What Is Autism?

       You may have heard about (or even know) of people such as these:
       The stereotyped person who cannot talk, but maybe can communicate through sign laguage or something known as facilitated communication and possesses savant skills with numbers;
        A child who learns to speak normally at the typical age but who, for reasons unknown, loses most or all speech;
        An analytical person, gifted in math and decoding words, who can't make sense of metaphors or higher-order concepts;
        A person who is unable to tolerate loud sounds, bright, flashing or flickering lights, light touch, but who is brilliant at reading and is fascinated with horses and is eager to share that knowledge;
        A child who teaches himself to read at age three and yet, as he grows, remains unable to "get" people and is totally lost in social situations;
        A person who insists on daily adhering to the same routine and eating the same foods, who withdraws from people because of the inability to "get" them and yet who is at home with ideas and concepts;
        These people and many more, are illustrations of autism. And every person's autism is unique; no autistic person resembles another. Autism is, put simply, the inability of the brain to make correct connections because of faulty wiring. This results in impaired social understanding and communication and often, challanges with language and daily functioning, sensory processing issuesand how one makes sense of the world. And autism occurs along a spectrum, from the brilliant person with Asperger's Syndrome without social skills, all the way to a profoundly affected person who is unable to communicate in any meaningful way or care for self or achieve any independence. On this blog, I will be using the term "autistic" rather than person with autism," because this condition is profoundly woven into one's identity; there is no way you can separate an autistic person from his autism the way you can separate cancer from a person who lives with it.

       Why is this subject so important to me? I speak from personal experience, for I believe that I grew up with undiagnosed autism. Many years ago (need I say how long?), I was conceived and my mother, then, was 16 years old. When my her boyfriend, my dad, learned about her pregnancy with me, he was livid. Thinking he was going to "eliminate" this "problem," he kicked mom, hard, in the stomach. As a possible result of this and her traumatic labor and delivery nine months later, I was born with an assotment of problems that set me apart from the beginning but that the "experts" could not make any sense of, because the autism spectrum diagnosis was did not exist back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was growing up. I was diagnosed as obssessive-compulsive, emotionally disturbed, socially and emotionally immature, withdrawn, behaviorally-disordered, mild cerebral palsy, epileptic, schizoid personality, learning-diabled, and more.
       As a child, I would be told, "You are just plain spoiled; you just don't want to try or do the work," "You will not amount to anything," "We don't know what to do with you," and more. I remember constantly receiving scoldings and spankings from the adults in my life. My peers often bullied me; they took note of how differently I walked, behaved, and though and they reacted to this by calling me names like retard, cripple, four-eyes, stupid, ugly, and things not fit to be put in print. And yes, the bullying did get physical, especially during my middle-school years. I don't recall that my bullies were ever were disciplined or suspended from school. The following year, I ended up in special classes; I felt that the school was trying to "get rid" of me. The fact is that they had no way of knowing how to help students with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorders, as the only time autism was diagnosed was when it occured in its severe, classic form.
       As it was, educators and my family did not know what to do with me. So I spent much of my childhood and youth in and out of special classes for my peers who behaved and learned differently, and a few times, I spent time in residential placement. Always, I remember what one of my teachers of one special class said. She said one day, "I taught a class of boys and each one of them ended up in jail. I felt like a failure." To this day, I wonder how many people in jail, in prison, and on the streets, have undiagnosed autism and who never received the proper interventions that could have empowered them to learn, conform to society, become independent and achieve productive lives full of friendship, purpose, and personal fulfillment.
       As an adult, I lived with pervasive feelings of worthlessness, frustration, confusion, anxiety, a shame-based identity, and I did my utmost to "pass as normal" and stay "in the closet," concealing my past and my challenges. I know I was not entirely successful, judging from feedback I would get and questioning glances and remarks that got back to me, where people would wonder "What is up with her?" Then, after years, I gave birth to my beautiful, precious daughter, who exhibited the same delayed speech and distance in human relationships that I showed at her age. One day, before she reached age three, she was oficially diagnosed with Pervasive Development Disorder--Not Otherwise Specified,"(PDD--NOS), a form of high-functioning autism (HFA). The doctor told us "This ia a variant of autism, which we now know occurs on a spectrum."
        Wow. Now we knew what was up with our daughter and knew how we could help her. Soon I hear that relatives were suggesting (but not to me) that I may have been autistic all along. Could this provide answers to my lifetime of challenges that had the "experts stumped about me?
        To this day, I have not found anyone in my area who evaluates adults over 25 for autism. I know I may never be able to get that formal diagnosis that could provide the closure I crave for my life. But I am forever thankful that my daughter and a whole generation, and future generations, can be spared much of the pain and hardship and anguish so many of us had had to suffer because no one knew any better. And maybe, this can help alleviate other social ills surrounding undiagnosed conditions.
        By no means do my daughter nor I represent all autistic people and this one blog can't possibly do justice to this most complext topic. So I will provide a few links to sources where you can educate yourself about autism.

http://autism.about.com/

http://www.autismandempathy.com/ a blog

http://grasp.org/Asperger's/Autism organization