Autism through the eyes of a 10 year old
February 1st, 2020
New South Wales, 2010, I was born. Hi, I’m Antonya and I’m a 10-year-old girl with autism and I wrote a bit to show you how being Autistic has changed my life for the good and bad. I’m in fifth grade and for as long as I can remember I have always found school a lot harder, especially math because my teacher likes me and the other students to use a variety of different strategies to work out a problem but I would only like to stick to using one way to solve a problem. I was and am very ‘dark’ meaning, I would always try to buy things in black or darker colours, I would say very gloomy and depressing things, for some reason that stuff would just happen without me even noticing and then everybody would look at me in a weird way and I would be so confused until somebody told me.
A little bit about me: I’m ten, I’m a girl, I like video games, I see psychologists and I struggle to show emotion. “I struggle to show emotion”, Basically meaning, If I’m scared I can and most of the time will look like I’m fine or if I am upset I will look happy or normal, I very rarely look happy, most of the time I just have a blank face, or in other words, I don’t ‘express my feelings’ or I just keep them to myself, I’ve always found it easier to solve problems myself because It’s hard for me to explain things to other and since I know everything about the problem, it’s easy for me to just do it myself. Over the years I also found that I had a hard time with social skills, I can be a very loud and outgoing person to my friends but if I have met you for the first time or haven’t seen you in like a year or something like that, I will be very shy and quiet. I don’t like meeting new people, going to new schools, and moving, so basically any type of change that means I need to make new friends and meet new people, I don’t like. Going onto a new topic, I can’t help but find a way to fidget with everything but mainly things I use in my everyday like such as: A pencil, a rubber, remotes, hats, any type of string or elastic, shoes, clothes and my hands. I also try to avoid things that I don’t want to deal with like, people, work and things like that.
I also look at things differently, I don’t look people in the eyes when i’m talking to them if i’m upset or if I don’t know them, I notice a lot of the smaller things rather than bigger, for example, If there was a huge billboard with big writing and small writing, I would most likely look at the small writing. I also don’t like to focus on a lot of things at a time or even 2 things at a time, I like to be more organised and just focus on each individual activity by it self.
-Antonya 2020
