This guest post is by Jonathon Helt, a young man on the autism spectrum who is applying to college. Jonathon is applying for the Spring 2025 Making a Difference Autism Scholarship via the nonprofit KFM Making a Difference started by me, Kerry Magro. I was nonverbal till 2.5 and diagnosed with autism at 4, and you can read more about my organization here. Autistics on Autism: Stories You Need to Hear About What Helped Them While Growing Up and Pursuing Their Dreams, our nonprofit’s new book, was released on March 29, 2022, on Amazon here for our community to enjoy featuring the stories of 100 autistic adults.
My name is Jonathan Helt and I have lived with Level 1 Autism for most of my life, and while it has made it more difficult for me to do certain things it also does not make me any less than the people around me. When I was young I had several little rituals that I would need to do in order to perform specific tasks. These tasks included having to knock on a door frame then tap my leg twice before entering a room and if I didn’t do this I would feel a sense of dread wash over me. Another ritual I would do is taking a deep breath before closing a gallon of milk. I went to a pediatric psychiatrist and was told, among other disorders like Major Depressive disorder, I had OCD. This was later proven incorrect when after many years I went in to get re-diagnosed I found out that instead of OCD I have level 1 autism.
We were originally unsure about this diagnosis, because what we knew about autism from the people around us and pop culture, it didn’t fully line up with who I am as a person. But as we learned more about autism, not only did the diagnosis make sense, but we also learned that how autism is portrayed usually doesn’t match up with how varied it really is. We had always been told that people with autism were unfeeling and unempathetic and since I always seemed to empathize with what others were going through we though it didn’t make sense but it turns out that while some people with autism can struggle with empathizing with others other people with autism can actually feel a lot of empathy towards others these were the some reasons the pediatric psychiatrist gave for why they though it wasn’t autism.
Over time we have learned that autism isn’t just a list of symptoms that you will definitely have, but is more a collection of different ways to have autism. Some of the things I go through on a daily basis are that I have a hard time talking to strangers because I can’t tell if they are friendly or not, which has made it hard to make friends. I have also found it hard to keep contacting the people that I am friends with. I have had problems with being able to tell what emotions I am feeling and have found it hard to put into words for others to understand.
When I was still taking PE I would sabotage myself because I saw that in the shows I watched that bullies were good at sports and were physically active so I internalized that if I did well in physical activities I would become a bully too. When I first watched Toy story when I was little I believed that the toys in my room were alive so I would do things like change my outfit only in the bathroom so that my toys wouldn’t see me.
Stories have always been important to me they have been how I have made sense of the world around me all throughout middle school I would go to the school library pick some books up and by the end of the school day I would return to the library and drop off the books and grab new ones before getting on the bus and then repeat the process tomorrow. I would read stories in class whenever I had free time. It made me feel safe and like things made sense. When I was little I would need a movie to be playing in the background in order to fall asleep because stories were the only way I could get my mind to relax enough to fall asleep and now I end up creating my own stories in my head in order to fall asleep.
My autism isn’t something wrong with me that I need to get rid of and it is not the reason I can succeed at things, it is just another aspect of who I am as a person just like my fascination with art is an aspect of who I am. You can never tell what challenges a person with autism is going through because autism is unique to the individual. I am currently studying psychology in order to try and get a doctorate degree because I want to become a child psychologist and help others come to terms with and find ways to work through any diagnosis they might have.
Follow my journey on Facebook, my Facebook Fan Page, Tiktok, Youtube & Instagram.
My name is Kerry Magro, a professional speaker and best-selling author who is also on the autism spectrum. I started the nonprofit KFM Making a Difference in 2011 to help students with autism receive scholarship aid to pursue post-secondary education. Help support me so I can continue to help students with autism go to college by making a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit here.
Autistics on Autism: Stories You Need to Hear About What Helped Them While Growing Up and Pursuing Their Dreams was released on March 29, 2022 on Amazon here for our community to enjoy featuring the stories of 100 autistic adults. 100% of the proceeds from this book will go back to our nonprofit to support initiatives like our autism scholarship program. In addition, this autistic adult’s essay you just read will be featured in a future volume of this book as we plan on making this into a series of books on autistic adults.
