School spent a lot of energy on what I couldn't do or wouldn't do or wasn't doing correctly. The story it told about me was largely a deficit story — here are the things that are wrong, here are the ways you don't fit, here are the problems you cause. That's a hard narrative to exist inside of, especially when you're already struggling.
But there were people outside of that narrative. And they made a significant difference.
My mum
This one is straightforward and also the most important. Through everything — the school situation, the police contact, the selective mutism, the interrogation, all of it — she pushed back, documented, corrected the record, and made sure I wasn't alone in any of it. She could have taken the path of least resistance and accepted the school's framing. She didn't. She fought it at every point and did it in writing.
Being believed by a parent when institutions are saying something different about you is not a small thing. It's actually foundational. I don't think I would have got through the last year the same way without that.
Online people who got it
Some of the people who've believed in what I'm building are ones I've never met in person — people from communities I'm part of, people who've seen the work and responded to it, people who engage with the things I make as if they're real and worth engaging with. That kind of validation from people who have no particular reason to give it — who aren't family, who have nothing to gain — lands differently. It's just someone looking at what you've done and saying it's good.
What belief actually does
When you're in an environment that's consistently telling you something negative about yourself, belief from elsewhere doesn't automatically cancel it out. But it creates a counterweight. It gives you something to return to when the other voice gets loud. The people who believed in me gave me evidence that the school's version wasn't the only version, or the true version.
That evidence matters. Especially when you're autistic and already prone to taking the stated position of authorities seriously. Having people who could say "that's not what I see when I look at you" was genuinely important.