Avatar: The Last Airbender was a groundbreaking cartoon released ten years ago. It featured an ensemble cast of characters ranging from a woman of color to a young disabled girl, all of whom were integral to the storyline and helped the hero save the day.
The disabled girl was named Toph, and a common joke in the series was that Toph was blind but so good at what she did — earthbending — that her compatriots often forgot that she was actually disabled. Toph was tough, and she was skilled, and she was smart, and she didn’t define herself by her disability. It was a part of her, but it wasn’t all of her, or even the most important part of her.
Meeting Autumn Cueller is like meeting Toph.
Autumn is undeniably disabled; she has a rare form of cerebral palsy, and it affects the way she walks and talks. What it doesn’t affect, however, is her outlook on life, her strength of will, her intelligence, and her forceful personality. It’s easy to forget, even with visible and audible evidence, that Autumn navigates the world in a different way than most of us do.
Those close to her know that’s the way Autumn wants it. “She is one of the most resilient people that I’ve ever met and she doesn’t want to be defined by her disability,” says Matt Sampson, program director of the Boys and Girls Club of Western Nevada in Carson City. “She doesn’t want anybody taking advantage of her, she doesn’t want anybody taking it easy on her, and she wants to do everything just like everyone else can. And she does it well.”
The 17-year-old Carson High School junior is excellence in action: she has a 4.3 GPA, she tutors youth at the Boys and Girls Club, and she jumped at the chance to participate in the club’s Glee Club program. She loves to sing and be on stage, in the same way that she loves math and science and reading: wholeheartedly and enthusiastically, with a positive outlook that is refreshing.
“You feel it, you know,” says the Boys and Girls Club’s special events coordinator Susie Messina. “Any time you’re around Autumn, she’s just always got a smile on her face.”
Her enthusiasm for the flavors of life around her led her to tutor, which she claims felt like the natural progression of things. “I love to teach,” she says, grinning at one of her students, six-year-old first grader Cassidy Shoeppler.
“I like to LEARN!” Cassidy replies. Cassidy, by the way, is now reading at a second-grade reading level thanks to Autumn’s efforts.
Autumn recently competed against two other local Boys and Girls Club members and plowed her way through to the state-level competition for the organization’s Youth of the Year program. While she did not win the coveted title at the state or national level, she was the only person at the ceremony to receive a standing ovation after her speech — a speech which she refused to let anyone else give for her.
“When Autumn first came to me about being interested in doing youth of the year, and she was aware of it, but I made her aware again that giving a speech was part of that process,” Sampson explains. “I said, do you want, you know, we can have somebody up there, you write your speech and we can have somebody up there to give your speech for you.”
Autumn refused, instead writing a meaningful speech about everything the Boys and Girls Club has done for her and memorizing it. Five days before she was to give the speech, she was told she had to change significant portions of it, and she did so, and memorized it all over again. At a ceremony in Reno, she personally delivered it, and stepped away from the podium five minutes later to thunderous applause; not once did she mention her condition.
In the speech, and in person, Autumn is full of praise for the Boys and Girls Club. “They allowed me to progress forward,” she says. “The Boys and Girls Club really accepted me and my disability. Coming here really helped bring out my confidence, because as I said, they all accepted me for who I am.”
Autumn is a Leader in Training, a program at the Boys and Girls Club that allows youth to learn skills in leadership, to prepare them for leadership roles as adults. She attends the club five days a week, volunteering and tutoring, in addition to maintaining that 4.3 GPA and studying for every honors course she could sign up for at the start of the school year. Staff at the Boys and Girls Club help her write down her homework so that she can spend more time studying, and in her speech she credits the club for helping her achieve her dreams. She says she considers the club staff and members to be a second family.
“I love it here,” she says.
A 4.3 GPA is nothing to sneeze at, and when questioned on whether she would like to be valedictorian, she grinned. “I’ll have no problem giving that speech!”
With such a wide variety of extracurriculars and an academic record that anyone would call impressive, Autumn could probably have her pick of schools to study engineering (specifically, computer engineering, or really anything involving mathematics), but right now, she’s considering the University of Nevada, Reno — staying close to her family in Carson City and the Boys and Girls Club is important to her. Her mother attended the Youth of the Year festivities in Reno with her, and she gave her speech wearing a necklace her grandmother had crafted for her. Family, of all types, is important to Autumn, including the new family she created during the Youth of the Year events — where all of the competitors for the state title got to meet each other and interact closely.
She took her state loss with a grace many 17-year-olds would not possess. “I’m really happy that Jeffrey won, and I felt like any of us would have been a great match for Youth of the Year.”
The Boys and Girls Club of Western Nevada is located at 1870 Russell Way in Carson City and serves Carson City youth aged 6 - 18, of all backgrounds and levels of ability. They can be reached at (775) 882-8820. Membership is $30 per year.
autumn-cuellar-speech-transcript.pdf by Carson Now
