Assignment- Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.

My response:

Queerly, words would autistically stick in my throat. When everyone else could assume incompetence from my quiet attempts to share observation and learning capacity far beyond the imaging of my wasting idiosyncrasies of autistic behavior, real connivance systemically was condemning me to a world of life skills and loser identification simply for lack of anyone’s ability to reach me. There I remained for years, buried within myself, unable to reveal my meager state. Fortunato himself was no less lost to human communication.

Within the insidiousness of this universal obscurity, love could come in but not express herself. I found the love that feeds life in cold desperation. Who I am as a warrior for the voiceless was honed and sacrificially offered in service. I discovered responsibility comes in the shadow of life’s gift and, quietly, peaceful heat emanates from the warmth of God’s love.

Fellow students will not have known this experience, nor risen from the depths of years of despair. Who I am shares this in every word that flows from my typing fingers. When service is sought to be understood, I am the voice serving the voiceless from awful risks they know and which I share even as I type this. Wanting “incapables” to disappear, our society sadly impoverishes itself by stealing their rights. What squeak will alert them to this error is the sound of my words and the passion of my commitment. This gift I will share with your campus, inspiring everyone to look to his poverty before God and his potential for greatness in service.

Who we are is amassed within assumptions about our world. Each day, they shape eyeshadow-like, learned reality taught by life so well that we would die for many of them. These assumptions are stories we have come to believe. They are untrue conclusions that filter impersonally the way we know each other and see the world. Powerful emotions are wrapped in their folds and salvation from them requires an identity-altering experience. I replayed the story of my imprisonment and the ways I was kept, assigning blame wherever I could. Then, in Self Expression and Leadership with Landmark Education, I learned there was no blame, and everyone was living from a story shaped by world-views peculiar to their profession, personality, and willingness to test the norm. Testing norms requires courage and passion often absent our educational system. What have we done to our society to become cowards to life, or has it always been this way?

Tasting freedom to ask these questions and move all of us to a sustainable level of active engagement with life is what I will also bring to your campus. We are quietly at war within ourselves for life quite boldly appreciated and death in the comfort of our stories. Hidden assumptions masking simple truth from sight are questioned by me. With power, I love to engage truth and strip her naked of the assumptions so few often see. Reality is sincerely embraced by me at every turn. In the silence and stillness of my communication challenges comes access to secrets most miss in the noisiness of this world.

Patiently, I intend to change who we are with each other and with the voiceless who yearn to join the world of communication and offer so much. Some have appreciatively compared me to a hero of mine, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wanting me to advocate for their lost state. With trembling love for their cause and awareness of the work ahead, I have accepted. I love life. Those who work with and support me will be gratified in life’s witness to truth and goodness, and will reap rewards in every quiet way that life shares her honors.