When you’re a teen going through adolescence, standing out from a crowd can sometimes make you a target for ignorant people.

The protagonist of this story is constantly misunderstood and made to feel ashamed of her intelligence.

When she found herself patronized yet again at a new school, she concealed her wit and found a way to turn the tables on her teachers and make history in her small California town.

Read on for the full story!

My act of petty revenge made them send me for a psych eval.

I grew up in a really messed up situation. I was diagnosed as autistic at a young age. I was adopted and considered a defective product and abused consistently for being “so weird.”

At 13, I was given some tests and put into special college courses. My mom beat me for thinking I was better than everyone, so I ran away from home at 14.

By 16, I was caught and put in a group home. All the kids in my group home (there were several houses, two for boys and one for girls) all had to go to the same continuation school.

The ignorance continued at this new school.

The first day of class, the principal addressed our home room and said, “I am here to teach you to speak on complete sentences and use words that have more than two syllables.”

I can’t tell you how much that ticked me off. I wanted to tell them to f*** off. How could you just discount all these kids when you know nothing about them? Most of the kids in the class came from situations as bad as mine, or worse. It doesn’t make us stupid!

She was finally ready to give in.

However, I was just tired of having to constantly advocate for myself so I said forget it, and decided to just act like a total airhead.

For an entire quarter, I asked the dumbest questions I could think of in class. I made stupid mistakes. I even talked like an airhead instead of my natural, more autistic diction (think Brennan from Bones).

But she started to find ways to use it to her advantage.

Honestly, it was fun and so much less pressure than trying to excel academically. (Ironically, it also made me more popular with the boys.)

Anyhow, one day we got a creative writing assignment and I was just really inspired. I wrote a parable about a boy who lived in the jungle and befriended an alligator. It was basically an allegory about toxic relationships.

Soon her teachers caught on.

I was called into the principal’s office for plagiarism. They couldn’t believe that I wrote it and wanted to know where I stole it from.

I told them they assumed I was an idiot, so I’ve been acting like one. If they cared to look at any of my transcripts, they would know I’m not an idiot.

They weren’t satisfied with this explanation.

They were ticked and thought I was psycho, so the group home made me meet with a psychologist for a day of testing.

He said I had an IQ of 152 and borderline personality disorder. (Later the diagnosis was changed to autism/adhd with CPTSD).

Anyhow, I got to be the first group home kid in Redding, CA to go to the public school in 1992.

It’s the school administration’s fault for being so easy to manipulate!

What did Reddit have to say?

This user is rooting for the author!

This redditor is relieved the story has a happy ending.

This fellow smart kid gets it.

Oh, the irony of it all.

It takes real intelligence to pretend like you’re dumb for your own protection.

It turns out, ignorance really is bliss!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.