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Payton Harper 2022 Scholarship Winner
Payton's Story
Breaking Patterns
“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” –Tuli Kupferberg
I agree with the words of Temple Grandin…“I am different, not less.” From an early age, I always knew that I was different. However, I was 8 years when I learned that it is autism that makes me different. Some people with autism have an intense and highly-focused interest in a specific topic. For me, that interest has always been numbers and patterns. Math, patterns, reading, and learning have always been easy for me. However, making friends, understanding others’ body language, and connecting with people took a lot more work. I could count to 10,000 by four years old, but I did not make a true friendship connection until middle school. Over time, I have learned to use my strengths to overcome my weaknesses, and it has had a profound effect on my life.
Most babies say, “Mama” or “Dada” easily around one year old. However, this was not my experience. I did not say my first word until I was 3 years old. I was a frustrated toddler who struggled to communicate with others. I understood the words being said to me, but I was not able to speak. Out of frustration, I would bang my head on the wall because I could not communicate my wants and needs. My parents took me for an evaluation and the specialist determined that I had a communication delay, but a high IQ. At this point, I was diagnosed with verbal apraxia. My brain knew what to say, but my muscles could not figure out how to say it. After months and months and months of speech therapy, I sat in my dining room blowing bubbles and surprisingly uttered my first word, “bubble” with the help of a speech therapist. Learning to speak eased my frustrations and allowed me to begin to communicate with others. This was my first experience breaking a pattern.
Although learning to speak was difficult for me to do, my journey to read was a little different. Given the speech delay that I had, my parents were shocked when just six months later (at 3 ½ years old) I was reading the street signs as we were driving in our neighborhood. My parents had no idea that I could read. They wondered…Who taught me to read? The surprising answer is that I taught myself to read with the help of a Leapfrog phonics refrigerator magnet. I played with this phonics toy for hours every day. I would put in a letter, and I would repeat, “A says ah.” My parents just thought I was playing with it because I liked the noise it made, but I was actually interpreting the information. I was able to see the letters and sounds as patterns and apply that to words. From this point forward, everything was different. I could lose myself in a book about dinosaurs or space or animals. I could learn about anything I wanted by just picking out a book at the library. Learning to read opened up a whole new world to me. However, my new love for reading meant that I could retreat even further into my own little world.
For most of my life, I have not really understood other people’s emotions or even my own, for that matter. I did not know how to read people’s body language or their facial expressions. Therefore, I never realized that what I was doing affected other people. For example, when I was in the first grade, I was practicing the song “This Old Man” for an upcoming school concert. I was sitting at a table building Legos with a classmate. I was sitting there singing the song over and over and over again. Just imagine, “This old man, he played one. He played knick-knack on my thumb with a knick-knack, paddy whack give a dog a bone. This old man came rolling home” stuck on repeat. My classmate told me to stop many times, but I did not realize that I was bothering him, so I just kept singing. He got so annoyed that he started crying. In my mind, I was just practicing for my upcoming concert, and I had no idea that I was so frustrating to him.
For most of my childhood, this is a scene that repeated often. I was oblivious to others’ emotions and feelings, and I could not understand why it was hard to make friends. Reading body language and facial expressions come naturally to most people, but it was a process I had to learn. At around 13 years old, I started getting better at it. I was able to interpret what people do for certain emotions. Eventually, I could tell that someone is happy because of the way their eyes light up or sad because of the way they hold their shoulders. Over time, I was able to understand what people were feeling without them saying it. Breaking this pattern has had the most profound effect on my life. It allowed me to step out of my own little world to make connections with other people and change my life forever.
I continually try to break the pattern of what other’s think autism is and what it looks like. Most people who meet me would not “see” my autism, but it is always there. Autism is a big part of who I am, and it has greatly affected my journey in life so far. For me, the pattern of lost friendships, solitude, and fear has been broken and replaced with companionship, connections, and a bright future. I hope that others can break the pattern of looking at autism in a negative way and see it in a positive light. Again, Temple Grandin says it best, “If I could snap my fingers and be nonautistic, I would not. Autism is a part of what I am.”
I am now 15 years old and getting ready to graduate high school…early. I skipped Kindergarten in public school because of my advanced reading and math skills (and to try to help build connections with my peers). By second grade, my mom (an English teacher) realized that I was not going to school to learn new things. To me, school was just a place to practice what I already knew, and a place for me to feel that I do not really belong. For this reason, I began homeschooling. That is when I discovered that I loved to learn, and I found my purpose. By the time I graduate high school in May, I will have completed 33 college credit hours as a dual enrolled (early college) high school student, including classes such as Calculus 1 & 2, Chemistry, and Physics. My high school GPA is currently a 4.2, and my college GPA is 3.94. I have been accepted into the Bama by Distance Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Alabama for the Fall 2022. Although I am only 15 years old, I am excited to begin college, and I truly believe my autism is what helped me get here.
Payton is such an inspiration to me and anyone who crosses paths with him. As a mother, he gives me hope. I am so excited to follow his journey. We are also very excited that Payton and his amazing family will be joining us as speakers for our next Autism Night which will be held in July! If you did not come yesterday, I hope you read this and feel as much joy as we did getting to meet Payton. He is a true ROCKSTAR!!! Congratulations and Roll Tide!!!
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