 The 40 Auti Podcast. The educational system was awful for me growing up and secondary school what we call middle school over here was it's always a hard time for everybody whether you have a disability or not but when you are autistic it's really hard but I feel like my experience I feel like I was manipulated and my parents were as well we had a very hard time trying to get me into a good middle school that would help me with autism so my mom it's a little hard to talk about but I'm ready to she found me that she stumbled upon this weird Christian middle school and they said that they were going to help people with autism and other disabilities and they had a great track record for that but what they didn't tell my parents is that they were actively trying to fix people like us trying to make us normal and we were constantly being abused under this horrible system of oppression and I was abused by this school for three years until my mom got me out and I went to a public school. That's really tough I mean I know from talking to other autistic people there's a lot of like therapies and stuff which are quite commonplace within like a scientific or teaching or parenting communities and a lot of these practices can be quite as you said they try and push you into a box and stop you from doing all your autistic things and a lot of people say that it can be quite sort of traumatic for them during those times. Yeah I feel like the school system especially the ones that are really private they try to sell you this idea that oh we're going to help your autistic child we're going to save them but we're the ones that are going to be abused the most. We're always looked on as an outsider even though we go into survival mode we try to fit in for all those years that were bullied and it has a big effect on us. I remember when I was in that school I was constantly shamed I was called names I was locked in bathrooms it was everyone's well by well there was I'll get to that later but I mean by the students but I did there was actually an incident where we had a principal but then we got a new principal and everyone was kind of like oh what's this guy gonna do he's but nobody questioned it but he was kind of a fire and brimstone kind of guy and I knew he hated my guts just because he knew I was different but there was I went up to he was just randomly looking out at the window one day and I just asked what do you what is he doing and he just touched me. Right what do you mean what do you mean in that in that sense is that inappropriate touching or like inappropriate touching he always had this weird kind of thing about me because there's just I don't know if autistic people are weird or mentioned in the Bible and were bad but there was the final straw when he called me a devil child Satan's daughter even though he well he wanted some of this I mean I don't get it but my mom was livid like she was just at the gas station he literally called my mom and just to tell her that I was being disobedient and that I was a devil child and that's when we had to leave but everyone said that this school was heaven but it was my hell and this is one of the things I always talk about in my speeches about autism is to really be careful about where you send your kids to school because even if you're autistic or not middle school is going to be the hardest time for anyone and we just want to be we want to love ourselves we want to embrace ourselves especially if we're autistic because we're always told to hide ourselves no matter what and I don't really like that but the good thing is that I started my platform ability beyond disabilities while in middle school and I say this all the time in pageants that when I was being bullied I started my platform by writing positive notes on my bullies lockers and one of the teachers saw me and she's like are you writing all these notes but she liked them and she told me to keep on going. Hey YouTube hope you have enjoyed this podcast clip so far if you want to check out the full episode you can find it here on my YouTube channel under the podcast section or you can go to Spotify, Apple, Google to check it out on different podcasting streaming services. If you have enjoyed this video this far please make sure to like perhaps drop me a subscribe if you want to see some more content from me and drop a comment down below even if it's something simple like an emoji or a heart it really does help satisfy those big YouTube algorithm gods in the sky. Anyway I'll let you go back to it. And I've been going strong for years and it's a platform for my pageant now so yeah I just want to encourage people that are like me that we're not alone and we can do anything we set our mind to or no matter what we've been through we're awesome. I really appreciate you sort of opening up about your experiences with that principle because I can't imagine that you know that's a very easy thing to do and you know I think it's from looking at sort of like the statistics particularly for autistic women but you know I'm sure other autistic people have experienced this but manipulation tends to be a lot more effective on us especially like it tends to be more effective on people when they're younger but if they're if they're autistic as well because we tend to sort of communicate and trust what people say because we like to communicate directly to people and so we have a lot of emphasis on people's words and what they say to us and that sometimes can be abused quite a lot because we don't pick up on the different signs that someone's putting across like the indirect communication that something might be a bit off or they might be lying and I know that also as well there is you know some statistics around you know around sort of sexual abuse with women as well which is you know it was quite hard for me to read but basically what I'm saying is I appreciate you opening up about something that's you know so it must be very sort of raw and hard. Thank you so much I really like opening up about it too and it's really true statistics say that women with autism and girls too especially we are more likely to get kidnapped we're more likely to get raped and it's because autistic people in general were very trusting I don't know why that is but I know I was very trusting in my most vulnerable state because I feel like I was in survival mode deep down when I was 13 I wanted to be accepted and it's hard when you're autistic as well you just want to be accepted and you know something is I don't want to say not all that right but a lot of kids they might think what's wrong with me why am I not like the others and I feel ashamed saying that because I always say love yourself and I do love myself I love myself above all else but at 13 you might not feel that way and I'm just being real we need to change that definitely I couldn't agree more I think you know for a lot of my life I've always you know had some really difficult issues of like my own self-esteem and confidence I think it's it's really hard when you see other people getting on and making friends and being a part of groups and then when it when it comes to you because you're a bit different in the way that you communicate and you think and sort of perceive things they kind of label you as this alien weird creature definitely yes oh my god like I know I was talking about that I would I would just be at my locker and then people just randomly come up to me and they'd always ask why do you look so sad and I'm just like what what I didn't think so I'm very happy today yes and now when I'm 26 or even years back when I had jobs in Florida everyone would ask me are you high because I have the slow voice and I'm just like no I'm tired but I'm not high so you really can't win with people who are not autistic