This is the first draft of my first article for the school paper:

We students are trapped in a reality we did not choose. The school system we are in, the teachers we have, the courses we take and the way we study them are all powerfully given to us in ways we are told help us, though they were designed for a world that has changed drastically. Who we are able to be is shaped by that reality, though we may want another. If we are to be successful, we must be able to see our own and others’ quiet hidden assumptions and lead ourselves and others to an alternate oasis of reality that serves our future.

When I was stuck in life skills with Lords of the Disabled arbitrarily assuming autism made me incompetent by their prideful condemnation that only those they communicate with are of sound mind, I altogether poisoned myself with thoughts that I was listlessly trapped. I now listen to hear many speaking students saying the old mantra of mine to themselves, “really, I just need to survive until I am out of here. This isn’t real life and soon enough I will be free.” What I missed and I fear many of us miss are the powerful assumptions behind our listless surrender and the kowtowing to a demon witness to waste.

Each moment in life is full of opportunity. We are governed by loss only when we say we are. When wonderful opportunity is before us, let us know that she is there uniquely quietly for our dreams, and that those dreams are just under the covers waiting to witness reality if we will only let ourselves gnaw at the assumptions willfully taught to us in family and cultural prejudice before we were born. Whenever we take a test like the SAT or IQ test, we assume something about ourselves.

Tasting a future beyond what our assumptions give requires courage, loyalty to a better world, and work. Each day, this is lost to real loving of ourselves, we awfully lose time and potential leverage into a future that we will mournfully never recover. Each awesome day witnesses a new opportunity for speaking a future that honors the person we powerfully can become rather than the future given to us. Leaving righteous folly of the measurements of ourselves out of the quiet internal conversation powerfully shaping us will world who we quietly become in ways that we individually choose for ourselves.

Copyright 2014 John Smyth