Why Aren't You Talking?? vs Shut up Ugly!! (Or, Conflicting Values of Two High School Teachers)

One thing that isn't well-known I guess is that I'm pretty autistic. Everyone can tell that there's something wrong with me but they don't know it's autism usually so they treat me nicely, like a good little pet. I wasn't nonverval persay, but much of my spoken speech was scripted and I had very little interest in interacting with others (this was probably less due to autism and more to trauma but anyways!). These skills I had in the first place degraded during COVID.

In 10th grade, it was my first physical year in nearly 2 years and I was a FREAK. I unadjusted to everything so the stupid lights and the terrible smells and the having to sit still for basically 7 hours drove me nuts. Straight up almonds. Legit pistachios. They installed these new bells too that played 90 decibels monotone mechanical screeching so that was upsetting my autistic ass.

ANYWAYS, I got introduced to Mr. Freaker, who took an immediate interest in because I was shy and I shared my last name with the local college mascot. I kind of digged him right away because he was strange and like to share stories, but about a week into school he had a fit (common) and yelled at me because I accidentally did a study game wrong (I can't quite remember but I think he insinuated I was stupid too) and this embarrassed me super bad and he probably knew this because my face got all red and I almost started crying. Writing this now, it makes me wonder if him being nice to me was to make up for this because he felt bad or if he genuinely just was short tempered that day and was fine after that forever but this is just another digression. 

ANYWAYS ×2, he always included me in class discussion (a first time, no other teachers did this) and would specifically ask for my opinion. He would also pick me for the major roles in Romeo and Juliet so I had to read a fuck ton which pissed me off super bad at the time BUT I really appreciate it now because I have stronger speaking skills/slur my words less/more confident in speaking. He was just nice to me, too. Forced the whole class to sing happy birthday to me (he made it weird because he was the only one who called me by my last name), offered me food frequently (I didn't accept it most of the time because I was bulimic but I'm all BETTER), and once gave me 5 fucking dollars for the vendo (which costs like 75 cents per snack). He also would get super upset if I made any disparaging comments about myself, which was just habitual to me. Like one time he complimented my intelligence or something and I was like "no need to flatter me bro" and then he got a little pissy and said "what, do you think you're not really smart" and that kind of made me feel embarrassed but in a way that made me realize I was being silly. So in the end this a taught me:

1) My opinion is important 

2) No one is going to kill me for misprouncing a word 

3) Not all adults (which now translates into authority figures) are bad and want to hurt me

4) People actually care about me

Sweet story right? ERRR wrong! He got fired for being insane and a sexual predator (allegedly, but I'm more inclined to believe it than not to), but that's a big messy story for a different blog post. For the next two years I had a teacher that would just tear me down. 

Mr. Arson was my chem teacher for 11th and 12th grade (I took college chemistry in 12th) and he hated my ass. I couldn't even bring this topic up to my mother because she interpreted it as me being egocentric and unable to handle that someone disliked me, which wasn't the case. This teacher made my actually life miserable and I almost dropped out of school because of it. Once, a kid was squirting me with water from a rinse bottle and I turned around with mine and said "imma gonna blast ya" a la Yosemite Sam, and Mr. Arson just starts yelling at me and calls me stupid outright. Yelling embarrasses me, but I wish this is all he did to me. He would gossip about me to popular kids, either pointing at me like a zoo animal when I did something weird or whispering about me in front of me. They didn't really go along with it, because like I mentioned earlier I was a good little pet and they all liked me, even when I acted like a nuts freak. Besides the immature gossiping, he made fun of my appearance (I have buck teeth) and told me I'd end up in prison (a first, I was a goody twoshoe so I don't even know where this came from). The worst thing he did had to be the behavior evaluation.

Basically, for some ungodly reason, I had to be reevaluated for autism multiple times and this was one of them. Most of the teachers declined to comment or filled out a little survey thingy about my mood. Not Mr. Arson. He wrote SEVERAL paragraphs about how annoying I was. If this wasn't bad enough, he even said that my friends didn't like it when I talked to them and it was obvious I was annoying them but I was too dense to notice. I can't even explain how bad this was. And this was shown to EVERYONE. My mom, my sister, all my other teachers, staff members, etc. and they all knew I was an annoying little bitch. It was devastating and I don't think I've really recovered from it and I was really asocial and miserable for the rest of the school year. So this whole experience taught me:

1) I'm annoying and everyone hates me

2) I'm too autistic to notice other people's feelings and I can't trust myself to read social cues

3) My most noteworthy feature is that I'm ugly

4) The only people who like me are sexual predators

I'm getting better and learning that I have to ignore the haters, and besides, I don't think your opinion is important of you get off mocking a mentally ill teen and trying to gossip to their classmates. 

Moral of the story: Sometimes in life you earn net zero social skills and sometimes your Chem teacher's an asshole and your English teacher is a predator I guess? Idk do I look like Aesop.