I am that kid that was always different. As a little kid I was taken to doctors cause I wasn’t developing quick enough, and I was nearly diagnosed for being like that. (I don’t know the proper term for it. When I was a kid, it was the r-word. My mother was told that was me.) Turned out I had fluid in my ears, but the sting is there.

Recently, I’d been accused of being autistic because of some of my quirks. I don’t have any real symptoms, but I think and do things differently than most people around me.

This is an important story. The sting of that misdiagnoses sometimes affects me to this day. It’s a story I’d heard since I was a little kid, and it hurt my feelings then, giving me unnecessary struggles that I learned to overcome. As Albert Einstein says,

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend its whole life believing it’s stupid.”