About Me

My name is Nicole Light. I was born in 1997 during aftermath of the Grand Forks North Dakota Red River Fire/Flood (external video)  and well, life hasn't been easy for me. My parents lost almost everything- and I was born early because my family's dog pushed my mother into labor.

I was raised by a single mother after she divorced my father while he was battling an alcohol addiction. My childhood was characterized by raising myself emotionally. My saving grace was my caring extended family. I'm truly grateful for all of the childhood experiences I had. Like everyone's childhood, some memories were good, some were bad. I had more ups and downs than a lot of children- so in one word, I would describe my early years as turbulent.

Due to my background, I have great sympathy for individuals facing incarceration, addiction, and poverty. I have extreme empathy for children who have high ACES. I have vivid memories of my own traumatic experiences living in poverty and visiting my father in prison as a small child.

I was a well-behaved child. Looking backward, I was well behaved because I could not afford to be an unruly child. There was no time to goof off or be silly. My family was in survival mode. My only hope to escape was to work as hard as possible while I was at school. I didn't socialize or fit in normally, I was quiet except for the rare times I could be my glittery, bubbly self, at theater practice. I was involved in theater nearly my entire childhood. Theater was my saving grace, and I loved memorizing scripts and "becoming other people". We did not have a lot of money, so my other hobbies were drawing, babysitting, watching movies, and walking to my best friend's house. When my extended family members paid for it, I took all of the extracurriculars I could. Volleyball, figure skating, Science Olympiad, improvisation, violin, choir, softball, just to name a few. I was a huge go-getter, and the only impoverished kid I knew who was a try-hard despite getting the short end of the stick from society.

In high school I was lucky enough to meet my high school sweetheart. His name is Caleb and to this day we have been together for over a decade. We met in the Fargo North library. He threw paper into my hair while I was doing homework. He quickly got my attention, spent hours talking on the phone to me, and we went on long walks together.

Our relationship was interrupted when I was accepted in to Brigham Young University. I was super excited because it was one of the top schools for animation, and I had always wanted to pursue some of my artsy talent. I was good at it, but ultimately I left because BYU was on the news for anti-LGBTQ sentiments. This was before the students started protests like "light up the Y rainbow." My college apartment was right in front of the Y.

Ultimately I missed my boyfriend, I was thinking more and more about my childhood dream of becoming a teacher, and I did not want my name on degree from a university that was openly homophobic. I went back to Fargo and attended NDSU. One of my regrets is that if I started at NDSU in the first place, due to my high high school GPA and ACT score, I would have had at least half of my tuition covered by a scholarship, and with my stepdad's role as a professor at the university, which is another 50% discount,I would have gone to college practically for free. I still don't regret going to BYU- Utah is beautiful, i made great connections, experienced the love of a Christian community, and was able to be on my own for a little bit.

I began to suspect autism during my second and third year of college at NDSU. Due to my own exposure to childhood trauma, my "introverted, hyperfixated, perfectionist tendency" was attributed to my environment and mathematic giftedness. It was not until my early 20s when studying child development, trauma, education, and disabilities, that I saw myself in the readings about autistic children.

I sought therapy for myself in a quest for self improvement. I did not know if it was autism or trauma. As the therapy melted away some of the trauma, it unveiled all of my underlying autistic symptoms, that would not go away no matter how hard I tried. After college, I was privileged enough to be able to afford to pay for an autism assessment (>$1000 USD). In 2022, while I was in my third year as a teacher, I was diagnosed with autism and comorbid alexithymia. For those who do not know what alexithymia is, it is an inability to recognize your internal emotions. This came as a surprise to me because I never thought of my issues as a lack of access to emotions. I found out that most people are able to process complex emotions (like those feelings wheels you see), but I am more likely to categorize feelings as just "feeling good" or "feeling bad."

My teaching experience in Halliday, ND was indespensible. I loved living in Western North Dakota. It was beautiful, a tight knit community. I had difering political iews to a lot of people, but it didn't matter a whole lot. I found that in the smaller community, people tend to care for each other in a genuine way. It was a lot different than when I was in Fargo. I definitely felt the difference to Fargo when I got back to Fargo. I noticed that in a bigger city, people tend to ignore each other more. It's almost like everybody views each other as NPC'S in videogames. In Halliday, we all held a very important role in each others' lives.

The tradeoff was that in Halliday, I did not really feel like I could be myself. I had leftist views, was obviously accepting of all of the types of people that people in small towns just don't have experience with since they are so isolated. It has always been interesting to me that in tight knit cultures, they tend to value conformity so much. you would think that as people get to know each othher more, they accept each ther more, but this isn't the case at all. There are very strict social rules. The nice part about being autistic in a small town is at least you know exactly what those social rules are. In big cities it is harder to manage what people expect of you.

The school sadly had to be closed down because the state wouldn't fund a school that had to pay so much per student to stay open. North Dakota started closing down small schools over a five year time frame. I knew that when I took the job, I knew that there was not a promise for how long that the school would stay open. The fact that I was able to stay for three years was better than I expected. I do have a bone to pick with the state over closing these small schools across the state. I understand the reasoning- that students can go to. a neighboring town for school. It's hypocritical though- Fargo has millions of dollars of funding and has specialized schools that spend about $30,000 dollars - this is nothing compared to what the small schools were spending. I'll come back to that later.

This was followed by a year as a private teacher. My husband and I purchased a home in North Fargo- only a block away from where we met. I taught very nearby for a private family. I have extremely fond memories of teaching the two girls I taught. I won't write more for the sake of privacy for the family.

What came next was one of the greatest regrets of my life and if I could do it over again I absolutely would have stayed for the family. It had been my dream to work for Fargo Public Schools and I'll never forget the day I got the call that I was invited to an interview for FPS' Explorer Academy. It was a school that I had high hopes for - they advertised it as a STEM school which was right up my alley and the photographs of the school clearly showed tools that are used for neurodivergent children. There were a few red flags during my interview that I should have heeded but after consideration I left the family to teach at Explorer.

To make it short- it was awful. I'll keep the story for another blog post. What it did do was motivate me to make the world a better place for autistic people. My online presence started growing as an autistic person. As I started meeting autistic people across the globe who had similar social experiences to me and being maltreated I decided to commit myself to advocated for neurodivergent children.