Making the connections
I had a project in primary school and I can’t remember what the brief was. If I remember rightly I had a partner. I was massively into the Beatles so I had a vague idea around a Lennon McCartney duo, not that I’d figured out how that would work. So it turned out to be another one of those episodes where I felt rather inadequate among a class that seemed to have had a pretty good grasp of what they’d been asked to do. I didn’t have a clue.
I got plenty of remarks about being a dreamer in my school reports so maybe that was my problem; I just wasn’t present when instructions were given out. However I feel there was something else at work: I just wasn’t on the same wavelength. There is more to listening than imbibing words, everything needs translating and converting to understanding otherwise it’s just noise. You wouldn’t know you’d been barking up the wrong tree if the right tree wasn’t pointed out and just about everyone has done that, except some of us remember those mishaps too vividly and some of us just didn’t get it more often than others didn’t.
It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I began to understand what autism was. I thought it was fundamentally about being averse to social interaction until I learned that someone with autism needs to be touched and included as much as anyone else. Its really about…
