My name is Brendan. This is my coming-of-age story. I was born in New York and grew up in an apartment near the George Washington Bridge. Early on, my mom took me to many different extracurricular activities such as soccer, gymnastics, wrestling and singing classes. The most recent of these were improv classes, which two of my friends attended with me.

I found that I never really enjoyed any of the extracurricular activities, except for improv and soccer somewhat. The two that I hated the most were the singing and wrestling classes.  The singing classes were so restrictive and often there wasn’t really anything to do except sit and wait for most of it. As for the wrestling classes, they were just too difficult for me.  When I joined, most people in the group had already been doing it for a while, so it was hard to even really get an understanding of what I was supposed to do, and mostly I just got hit to the ground repeatedly.

I started academic classes with preschool at the age of four, then I started kindergarten at Castle Bridge Elementary school, which was a public school with special ed teachers for the kids who had slight special needs. The school was only nine blocks away from my house, which was convenient, but annoyingly, the school buses would pick me up first, then collect every other child, meaning that, even though it was only about a ten minute walk, it ended up being a very long bus ride. Since I was a child who didn’t really have a good sense of time, plus having ADHD, the long bus rides felt way worse, especially since I didn’t even have a phone at that time, so it was just me sitting there being annoyed. To me, the bus ride felt like it was over an hour, but it was likely only about 30 to 40 minutes.

One interesting thing about this time is that it was about when I started to always wear red jackets. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently a symptom of Autism is that people who have it often tend to wear the same thing every day. Since around 3^rd grade, I have almost always worn red jackets any time I went out, no matter what day it was, prompting my mom to fill my closet with red jackets. It gives me a sense of familiarity.

I went to Castle Bridge through 4^th grade and initially Spanish was taught simultaneously with English, but then they updated it to where you had to talk only in Spanish for a about half of the time, like half the day was Spanish and half the day was in English. Then they changed to where it was one day at a time, and finally one week at a time alternating between English and Spanish.

Eventually I had to leave the school at about 10 years old, before the 5^th grade, because I could not learn during the weeks when the teachers spoke Spanish. Even though I had been in that school since the age of five, I never really picked up on how to speak Spanish.  After that, I was moved to a different school that I can’t remember the name of. The new school was a school for children with severe special needs, and while I do have special needs, the school was not for me. It was for children with much more severe behavioral problems, not just for Autism and ADHD like me.

At that school, there were a few padded rooms where they would put kids who were lashing out. It would be quite common to walk down the halls and pass by one of the padded rooms only to see a teacher leaning against the door to hold it closed as a kid was screaming inside and trying to force the door open.

As for me, the first class I went to in that school wasn’t too bad. The class was fine and the teacher was nice, but after an incident where a girl scratched my neck badly, I was moved out of that classroom to a different one. I felt it was unfair that I was the one moved when she was the one who scratched me.

I got moved to a different classroom with older kids and a teacher who did not seem to like teaching her students. I had a way worse time in that classroom. In the previous classroom, the teacher was very interactive, unlike the new classroom where the teacher didn’t seem to care, and the kids were much worse behaviorally than in the previous class.  I was barely able to follow the material at all, especially since the teacher had a teaching style that didn’t work well for me.

One problem I had was when she started to teach division. The teacher never actually used the word division, instead explaining it in a different, hard to understand way.  For almost a week I was just there not understanding the material. Then finally, after figuring out how to do the teacher’s weird and over complicated method, I realized it was just division, something that I had already learned at Castle Bridge, which was quite annoying.

Eventually, I got tired of trying my best, only for it to lead to mediocre results, so I just stopped paying attention to my classes entirely. I would mostly just go to class, sit down, lay my head on the desk and just wait until class was over. That was mostly how I went through the days for most of that class.

After only a year my mom got me moved to a school that was a better fit for me. I went to The Hallen School, which was also a special needs school, but much more suited for me since it was more catered to people with Autism, ADHD and other less serious disorders. I had a much easier time there. I stayed there from 6^th grade until 12^th grade, when I graduated at 18 years old.

I’ve made a few friends over my life. There is Sophie, who I met in kindergarten. There’s also Jalil, who I met at the age of 12 at Hallen School, then Michael and CJ, who I met there at around 16 years old. A funny story is that CJ was a year older than me and was meant to be put in the grade above, but due to a mishap of the school, got placed next to me in our class, which is how we ended up becoming friends. After that, I’m mostly up to where I am today, 19 years old, completing my first year at Guttman Community College. I recently decided to change my major from liberal arts to 3D-modeling. College has been a huge challenge for me, requiring many accommodations, which the Accessibility department at Guttman has aided me in establishing. I hope my future college will be as helpful.