Mitchell Franklin

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Hi

My name is Mitchell Radford Franklin. My mom and dad are Jon and Becky Franklin. Mom is helping me with this.

When I was 3 years old I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome and ADHD. It is a high functioning Autism. They told mom that I would never be independent, hold a job or drive a car. As I grew up mom and dad did everything they could to help me learn to overcome my inadequacies and learn to function more like my peers. My mom said that she use to take me to church but one day she took me to my class and 2 other girls in that class said, “Oh great. It’s Mitchell.” So we stopped going to church. She said it reminded her of how she was treated at the same age and didn’t want me to go through the same things.

I really didn’t care about the church. I didn’t understand it. I just wanted to have fun and be a kid. Grandma (mom’s mom) had a “quiet book” and a bag full activities that she took to church for me to help keep me entertained during sacrament meeting. It was something she had made where the pages were made of cloth and had activities that helped me learn simple skills like zippers and buttons and counting. She use to babysit me and my sister while mom was at work. Mom says that the only reason I turned out so well is because Grandma raised me better than she could.

Mom and Dad made a lot of mistakes as they were raising us. A Lot! I blame the church because of the way the church made my parents think. Not to mention how messed up my other Grandma (dad’s mom) raised him. I remember my parents arguing a lot. I thought it was funny at times which then made mom get mad at me! I didn’t understand what my parents were going through. So I played a lot of video games to cope not only with my parents, but also my social anxieties.

That is actually some of my best memories is playing video games with my mom and dad and my sister. We would all play together or watch each other play. It was so fun! I liked playing both shooter games and platforming games and because of my learning disability I would get in some trouble at school because I would talk about guns a lot. It wasn’t because I wanted to hurt anyone. I just liked the history of them and the different models, different calibers and how they worked. I didn’t realize that there was a social fear of mass shootings. I even got in some trouble at school because I was talking about bombs. Mom sure got mad at me because of how many times she had told me not to talk about weapons at school. She was constantly getting phone calls from the school about the things I was talking about. Back then I just didn’t understand what the big deal was!

In 2014 my parents found the work. At fist I didn’t understand it. I just thought it was something that taught my parents how to be better parents because they started acting better towards us and each other. By then I had 2 more little brothers and they didn’t make the same mistakes with them.

In 2019 I crashed my first truck. I was lucky that it banged up my knee but nothing else. After the crash my dad and I had a great heart to heart talk. I started to understand my dad a lot better. I started to realize the abuses he went through as he grew up and how he didn’t know how to be a good father because he had no example of his own.

I didn’t look into the work until late 2018. I noticed that my parents had been listening to the blog talk show. I got curious what they were listening to. So I started listening to the archived stuff.

The stuff Christopher talked about really made sense to me! It was like YES! All this stuff that was going through my head that I didn’t understand that Christopher could explain was AWESOME! I have been reading the books at my own pace and following the best I can. When mom and dad realized that I was also following the work they helped me start to learn how to ebb and flow with the work as things evolve. I am doing my best to follow the guidelines that Christopher has set for us. I want to be a good supporter of the work and of Christopher. I don’t want to think about how things could have been if my dad had not found that Ida Smith video!

Mitchell Franklin

307-880-3006

JelloTron6000@gmail.com

Here are some pictures of me as a little child, before my beard.

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