I (20M) had this woman friend (19F) when we were teens, like 15 and 16. The friend talked behind people’s backs. She made fun of them for being wheelchair users, autistic, etc. She said she didn’t want to be that way but she was. Me and my other friend went along with it and called her a good person. We defended her because she was good to us and that’s all that mattered.
She said autistic people were dogs. She wanted to kill my autistic friend. She said he was so ugly, he would never have a girlfriend and didn’t deserve a hug. She told an autistic girl who was traumatized she didn’t deserve a hug either because autistic people are “disgusting” and “her slaves”.
She saw a garbage can and told her friends that a mildly stocky girl (as in her body type) with some eating disorder that the garbage can was donations for her food :(
I never saw her again, but I’m glad I could recover and be a better person, hopefully a good one to autistic people. I do feel bad that I didn’t help him though.
The greatest revelation of true adulthood is understanding just how much of your life up to that point was a phase. You thought you were “different”, better, smarter, invulnerable. I hope to have the chance to run into people I thought less of while in school and discover they are living full lives beyond our origins. Every time I cringe at something I said as a teen I try to remind myself that others grew beyond their failures too.