The Future Seen from a Small Back

On a summer morning, my son is playing with Lego blocks.
As he stacks them one by one with his small hands, he creates shapes freely without any blueprint. Watching him, I suddenly wonder.
—What kind of world will it be when this child grows up?

My son has a disability. Yet, thankfully, he has been blessed with friends since nursery school, and his classmates have naturally helped him with things he cannot do.
He says that he, too, has supported his friends within the scope of what he can do.
Now that he is in elementary school, there are children with various characteristics around him.
It seems they spend their school life and after-school time supporting each other's strengths and weaknesses.
—I want the future to be more diverse and easier to live in than it is now.

When I was a child, I was aware that I was a very strange kid.
I don't know if it was because of that, but I was bullied and always treated as an 'outcast'.
Instead of 'the nail that sticks out gets hammered down,' I was hammered so much that I broke.
Children who didn't fit in were considered abnormal.
—I feel like that was the era of such values.

Instead of being able to ask for help, I was scolded and suppressed in my school life.
Eventually, I stopped going to school and transferred to a correspondence high school.
Just because of that background, I was looked at with prejudice during job hunting, with questions like 'Why did you transfer?' and 'Why did you graduate in September?'

It was my current workplace that accepted me.
During the online interview, I had camera issues and made mistake after mistake, and my resume wasn't exactly clean with many job changes, but they still welcomed me and said, 'It's okay.'
When I actually started working, it was a very warm company, and I am still working here today.
—Ah, this is what it means to live easily. I felt that from the bottom of my heart.

And now, when I look at the backs of today's children, I cannot help but think that there is a future where it will be easier for anyone to live and where everyone can find their own place.
I wish for it to be so.

The future does not arrive naturally.
The choices and attitudes of the adults living now shape it.
What I can do might be small.
But I want to keep weaving words.
So that when the children grow up, it will be a future where they can truly feel, 'It is okay to be here.'