Autism and Me.

Autism is a little word with large connotations. People who have autism are often confined to what we denote autism as, but autism is so much more than a word or a simple denotation.  Autism is essentially just one aspect of my being, but occasionally it feels like my whole being.  Autism Spectrum Disorders are defined by the CDC as one of many developmental disabilities. I have Aspergers Syndrome, which is on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, so I have trouble with social interaction and unusual behaviors and interests. Aspergers syndrome affects your development of social skills, for it inhibits your ability, especially as a child for normal social interactions. I was not born with the social know how and have had to learn social norms and skills. Most children are born intuitively knowing how to be social. People with Aspergers are not, so we must learn how to be social plus add in a few odd behaviors such as rocking, chewing on things, hand flapping, and a few narrow and obsessive interests and you’ve got a perfect storm for being socially unacceptable.  People with Aspergers Syndrome such as myself do have normal language development and intellectual skills, essentially we have average to high I.Q’s and are very verbal almost to the point sometimes of annoying others. Now that I have given you the basics of what my disorder is I’m sure you are wondering how did I find out that I had this disorder in the first place?

My mother has told me she knew from the day I was born that there was something different about me, for I didn’t act like the other babies. I could not sleep and would scream for hours at a time. I could not be consoled, for I would pull away from whoever was holding me. However, sometimes I would just be quiet for two or three days at a time and just look at things around me and then of course the screaming would start again. I would get over stimulated from seeing, hearing, and tasting the things around me and my response to that would be to scream, for overstimulation is simply a system overload and in this case the nervous system.  I did not take an interest in children’s toys instead I took a curiosity in ordinary objects such as my father’s reading glasses which apparently I broke by age two. My father has never had glasses since.  I still love glasses and love to try them on whenever I can, for I guess it is one of my autistic obsessions because I like the way they feel on my face and in my hands.  I was an extremely tactile child as many autistic children are.  My first memory of being autistic and knowing what I was doing was different was when a girl got in my face at a resale shop called Other-Mothers.

I did not like when people would get in my personal space without invitation and this included my parents.  As I said before I did not have any innate social skills and had trouble from the time I was old enough to talk with social interactions, especially with people my own age.  I was in the toy section in Other-Mothers playing in a toy kitchen when another little girl wanted to play with me. I really did not like other children touching my stuff or getting in my individual space, but this little girl insisted on playing with me and I remember being really puzzled as to why. “Why was she not happy with just playing by herself and minding her own business?” I thought to myself as she got closer, and closer to me. She finally got so close I could smell her cookie scented breath and then I proceeded to haul off and smack her across the face. My mother ran over horrified and the girl of course was crying her eyes out, which of course I had no understanding as to why. She had invaded my space and I did not want to be her friend I just wanted to play by myself.  That is one of my first memories of being autistic and one of my mother’s first warning signs that I was, for most children do not hit other children unless provoked and most do like to get in each other’s space and talk. I, however, was not like that and did not like being close to other people especially other children.

For many years afterwards I would play mainly by myself because even on my diagnostic paper it says “Does not ask to play with others except every two to three months.” I was not a social child. Autistic children live in their own world or to put it more simply in their head and that’s where I was for most of my childhood. I would spend hours on the swing `pretending about books I read or making up my own stories.
            I loved swinging as a kid and I still love to do it now because I can often be found on the swing set in back of my college swinging before classes. Swinging for me is a form of “Stimming” or self-stimulation and always has been. I know what you are thinking, the word “Self-stimulation” sounds like something sexual but it is not. Stimming, as it is called in the autism community, is a very normal and healthy thing for an autistic person to do, for it helps to keep our nervous systems regulated. Swinging is one of my autistic stims and the movement helps to calm me down. I would swing everyday as a kid anywhere from two to four hours and since I was homeschooled I was allowed to do this because it helped me to calm down and focus on my school work. Self-stimulation helps to keep an autistic body in balance.

I would swing and swing. I loved the way the air would rush by me as I flew through the atmosphere. It was for me as if time and space had stopped and it was just me, the swing, the air, and my imagination. The swing was my escape from a world I did not understand, nor that I felt that I fit into. It was my time machine, airplane, and rocket ship I could go wherever I wanted to go in my mind and I wouldn’t have to interact with anyone else which was what I found so difficult to do as a child. It was my getaway, my break from reality. The movement regulated me, but the time spent away from the world calmed my soul.

So I continued in the pattern of being in reality and then escaping from it. My Mother says I would get a “zoned out” look whenever I would stim like I was someplace else, but what she didn’t know, because I could not verbalize it at the time, is that I really was someplace else. My “Zoning out” and terrible social skills and my inability to make friends made my mother seek out a diagnoses for Aspergers Syndrome which in turn lead to my diagnoses. I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome by a Psychiatrist at OHSU in Portland, Oregon when I was nine years old. I did not want to have autism or anything to do with it, so for the next ten years I pretended I did not have it. Why didn’t I want to have autism? Well, I did not want to have it because I did not want to be different. I just wanted to be like everyone else.