Valerie
Tuesday, January 1, 2008

I'm on the spectrum

I used to tell people I’m a writer because I don’t know how to talk. I was always aware, even before I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome four years ago, that I had a curious communication style - one of extremes. When I am in a familiar setting with people I know, I can be excessively loquacious. But I can also plunge into nonverbal land, especially when I’m tired or with groups of people I don’t know well. Then my style is easily mistaken for passivity or aloofness. I always struggle with these extremes. How do I refrain from monopolizing the conversation? How do I share the thinking that courses beneath my wordlessness?

Now I understand this phenomenon in different terms. My style is what autism professionals call “delayed processing.” To overcome the delay, I have turned to writing as a tool. It helps me script situations that I am anxious about before I enter into them. It has been a friend to me in sorting out complicated social exchanges that I can’t decipher in real time. Writing helps me organize my thinking, but most of all it connects my emotions to my thoughts and ideas.

I wrote a lot about my son Elijah after he was first diagnosed with autism as a little boy 14 years ago. I was a single mom and we were dirt poor, yet somehow we hobbled through our days with moments of supreme joy and connectedness. All of those hardships and flights of happiness eventually translated themselves into my memoir, Elijah’s Cup (Jessica Kingsley Publishers).

When Elijah was 12 years old, I left my teaching post as a professor. I liked my quiet life of focused research and low-impact social interaction, but I was on the autism “fast train.” Elijah was depressed and in crisis at school, and I had to do something about his safety and happiness. So I founded a school for kids with ASD. Today, I help other organizations design their own programs. 

I try to write about whatever seems to be most urgent and necessary. My calling as a writer keeps me on track, and I hope it makes me useful to others as we move together through the ebbs and flows of this thing called autism.