Being queer and being autistic have one thing in common: People can smell it on you and it makes them mad. I spent the first fourteen years of my life trying not to scream. By the time most kids were graduating junior high, I had spent over a year of my life in prison, the psych ward, and a group home. I had been kicked out of school, had my heart broken, and was already spiraling down a hole of sex, drugs, and self-mutilation. My father was a pedophile and my mother was a religious zealot who tried to perform an exorcism on me when I didn't act the way that she wanted. I didn't need to be free of any demons, though. I needed to be free of them. How I Learned to Hate Myself is a book about autism, abuse, growing up queer, navigating the mental health system, trying to find love, and desperately clinging to the parts of myself that felt real in a world that insisted that my reality was wrong

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