What This Boy With Asperger’s Wants to Tell School Bullies When He’s an Adult
Devin Smyth recently wrote a personal essay about growing up with Asperger’s syndrome, titled, “My Reality and Some Fantasy.” This week he read it on CBC Radio One.
“I have been teased a lot by boys who don’t get me,” Devin, from Lethbridge, Alberta, said. “They mock me or laugh at me… This is the worst thing about Asperger’s.”
But the 11-year-old has a cheeky message he’d like to tell his bullies when he’s older:
I know I will be rich someday and do lots of cool work, like helping poor people and design cool clothes for movies or invent cool technology. Then when the kids who have been mean to me want to take advantage of me, I’ll say, “Sorry suckers, you had your chance.” And my pretty wife and me will drive off on our yacht to see my mom, and maybe dad if he’s still alive, at her nice old folks home I will buy her in Hawaii. The end.
When asked if he had anything else he’d like to add, Devin paused for a moment and then said, “Asperger’s is not a disability, it’s not a punishment, it’s not something wrong, it’s not something to be made fun of.”
