5 Years Later - The Ideal Form of Baby Steps

Posted on February 27, 2020

Okay, I didn’t think I would ever do a reflection piece, but now I think I probably should. So about 5 years ago, I first got my foot in the door for being an advocate for autism awareness and I felt like I was becoming a completely different person, so let me explain.

Since this was BEFORE I got into being a blogger here for #ASDNext, I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle using my voice. I was interested in exploring math, that’s it MATH, I somehow thought that I was going to push myself into being an engineer.  However,  I only liked the mathematics part of my studies and one day I just wasn’t doing well in it so I wanted to switch. Walking out of school, I just needed to get my head out of the blue. I was just relaxing at the park when I suddenly received a phone-call from my mother and she joyfully tells me, “Hey son! NBC wants to interview you!” Now I just flat out thought that the entire thing was a joke or something because I never thought about doing anything special like that OR that my opinion was going to matter. However, it was one of few things that made me see things maybe a LITTLE bit differently.

So when I began talking I mentioned how I wanted to be an engineer (No specifics, just that I wanted to do but had no actual background training on any of it or physics expertise) and a musician (I had not played my viola for 5 years at this point in time) but if there was one thing that happened during the interview that moved me was when I ran out of things to say and somehow “baby steps” were mentioned by the person interviewing me. So… “baby steps?” Just those two words alone made me slowly change my mind on what direction I was trying to go. I saw myself become a more involved public speaker for autism awareness, maybe this was the direction that I wanted go in, I recognized that I have gotten more advanced at typing, and I also saw that I could speak about movies, video games, comic books and now autism. Surprisingly enough, these things that I was passionate about turned out to be my “baby steps” and now I just can’t wrap my head around that I just used to be in a profession that I thought I was bad at. This all happened because I looked back at that interview.

So now, it’s 2020 and I am very astonished on where everything is going right now. I want to do all I can to make topics on independent living, planning and heavy involvement on autism awareness! I can’t believe how it’s  been 5 years and just looking back and seeing how those baby steps were a propeller for me into moving into the next step of what is now my reality!