I appreciate your comment. All too often institutional evil goes unnoticed especially in rural communities. No one believed me when I told them this school was bad for me, but everyone was completely surprised when I failed in my later education. Meanwhile I have fairly regular nightmares over my experiences there that are sufficiently bad enough to wake me up mid-sleep and I'd be incapable of falling back asleep until 12+ hours later. I probably need therapy for this, but I know I won't be able to get it due to insurance issues.

For the longest time I was pretty much left behind and was severely lacking in education and even my personality took a turn for the worse. Those schools don't help you. They give you contempt for authority and a pessimistic and cynical outlook on many subjects. Some people may say that's how I should act towards a lot of subjects, but this was an ingrained childhood experience that would negatively impact you at a core level. I still don't get how people were legitimately stupid enough to try and goad severely autistic people into writing or speaking when a lot of them were non-verbal. I have the disability yet people in a position of authority who lacked my disability chose this path for us and thought it to be the best way of approaching things.

They thought "coping" was the catch-all solution to fix the behavior of students there, and even the severely autistic people can get openly annoyed by the staff. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I think they look at severely autistic people like animals due to their lack of communication, but I always remember them lashing out without warning if they got upset enough because despite their disability, there's still a person in there. One memory that fails to escape me is a bulky red-headed severely autistic high school man kept having staff be hands-on and violating his personal space which he eventually without warning grabbed the wrist of the staff member nearby and squeezed hard enough to cause pain while bearing teeth and eyes wide open. That's when the aforementioned "security guard" took him out of the room.

When I left high school, I was highly estranged and had a warped worldview. Being a part of internet communities helped me grow up more mature, more intelligent as I had the ability to learn things at my own pace and need, and it changed me from someone who was originally thought to be a lost cause in the education system. Yes, people truly had that level of contempt for me and so very many others. When I went onto chat rooms and participated with other people, I learned how to participate with others and put that experience past me, even if I still have nightmares from it years later. Some of the only people in my childhood who treated me with any sort of kindness was people of the days of Digg, Reddit, IRC, and Discord.

I ended up a better person long-term, even if I was and to an extent still am fucked in life. And there's no amount of thanks I can give to the people who showed me kindness online at the absence of everyone else in-person.