PART 2: THE LIONHEART ERA (2008-2013)

In September 2004, an article appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In it were stories of autistic students being coached through their struggles and brought to life in the world at a place called The Lionheart School. The Lionheart School (or "Lionheart" for short) is a special needs school designed for students between the ages of four and 20 with disorders in thinking, regulating and communicating. According to the school's official website, "[its] mission is to provide a developmentally appropriate education for children who need a specialized learning environment, therapeutic interventions, supported social interactions, and strategies to accommodate their individual profiles." It uses the DIR/Floortime model to leverage the strengths of its students and while academics are addressed, they are not the main focus. My parents saw the article in the paper and thought immediately that if I were ever going to be in school, that would be the perfect place. At the time, though, we had just moved to McDonough, Georgia, about 40 miles south of Alpharetta, where the school was located.

Fast forward just a few short years. All the therapies described in Part One, combined with homeschooling, had helped me to become more in tune with the world around me and culminated in my arrival at Lionheart in August 2008.

I remember being extremely excited, as I had been homeschooled for several years prior and was anxious to actually to go to a "real school." I remember, however, being surprised by the school's campus: a set of trailers on land given by Alpharetta Presbyterian Church. The total student body was, instead of the teeming numbers I had imagined, mere 30-some-odd students. My first year there was tumultuous almost from the start. I remember one boy who would always quote cartoons and movies that I had seen. Though later in my Lionheart career it was something over which we bonded, I took great offense to it at first. These were my movies, my cartoons, I thought. These were not meant to be "scripted" (such was Lionheart's terminology) by some stranger kid. I became livid at him--the only time that happened that I can recall. In fact, it is one of the only times I can actually remember becoming angry at students, as I became good friends with many of them fairly quickly. It was the teachers that I had to worry about.

At Lionheart, each student moves through an individualized matrix, tailoring a schedule to meet their needs. I had OT, speech, hippotherapy, swimming and more, not to mention reading and math. The teachers during my first year at Lionheart seemed--at least to me--totalitarian and irrational. Of course, I came to realize this wasn't true, but at the time, I felt like I was smarter than them and had nothing to learn from them. There were many times when I rebelled against them for various reasons. Maybe I was about to go to another class from Floortime and did not want to leave, or maybe I wanted to play more and needed to talk with a teacher. Or maybe they were simply trying to respond to my irrational behaviors, such as wanting to call a floor repair company to make all clouds go away because I was morbidly afraid of being struck by lightning. Needless to say, my first year at Lionheart seemed like a disaster, but my teachers could sense potential, and so I stayed for another year, this time, with my mother working as a teacher. I still threw tantrums and became angry at people, but I was slightly less opposed to my teachers, although I still viewed what they did as wastes of time better spent playing on the playground or in front of a screen or just relaxing and reading. They never gave up on me, and in time I learned they had so to teach me.

They taught me how to work through conflict effectively, how to think of other people and see other people's perspectives. They worked tirelessly to help me learn to regulate my emotions. In the early years, one of the directors, Elizabeth, would take me to the Floortime room or OT room when I became irate over things like people hiding things from me (like a teacher's phone), leaving OT or computers not working correctly. When things didn't go the way I had planned or intended, I would simply start crying, yelling and lashing out at teachers in particular because I thought they were responsible for it.

In the summer of 2010, the school moved into a building built for them in the back of a small office park nearby. It was in this building that I truly began bonding with both my friends and my teachers. Instead of closing in, I began interacting with others. I made friends rather quickly and met an array of amazing people.

Yet, of course, this did not take place without the work of wonderful teachers and counselors, like Victoria McBride. A long-time "time-waster" in my mind, she ended up talking me through everything, big or small, that bothered me. Conflicts, what I perceived, life in general...Victoria (we all called our teachers by their first names) was simply the best thing I had at that stage of my life. It was under her influence that I learned how to behave at my next school, how I learned why I felt so strongly attracted to that one girl, why I felt I was smarter than almost everyone I knew but needed to appreciate what made them special, too, how I could work harder, go the extra mile...I learned a lot from her. By the time I left, she had become a second mother to me.

The most important thing I learned from Victoria--and also many of the other teachers, such as Ashley Cheek and Elizabeth Dulin--was that people had value in other ways than intellect. As I matured at Lionheart, I began to see that I was actually extremely bright compared to the other students. Of course, there were varying levels of cognitive capability, ranging from archetypal "nerds" to scarcely literate 18-year-olds, but there were people who had other callings in life--people who could understand relationships or horses or golf far better than children's novels or arithmetic or the natural world. This is something I have to remind myself of often because I am the smartest person in almost every room I walk into, and, as stereotyped as that sounds, my intellectual abilities often go to my head. But I know that because of what I learned about other people and myself at Lionheart, I would not have survived outside its walls.

I also built an impressive and diverse network of friends. Each of these people had their own stories and quirks, but the one I liked the most was Isaac Jacobson. Socioeconomically, we were worlds apart--he was the son of a radiologist who lived in a country club, and I was just a kid from a family of teachers who lived in a "normal" subdivision like almost everyone else I knew. Yet there was something about the two of us that we inherently recognized, and it is safe to say that he was my best friend the whole time I was at Lionheart. We would always talk about Nintendo games,new movies and Apple products. He loved Apple more than anyone I know. Yet he and I were both Christians, and every now and again we would talk about our faith. It felt amazing to have someone outside of family or church to talk about God with.

In 2012, my family began to realize that I definitely had the potential to go to college one day, and they decided I needed a step between the safety of Lionheart and the demands of college, and thus they began a search for a new school. The place we found was called Mill Springs Academy, and, had it not been for Lionheart, I would not have known how to survive there or anywhere. I am immensely thankful to everyone at that wonderful place who helped form who I am today.