Acceptance

I know I complain about my Asperger’s Syndrome often. But the truth is I wouldn’t choose to have the condition cured even if some miraculous medicine could make it disappear. My condition not only made me unique; it gave me a purpose.

Since childhood, I’ve felt compelled to seek out people who don’t blend into their surroundings or feel like they can’t fit in with the rest of the people in their community. The intense sense of isolation made me feel like I didn’t belong with my friends.

Even when I joined them in pretending to be Star Wars characters on the playground, I felt like they enjoyed being with each in a way I could not.

It made me seek out others who felt like me or were just different. And I found them in books about people who faced discrimination or who came from other countries.

I felt connected to characters in books like “Native Son,” the classic novel about a black man living in the segregated Chicago of the 1930s, and “When the Elephants Dance,” a novel about a family hiding from Japanese soldiers in the Philippines during the occupation of the country in World War II. I was inspired by the story of Nelson Mandela’s fight against apartheid in South Africa.

Though I had not faced the severe discrimination that confronted these people, I could at least empathize with their feelings of alienation.

These people felt more isolated and ostracized than I could ever imagine was and were, in most cases, fighting for the right to belong. I felt compelled to seek out people like these and learn more about them.

Journalism gave me the chance to do that. My autism made me sensitive to people who were fighting for the right to belong or be different. It helped me find stories and sources that other people might overlook.

As a student journalist, I’ve met and written about the man who led the college student movement to protest segregation in the civil rights era. I ate pizza with a Sudanese refugee and investigated the struggle to diversify the university’s faculty.

With every story I write about a subject like the ones above, I feel like I become more human. I’m forced to confront my fear of the unknown to find the people who make articles interesting.

And I hope that my stories help others understand what it’s like to be different or encourage them to care about something they might not normally think about. That’s the secret to the best articles. They make people care about something that might otherwise be alien to them.