 This past
year (1999), the last of the century has been for
me a gradual realisation and coming to terms with
the fact that I am Autistic.
I started out acknowledging problems
and embarked on a search that ended in diagnosis
at the end of October.
I already feel part of a wider
Autistic community whom I have met through the
Internet and feel particularly grateful to those
people on the news groups and mailing lists who
have guided me through this process. I would not
have made it on my own without them.
According to the researchers, we are
supposed to be weak on Theory of Mind, that is to
say we cannot put ourselves in the position of
others to know what they are thinking, and so
supposedly lack empathy. It is supposed that much
is communicated between people by eye gaze and
gesture, which communicates state of mind, mood
etc.
How this relates to me is that I am
never sure of how I am being understood in
conversation or how to modify what I am doing to
maximum effect in social relations. On the other
hand I have the capacity of reason and logic, and
can determine in other ways what I am lacking in
NT (neuro typical) intuition.
Borrowing the popular analogy of a
jigsaw puzzle, we are not supposed to be good at
seeing the complete picture but are better at
seeing each part as seperate in its details. It
is my belief that seeing only parts of the "picture"
gives me the opportunity to make different
connections and come to radically new conclusions
that people who see it otherwise will not be able
to. Sometimes I will be mistaken in this but I
hope that it pays off sometimes in that I have
some remarkable insights not being clouded by
convention or social thinking.
The social animal is always led to
majority conclusions, going with the flow,
following the crowd. The Autistic thinker comes
to his/her own conclusions and does not care it
they are not socially acceptable. All progress
has come through being unafraid to differ in
opinion from the majority, look at Galileo, and
Einstein.
Nonetheless I do not seek out
isolation deliberately. I do need others to exist
and many of my troubles seem to come from being
rigidly independent. We are all interdependent whether we
are aware of the fact or not and if each of us
persists in being the centre of our own existence
we are all doomed to suffer at each others hands.
Nonetheless I reserve the right to follow my own
path to the universal human goal.
I will never run
with the herd
From my own mind be deterred
I am my own very self
One item alone on the shelf
Above all things divergent thinker
From the well of Autism, a drinker
So go on, say what you will say
I will go on in my way.
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