TED Talk: "How autism freed me to be myself"

This is one of those great talks that transcends autism, and yet is so relevant to the conversation about autism. Rosie King has autism. Her brother and sister have autism. What she's asking is that we re-think what autism is and, more importantly, why "normal" is so important to so many of us.

"But if you think about it, what is normal? What does it mean? Imagine if that was the best compliment you ever received. 'Wow, you are really normal.'"

(Laughter)

Instead, she says, the "compliments are, 'you are extraordinary' or 'you step outside the box.' ... So if people want to be these things, why are so many people striving to be normal?"

I'm reminded of the excellent talks by Faith Jegede and Andrew Solomon.

Regardless of your connection to autism, this TED Talk is a clarion call to celebrate uniqueness. It's six minutes of awesome. Watch and share, please.

"My body is not my own"

C gets up every night, 2-4 am, stimming, and comes into our bed. My wife is often able to calm him, which usually takes an hour or so. I trundle off to the boys’ room to get what sleep is left to be had.

Monday night C was even more out of control than usual. I ended up taking him to the living room around 3 am because his whirling dervishness resulted in several accidental kicks to my wife’s head.

I laid next to him on the couch, swaddling him in a blanket to soothe his proprioceptive issues. Once swaddled, it was actually easy to talk with him, more so than usual; he was lucid and responsive.

At one point, I asked him what was going on, why he couldn’t calm down. He said — in his typically poetic if literal way — “My body is not my own.”

“My body is not my own.” I had to think on that.

Probing a little more, I was able to tease out of him that his brain is “tired,” but his arms and legs won’t let him sleep.

“You can’t control them?”

“They won’t stop moving.”

"Do you want to sleep?"

"Yes," said without hesitation.

...

C finally crashed at 5 am for 45 minutes, though I never did. But I did learn something: while it’s easy for me to be frustrated with him in these moments, he can’t help it. In fact, it’s not even his choice; he wants to sleep, desperately so it seems.

Will this give me more empathy the next time his middle-of-the-night stims are this extreme? I don’t know, but I hope so.

Prime people

Here's a guest post from my wife, related to last week's Prime time post.

I was with C at an autism-friendly screening of The Lion King. In the back of the program was a photo accopmanying an article on the young actor playing the lead in The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night Time.

I said, "Look, there's a play about a boy who loves prime numbers as much as you do."

C smiled, then said, "But everyone loves prime numbers."

I said, "No. Not everyone loves prime numbers. In fact, a lot of people have trouble remembering their prime numbers."

He looked at me like I had three heads. And even though three is prime, this did not make him happy. So I added, "Only this boy and you like prime numbers, which means you two must be very, very special people."

He seemed to like that. He looked at the photo in the program and touched the boy's face. He smiled and said, "This boy and I are prime people."

Prime time

C's latest obsession is prime numbers.

He carries on about them at length, so much so that I installed an app on my phone that is nothing but a long list of prime numbers. He scrolls up and down, scanning for the red dots that mark a prime number, bouncing with joy when he discovers a new one.

He tells us that "two" is his favorite prime number because it's the only even prime number. He informs us that prime numbers are only divisible by one and themselves (as if we weren’t the ones who explained that to him in the first place). He's just starting to understand what "divisible" even means: "Eight isn't prime because two and four go into it."

He quizzes us: "Is 35 prime?" We play the mark: "Why, yes! 35 is prime!" He squeals with delight: "NO! 35 is NOT prime! But 37 IS prime!" So proud to be schooling mom and dad.

Tonight I asked him which of his classmates is a prime number. This stumped him, so I explained that if they had a prime number of letters in their name, they were prime. We determined that he's the only prime number in his class, a fact that pleased him greatly.

I don't really know how he first heard about prime numbers, and I don't know what the allure is.

I do know he loves them, so I love them now, too.

...

My favorite prime number, in case you were wondering, is 67...and I don't really know why.

"Quiet, please."

There we were, standing on a platform that jutted out into the middle of the Marine Park marshlands in Brooklyn, when C said, "I need privacy. Can I have quiet, please?"

If you know C, you know how rare it is for him to ask for something so directly, so clearly, let alone string together two unique but related requests.

He repeated his plea: "Can I have quiet?"

"You want us to go away?"

"Yes. I want privacy."

Faced with such an unequivocal demand, what else could we do but grant the request?

So the three of us walked back up the path and, from some distance, watched C sit quietly, by himself, in the middle of so much...silence.

And there he remained, at peace, for a surprisingly long time.