Every summer my family takes a road trip to New York City for just a few hours. This trip is to bring my younger brother, Ben, down to a bus stop where he, and about one hundred other kids, pack in together and then drive to a camp in Utica. There, he’ll spend seven weeks working, camping, learning and living with other adolescents and kids, who have been diagnosed with different levels of autism.
Benjamin Evan Szymanski was born June 24, 1994 and was diagnosed with autism a year later. Autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, is a group of complex disorders of brain development. As defined the by the organization Autism Speaks, the mental disorders associated with autism show themselves in varying degrees. Some of the attributing issues include social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and repetitive behaviors. Ben faces challenges every day, but over the past 20 years I’m lucky Ben has come so far.
Most brothers grow up together roughhousing, calling each other names and picking on one another. Ben and I aren’t like most brothers. In fact we didn’t connect on a lot of levels and we still don’t. That’s because, for example, his mind was spinning around a scene from the Disney film Lilo and Stitch, and I was sitting in front of the TV, playing violent video games. That’s what separated us; mentally, I was maturing and searching for more graphic things to indulge in, whereas Ben was stuck around childhood, enjoying the Disney movies from when we were kids.
Expressing his feelings was never easy for Ben. One night, after a disagreement with my mom, he ran upstairs and began ripping pages out of a library copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I would be in so much trouble if I did that. But with Ben, it was different.
Whenever I was angry or sad after getting into trouble with Mom and Dad, Ben would come over, study my face for a moment and he’d start to cry along with me. He didn’t know why I was so sad; he just knew that there was a reason to cry because his older brother was crying.
Now, coming up to his twenty-first birthday, Ben towers over me with his black-rimmed glasses and tells me what chores I forgot to do. Ben has grown up to be more productive and independent than I would have ever thought. He attends a special needs program through Wesleyan University with other young adults with learning disabilities. On top of this, Ben works a part-time job in a grocery store bagging groceries. Ben will finish his last year at Wesleyan and then he’ll be able to work as a grocery store bagger.
At the end of the summer, our family takes that same road trip down to New York City and the young man we pick up is not the same person we left at the beginning of the semester. He’s slimmer, tanner and most of all happier than I ever get to see him all year.
Nathaniel Szymanski is a senior at Western New England University in Springfield.
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