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It has been almost a month since I graduated high school. I know a lot of you guys were expecting me to say something a lot sooner, but I struggled with the idea of how I was going to deliver it. I had a video project planned that I really ended up disliking.

To the few friends I had who shared this time with me, whether or not you see this, I appreciate you more than my life itself. You guys were the only thing that helped me survive, even if our friendship didn’t.

Up until I was around 15, I thought it was just normal to feel like life was unfair. I thought that the adults in my life wanted the best for me, regardless of whether I understood why they were pushing weird and inconsistent expectations on me. I would later find out that a lot of this feeling was due to unaddressed ADHD and autism that went undiagnosed for an irresponsible amount of time (17 years and 10 months). This made most of my middle school and high school memories include internalized feelings of self-loathing and anxiety stemming from my inability to perform in the classroom without exhausting all of my brain’s resources. But of course, as most people in my shoes will tell you, it went unaddressed because my grades were normal. I was ignored like a check engine light. I would seemingly run fine for a while, but it didn’t change the fact that I was on the road to crash out or start smoking (an analogy, not a confession).

It doesn’t help my journey of self-discovery when conformity to an institutionalized educational environment is rewarded, and those with obvious intellectual disabilities are separated and reprimanded for not behaving or completing assignments on time. Especially since most of the time, I wasn’t even one of those students. I was just groomed into looking down on those people, regardless of whether I knew that’s what I was doing. I internalized when teachers would say, “I know this isn’t all of you, but some students are doing [blank],” in my head as, “At all costs, don’t be like them.” I would overexert myself to prove my neurotypicality that simply didn’t exist, because I couldn’t be like them.

School was less of a learning experience for me and more of a place where I tried to prove that I wasn’t fundamentally intellectually disabled when it came to the classroom. My disability stuck out like a sore thumb once I made it to high school. Though I still didn’t recognize the sheer depth of my neurodivergence until much later in my high school experience, I was almost instantly thrown into a four-year-long psychotic depressive episode that I am still struggling my way out of as I write this.

I was burnt out.

I remember my freshman year, I was given two detentions for being late to school five times due to my depression. Waking up in the morning was fucking impossible. This left me and my poor sister, who was driving me to school (sorry, Karissa), almost defenseless when it came to waking up in the morning. But after receiving these detentions, none of that mattered. In my mind, I was finally one of the aforementioned them. Not only did decent performance in the classroom become almost impossible for me, but I was now labeled on my “permanent record” (uh oh!) as needing discipline for this negative performance.

I want to say I hated math. I was accelerated a year due to what I can only assume was a fluke or some supernatural instruction I received from my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Slota. However, I am glad I did. I would have never met Ms. Corliss. By the time she got me, I had absolutely no trust in the adults educating me. I was so broken down by the system. But she knew what she was dealing with, and I don’t think she could have handled it better. She was the first teacher I encountered where the student’s emotional ability to complete the coursework at a given time was a factor in her educating.

It was refreshing—until she got let go.

When Lacey was audited in 2023, because of what I can only assume was alleged fiscal negligence by many schools in the state, including mine, hundreds of teachers both in and surrounding Ocean County were let go.

She was one of them. We tried so hard to keep her. The April 14, 2023, Board of Education meeting was where I publicly asserted the Board of Education as the enemy. I felt that the board was spending money on grossly underutilized and unimportant facilities, while one of the only staff members who understood me at the time was being let go. How else could a 16-year-old who was already feeling marginalized by most of the adults around him interpret this? It almost felt like Ms. Corliss was being punished for being an adult that I trusted. There was nothing I or any of the other several dozen speakers at that board meeting could have said to make this stone-faced, inflexible, shallow, and egregiously steadfast board change their mind on any topic.

Though I don’t regret it even a little bit. After the Board of Education meeting, I would meet Ms. Mandes. One of the school psychologists and a licensed clinical social worker who heard my speech and wanted to check up on me. She was single-handedly the most important person I met in high school, student or staff. There is absolutely no question in my mind that she is the reason I was able to make it through the rest of my high school experience. I could write an entire novel on everything she did for me and all of the personal sacrifices she made for me and every single student she helped. She was a staff member who represented me when I felt like everyone was trying to fight me off. She wasn’t afraid to tell me when I was being dramatic or overthinking. She wasn’t afraid to inconvenience other staff members for her students. She was the powerhouse I needed at a time when I was losing all faith in the adults around me.

My senior year was rough for me. Not only was I already extremely burnt out, but I had grown up. It felt like every single rule, every single piece of instruction, was a staff member speaking to me like a child but expecting me to act as an adult. It was a difficult transitional period. I suddenly had to evolve from that already feisty and strong-willed high schooler to somebody who suddenly needs to function in society and, like, participate in capitalism or whatever. This year, I lost a lot of my friends. This was no fault of theirs. I had isolated myself so badly that, in a knee-jerk reaction, I had pushed everyone away. I had involved myself in unnecessary conflicts due to an imbalanced feeling of defensiveness and self-pity. I try not to regret or resent this version of myself as a pursuit of self-empathy and compassion that I lacked for most of my life. I try to look at this version of myself from the perspective of the adult I needed. However, I always wonder how things otherwise could have been.

I try not to think about that, though. Regardless of how things went, it already happened. These few weeks of being released from what felt like my state-mandated incarceration have been an aggressive path of self-discovery and rehabilitation. I really want to say that I immediately started feeling better, but I just can’t. I spent much of my break riddled with anxiety and wondering why I still feel so depressed and drained. I have been wondering why these feelings won’t go away despite my main trigger being out of the picture. It took addressing it with my therapist and a lot of self-compassion to realize that I just need time. I need to exercise the muscles in my brain that handle the aforementioned self-empathy and compassion, to simply give myself the grace to feel depressed in a way that school didn’t allow me. I am not saying that there aren’t fundamental lifestyle and habitual changes being made behind the scenes to combat these feelings, but I realized that the anxiousness behind anticipating this flip-of-a-switch moment—where I would suddenly be frolicking through a field like an early 2000s Claritin commercial—was holding me back and making the depression worse. I’m also not saying I haven’t frolicked through an open field since I graduated, but it just wasn’t as euphoric as I expected it to be.

I was originally going to create what was essentially a hit piece against Lacey Township High School. I was going to be messy to students and staff alike. I wanted to explicitly express my sheer hatred with no boundaries, as that’s something that has always been incredibly therapeutic to me. Though this time, I wanted to step back and take a more objective approach to my experiences growing up, to be sensitive to the marginalized child who had to experience that. I faced enough blind hatred and closed-mindedness from the adults in my life. This time, I want to step up and be like the adults who looked past my inadequacies and incompetence. I am not going to spend my life blindly hating my school like they seemingly chose to do with me. Part of my healing journey is becoming the adult that I wish I had. I watch many of the childhood videos I filmed of myself prior to my beginning my path of self-discovery and wish I could jump into the screen and talk to him for just five minutes.