My Life with Autism

If I could snap my fingers and become nonautistic I would not, autism is a part of what I am” (Temple Grandin) She is a professor and well known autism activist. A good quote to begin to tell my story about autism. Firstly question, how many of you, when looking at me, would think I am an autistic individual? I would assume not many, but it is true, I was diagnosed with Autism at 4 years old. So you might be asking, what is Autism? Autism is defined as “a neurodevelopmental disorder that impairs a child’s ability to communicate and interact with others”. Which boils down to, that a person with Autism will often struggle with social issues as simple as asking a question. We are often unable to explain what we would like and can be prone to massive outbursts. When I was younger I went through a lot of what I just said because I didn’t know how to cope and I remember walking lonely at recess wanting to play but simply not knowing the words to say. I was lucky though on three fronts, firstly I am diagnosed with something called Asperger’s Syndrome which is Autism on a milder level. The difference being the people who are lower functioning are often unable to talk at all and can have minimal social ability. The second reason I was lucky was that I had not only a mom whose job involves working with autistic kids. So she knew what I was going through, and how to react to certain quirks or idiosyncrasies I had. The third reason I was lucky was that I was able to attend a specialized program called the PAST program which taught me the basics of social interaction and truly completely changed my life. 6 years ago, if I had been trying to say a speech I’d probably start freaking out and melting down. This leads into one of the myths I have heard about this disorder, we as autistics do actually feel emotions. We feel happy when we succeed and sad when we fail the difference is that we sometimes have difficulty explaining that. To give an example, it has been said that people with autism have huge meltdowns because they have “terrible parents” but really it is cause of something called sensory overload. An example of that would be, a regular person would walk down the street normally, but for someone such as myself my brain is constantly analyzing who you are, what you look like, and any threat you would pose because I am (myself) constantly looking for dangers. Anyway my point is that I am constantly using all of my senses to analyse everything which is easy when I am in a non-crowded area, but if I get into a crowd, have you ever seen those robots break down trying to process too many different things at once? That is a perfect example of what has happened to myself before and happens to almost every autistic and probably to everyone at one time or another. There a few other symptoms of the disorder I relate to I want to explain. 1 thing quite common in people with Autism is we become extremely obsessed with certain things. Myself I am obsessed with sports knowledge. I have been called by my friends and family, a “sports encyclopedia”. Through that it is my dream to report on Sportsnet and make sporting knowledge my job. I have a story about my obsessions, when I was about 6 I was completely obsessed with the weather. I mean: I had to have it on 24/7, I loved to explain it 30 times and it would drive my family insane to the point where there was literally a rule in my house that if someone was in the room I could not turn on the weather. Another thing that is common amongst autistic people is that we strongly enjoy repeating words or phrases we hear. I believe it is because we love structure and for myself, for an entire year as the answer to everything I would say touché. To be fair I was 11 and didn’t know what the word meant, I