Here’s a story from last summer that I never got around to telling.
So I worked at my camp last year teaching a cartoon drawing class. The kids loved me. They loved all the college student staff members, they thought we were so cool. My campers in my class called me Dungeon Master all week.
But anyway, there was this group of middle school boys in my class, 13-14 year olds. They were a handful, obviously. But they liked me, so they listened to like 90% of what I said and getting seventh grade boys to listen to me is one of my biggest accomplishments tbh. There was this one of them that we’ll call C.
C was new to camp. A couple of the boys I had taught or seen the year before, so they knew me. But it was C’s first year. C was a problem camper. He acted out, he had a hard time connecting with his cabin-mates and making friends, he was annoying during group events and distracted the other campers. C was one of the campers the staff would talk after hours about how to deal with him.
In my class, there were several things I noticed about C. C made drawings that were vaguely racist or antisemitic. He said things that were mean or edgy and acted very much like a 13 year old boy. He also joked almost constantly about how he was ugly and nobody liked him.
But C was easily one of my favorite students. He was actually enthusiastic about my class. While most of the boys his age just kinda doodled and goofed off, C would ask me for prompts. Every day he would ask me what he should draw, and I’d tell him some silly thing, and he’d actually try to draw it. He was a huge pain in the ass and he never shut up during my mini-lectures, but I could tell that he was actually taking it seriously even if he was trying to hide how much he liked it, because liking things isn’t cool when you’re that age. It was easy to spot a kid who really wanted to try but was buried under a truckload of middle-school self-consciousness.
So the last day of camp came and I had all my campers gather everything they had drawn that week so I could display it under their names. C was very distressed. I sat down with him to ask why. He told me he was embarrassed of his drawings and didn’t want anyone to see them. And then he said:
“What if someone sees this and thinks I’m autistic?”
Bear in mind, I had prepared for this. I knew I was dealing with 7th/8th grade boys and I knew one of them would say this. It’s a popular thing to say for people their age. So I said:
“Well, you’d be in good company then. You know who else is autistic?”
He looked confused for a moment, and then his eyes opened up super wide and he said “Is it you?!”
I said “And I’m cool, right?”
And he said “…Yeah!”, like slack-jawed in awe. He wasn’t even embarrassed about the comment or anything. He was genuinely shocked and impressed that someone autistic could be someone like me. I completely blew his mind.
And his friend was sitting there watching this whole exchange, and then they both started freaking out about it. Their third friend came over and was like “What’s going on?” and the second one smacked the back of his head and yelled “YOU MISSED A HEARTFELT MOMENT”
C said that I made the week for him. We ended up putting up all his drawings and I told him that if anyone thought he was autistic he should take it as a compliment. And also that his drawings kick ass.
TLDR: I worked at a camp and bonded with a 13 year old boy and totally changed his perception of autistic people
