Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would flinch at someone giving me a compliment. But Jessica, it seemed, loved to make my nightmares come true.

“What?” I laughed in disbelief, trying to play it off. 

Jessica smiled shinily. “For real! I never would have expected it. You seem so normal— I had no idea you were autistic!”

I raised my eyebrows and accepted the microaggression. Mere weeks into my autism diagnosis, and I was already learning that offensive comments came with the territory. 

It was an eighth grade Spanish class and Jessica, an artificial blonde with a suspicious abundance of teeth, overheard me casually mentioning my autism to a friend who already knew. Of course, she thought it her neurotypical duty to respond. To immediately assure me that despite my terrible curse of a diagnosis (note the sarcasm), I wasn’t weird like the rest of them. I believe her so-called compliment that triggered the conversation went something like, “But you’re so smart!”

Smart. I mean, I was at the top of that Spanish class. In fact, I was at the top of every class. Yet somehow, my intelligence made my autism diagnosis surprising. 

I had always been different. That was clear from day one. But sitting in that gum-coated desk as my classmates practiced conjugating verbs around me, I didn’t feel just different. I felt like an anomaly. An alien. A platypus in a flock of beautiful swans. 

Nowadays, this interaction would barely give me pause. But as a newly-diagnosed autistic, it shook me to my core. I pondered how Jessica could possibly go over that statement in her head and decide it was okay to say. I reevaluated my previous white-privileged idea that comments like that only happened in movies and books. I even wondered if I should throw a party or send a celebratory Instagram post: “Baby’s First Microaggression!”

All I know is that whatever was going through my head, it was not Spanish preterite tense. And when I walked out of that classroom that day, a fundamental autism life lesson bloomed in my brain for the first time:

Maybe I was the same person I was before the diagnosis… but others weren’t going to treat me that way.

Those early days were certainly a rocky start. This interaction may have been the first slice of ableism I experienced as a newly minted autistic, but it wasn’t the last. When I told the school psychologist I was autistic, he started comparing me to Big Bang Theory characters. My grandmother called me “high-functioning” and recommended a show about a French autistic detective. Even my mom tried to diagnose both my dad and her boss in a flurry of denial about the sheer depth of my difference. All of these events have one thing in common— trying to dial down, freshen up, or put a pretty bow on autism. No one wanted to stare my disability in the face.

That’s why when it came to my autism diagnosis, I felt like an extremely domesticated dog who had chased a squirrel and actually caught one. I had fought so hard for a diagnosis, dashed after it with virtually no support— and now I had no idea what to do with it. 

After all, I wasn’t supposed to talk about my autism. I didn’t get help for it in school. Entire sides of my family knew I was autistic and didn’t adjust their behavior a single inch. Aside from my sister and my best friend, no one let me off the hook to make things easier for me. Instead, when they were upset with me for some social gaffe, like a blank facial expression at an inappropriate time or freaking out over a change in routine, they never once considered that autism might be a factor in my behavior.

Because why would they? I wasn’t really autistic. It was just mild— a personality difference, that’s all. I was so articulate. So normal.

So smart.

For so long, I believed them. I practiced facial expressions in the mirror. If I wanted to treat sensory overloads or meltdowns, I had to do it myself. I rocked back and forth and flapped my hands behind closed doors, wondering what Jessica would think if she saw me acting like one of “the special ed kids.” (Checkmate, Jessica. I was a “weird one” all along.)

But then, the summer between eighth grade graduation and the first day of freshman year, something… shifted.

I’m not completely sure what it was. Maybe it was the feeling of freedom, like the weight of a million textbook-stuffed backpacks had been lifted off my shoulders and flung into the sun. 

After all, the kids at Prospect didn’t know me. They didn’t have my status as a “weirdo” written in stone in their minds. I would be just another face in a packed building— and in high school, who had the time for social ostracization? The way I saw it , one bad grade could make anyone spend the rest of their adult lives roaming the streets wearing only a garbage bag and bowling shoes. So what was the point of picking on anybody?

But if I really had to choose, it would be my experience at summer band camp that changed my perspective. There, I met incredible people of all ages— people that were nothing like the almost comically evil students at South. I met upperclassmen who strove for excellence in every facet of their life and still had time to guide herds of music novices like a benevolent king. Maybe my peers and the outside world saw them as nothing special, but I saw them as oddly tall, acne-speckled angels.  Plus, for the first time in my life, I had role models! (Ones who weren’t dead, anyway.)

Even better were my new friends. Despite trying so hard to change myself, the ruse eventually shattered— but none of them so much as batted an eyelash. 

Whenever I broke down into an anxious spiral, they didn’t enable me like my old companions did. They told me that people liked me. That it was okay to not be perfect. And that if I didn’t get off the turf right now and get to warm-ups, by God, they would shove my clarinet where the Sun don’t shine. 

They tolerated my craziness. Most astonishingly of all, they actually liked me. And when I finally built up the courage to tell them I was autistic, no one went down Jessica’s dark path. (Of course, there’s the occasional calling me “special”… but, you know. Baby steps.) 

It was Seneca who said, “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” Well, Seneca has clearly never been stabbed. But I have to admit he had a point. I spent all that time hacking off pieces of myself to fit into the mold of other people’s expectations— and for what? A nod of approval? A smile in the hallways? 

No matter what, I could never be what they wanted me to be. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t magically transform myself into a quirky but completely functional and easily social human being who loves making eye contact and talking about the weather. Because no one can simply stop being disabled. 

But what I could do was stop trying. 

Until I met new friends, I never realized how much of that pain was self-inflicted. Maybe I couldn’t control what others expected of me, but I could control how I dealt with those expectations.

My family still largely ignores my autism diagnosis. There are still people from South Middle School who pass me in the hallways and side-eye their friends. The difference is this time I hold my head high and don’t let it get to me, because they only ruin my day if I let them.

(And also because my GPA is twice theirs. That takes the sting off quite a bit.)

If I had a crack at that conversation with Jessica again today, my message for her would be something like this:

“Yes, I am autistic, even if I don’t fit the derogatory ‘dumb’ image of autism you have in your head. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have the struggles that always come with a disability. 

“No, I will no longer smile and act like what you said was a compliment. Because it isn’t.

“But I will not take your comment to heart because we’re both eighth graders, for heaven’s sake, and we both have a lot to learn. I won’t internalize it and act like your standards define me because they’re not powerful until I let them be.

“Maybe one day you’ll look back on this and cringe as much as I did. Or maybe you won’t, and the whole incident will dissolve from your mind like a Himalayan salt lamp in a dishwasher. Either way, I wish you only the best.”

Then I would mentally pat myself on the back as double rainbows bloomed over me, birds erupted into joyous song, and everyone clapped because ableism was solved.

It’s not very realistic, is it? But I wrote it, so it’s real in a sense.

And as I strode out of that cheering classroom, I would think to myself: See— was that so hard?