten, I would be hanging out with birds and snails while watching the other kids talk to each other, wondering how they made it look so easy.

I knew it when I would hold my mom's hand a little bit tighter when someone my age would walk past me, already painfully aware of a neurotype that I didn't have.

I knew it when I would read books and watch movies and never once see a character that I could relate to, instead finding peace in fantasy characters who also didn't fit into the world around them.

Similar to how others knew that I was different, I did too.

Still, at the age of 27, I don't know what it is that actually made me so different, and I don't know why my peers clung to that difference so deeply either.

Maybe this little box of normality that all of us have been taught that we have to mold ourselves to fit inside starts far younger than what we believe, that it's societally conditioned into us to be normal, to behave, to be like everyone else, far before it starts showing its claws and its talons.

When I was 13, I was diagnosed with autism.

And because of the stereotypes that I have heard about autism, I knew my brain to be wrong, to be broken and to be cursed.

A lot of my peers thought the same.