I’ve always known of the prejudices that exist in this world, but I have never seen why people have these prejudices. I can understand how stereotypes can have an effect on someone even though I know that is a bad way of thinking. It’s just when it comes to straight up prejudices I never understood how someone can just hate another person because of skin color, weight, class, language, or even features, and I’ll explain why.

I mainly because of how this daycare changed my life.

When I was five I was rowdy and out of control, I had difficulty talking to adults, and developed ticks easily. When I was brought to the doctor I was examined by a therapist who believed I had mild autism and tourette’s. They ended up putting me in a special daycare to further examine my case.

This daycare was designed to help children who have these types of syndromes, and it allows them to get a better look at the children. This was so they could study the disorders at a younger age and come to conclusions on each child’s status. I was only five and an ambivert which means I would be both introverted and extroverted at times. My personality caused me to seem autistic to the therapists and workers. The ticks I had developed weren’t helping my case for tourette’s either.

I ended up staying in that day care for much longer than I was supposed to, about seven weeks longer.

That changed my view on people with those types of disabilities because I made friends there. I saw them as no different than myself. The therapists learned that my ticks were developed due to anxiety, and that I had was just very shy and nervous with adults I had to leave. That actually made me sad because I had some good friends there. This daycare changed my whole view on people in general, so much to the point where I just don’t understand prejudices at all.

Some people won’t want to hangout with someone just because they are autistic, but for me I see them as no different than myself. The daycare is one of the reasons why I am terrible at knowing if someone has a disability at all unless its sadly obvious, and I owe that all to the daycare.

When I moved to Pennsylvania I ended up making friends with my neighbor. We were best friends up until tenth grade, that was the point where we slowly started to distance ourselves. I had maybe spent roughly 10,000-20,000 hours with this friend, and I never had a suspicion that he had a disability of any sorts. He was extremely smart, caring, funny, charismatic, and so much more. One day my mother was talking to me about him and casually brought up the fact that he had autism. I was so shocked to learn he had autism because I never knew. No one had told me so I never noticed that my childhood best friend had autism.

That was another moment that changed me and helped me realize even more that everyone is the same. No matter what disability you have a human is a human and they deserve to be recognized as one.