It's so hard isn't it. DS has been to sick bay nearly every day it seems since school started as he keeps getting hurt by others kids "accidently". So I know what you mean about surviving and part of me would love to transform him into the model child so he skims through school and everyone says "autism X doesn't have autism" but them I remember this poem

HE ALWAYS

He always wanted to say things. But no one understood.
He always wanted to explain things. But no one cared.

So he drew.

Sometimes he would draw and it wasn't anything. He wanted to carve it in stone, or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass, and look up in the sky, and it would only be him, and the sky, and the things inside that needed saying.

And it was after that, that he drew the picture. It was a very beautiful picture.
And when it was dark, and his eyes were closed, he could still see it.
And it was all of him, and he loved it.
When he started school, he brought it with him. Not to show anyone, just to have with him like a friend.

It was funny about school.

He sat in a square brown desk like all the other square desks. And he thought it should be red.
And his room was a square brown room. Like all of the other rooms.
And it was tight, and close, and stiff.

He hated to hold the pencil and the chalk, with his arms stiff and his feet flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching and watching.
And then he had to write the numbers. And they weren't anything.
They were worse than the letters that could be something when you put them all together.
And the numbers were tight and square, and he hated the whole thing.

The teacher came and spoke to him. She told him to wear a tie like all of the other little boys.
He said he didn't like them. She said it didn't matter.

After that they drew.

And he drew all yellow, and it was the way he felt about morning, and it was beautiful.
The teacher came again and smiled down at him. What's this, she asked?
Why don't you draw something like your friend's drawing? Isn't that beautiful? It was all questions.
After that his mother bought him a tie.
And he always drew airplanes and rocket ships like everyone else.

And he threw the old picture away.

And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big, and blue, and all of everything.

But he wasn't anymore.

He was square and brown inside, and his hands were stiff, and he was like everyone else.
And all the things inside him that needed saying didn't need it anymore.

It had stopped pushing.

It was crushed.

Stiff.

Like everything else.

We were given this at a staff meeting one day and it has stayed with me always and just speaks to me when I look at X