For Fairfield’s Chris Walsh, list of achievements keeps growing

FAIRFIELD — Chris Walsh has spent his life learning how to thrive because of his autism-spectrum disorder, not in spite of it, he said.

The 18-year-old Fairfield resident and St. Luke’s School graduate said having Asperger Syndrome made him comfortable with pushing himself and learning on his own. He said he focused on this experience in a recent meditation, or speech, that he gave to his school over Zoom.

“I wanted to convey my humanity,” Walsh said, adding that he experienced being ostracized because of his condition growing up. “I was essentially in the closet with my diagnosis for about 17 years.”

Walsh said society made him feel having Asperger Syndrome was weird or something to be ashamed of but felt comfortable sharing his experience with his school because he felt people had come to like him for who he is.

“I would be cheating myself and, more importantly, everybody else who is on the spectrum and is made to feel weird and ashamed about their condition if I didn’t use my voice for some kind of good,” he said.

While he cannot speak for every person on the autism spectrum, Walsh said, he hoped sharing his story would make people less likely to judge others like him or other people who are atypical in some way. After he delivered his meditation, Walsh said, he was contacted by both friends and acquaintances who said they appreciated his story.

According to Valerie Parker, a communications specialist at St. Luke’s, a private day school for middle and high schoolers in New Canaan — Walsh — who was the school’s 2020 valedictorian of a graduating class of 81 — received awards on a range of subjects during his time at the school including history, mathematics, world language and English, and earned two of the school’s top scholar awards.

He was a member of the school’s Cum Laude Society and a senior classical scholar who made a presentation on the Historicity in Latin Literature, and participated in a number of extracurricular activities including holding leadership roles in the Model United Nations, math team and the school’s Center for Leadership Lunch and Lead Speaker Series, Parker said.

Walsh said he gets passionate about things he is interested in, whether it be Minecraft or his role as a docent at the Fairfield Museum. His work in the museum included creation of an exhibit about the history of witchcraft in town.

“I discovered that witch trials had happened on the museums grounds,” he said. “I did a lot of research to keep myself busy, and got very sucked into it. Eventually, they offered me the chance to build a permanent exhibit for them about those witch trials”.

Walsh said he is working now as an intern for The Center for Global Enterprise, a nonpartisan research institution that studies global management best practices, the contemporary corporation, economic integration and their impact on society.

His current project, he said, is helping design executive training courses focusing on supply chains in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Walsh has been accepted to Brown University, where, he said, he thinks he will have the opportunity to explore what he wants to do with his life as he learns more about himself.

Walsh said he eventually expects to concentrate on a profession involving entrepreneurship and public policy — although whatever he does, he said, he plans to continue studying Latin. For better or worse, he said, growing up with Asperger’s has made him feel like he has to prove himself.

“I think that’s healthy in everyone to a certain extent, because it inspires us to do better for ourselves and for society,” Walsh said. “The important thing is having a healthy view of that.

“I spent a lot of my childhood being implicitly told that I was ‘less than,’” he said. “It’s been very exciting to, over recent years, realize that a lot of the things that I had believed made me less than... I was able to turn into blessings — not curses.”

Walsh