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Chapter 13
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Interjection Twelve I wondered - why me? Why can I figure this out? What has made it so easy to do these vastly complicated things without ever knowing how, but then not be able to do anything but conceive them? Why was I even contemplating these wildly philosophical and outrageous ideas? They seem to be apart of me, something innate. I don’t pursue them because I’m pressured to, or told to. I wasn’t researching it for a class. I’ve always been constantly pursuing knowledge my entire life. I have always been different. I’ve also always tried to be like everyone else and pretend I didn’t like learning but secretly loved it. But whY? I googled: “Life’s biggest questions” and this amazing site with an explanation to what the purpose of life is came up. It was almost exactly what I had been figuring out as well. Knowing you’re not the only one in the entire world thinking a certain way is comforting. It was on that site I came across the web site for Temple Grandin who is a writer with autism. She also does animal psychology and design. She had an article about how she thought, and how she described her thinking process. “Thinking in Pictures” She said she thought almost only in pictures. She described a time that she almost hit a deer and the mental processes she went through. Surprisingly what she described was exactly how I thought and responded to the exact same thing. *it wasn’t a deer though it was a transmission on the freeway* I even read a part on her site where she described the scenarios she needed to go through in her journals to do something new in her life.
The example she used was graduating from high school and going to college. She said in order for her to understand and accept the change she needed to visualize a scenario to represent it. She quoted a journal entry she had made from high school about going down a hall with different doors that represented choices in her life. I remembered an almost identical journal entry I had written when I had just graduated high school. What really surprises me isn’t that they were exactly the same, or that she used journals too, but how significant I had thought that journal entry was. It was exactly how she had described her own.. It was also when I started to write the most..
This is from my 2002 Journals. It was the entry that was just like Temple’s: The Long Haulway - 2002
It's like Im walking
down a hall, and not knowing which door to go into. Not knowing
what's inside? Not really careing what is at the end or what im even
walking towards. I walk, sometimes run, crawl, occasionally stop and
curl up into a ball and go to sleep. It's a huge hall but sometimes
it seems soo small and the walls are caving in. Every once in a
while I'll try a door and see what's inside and it's refreshing
because its better than the hall, or at least it seems to be that
way at first, but I always leave the room, shut (or slam) the door
and just keep on going. But it's getting harder and harder to find a
reason to keep walkin when there is nothing in sight, no one to walk
with and no one reason to open any more doors. Its a lonely journey
and Iv'e walked it alone for most of the journey.. The times I had
company, doors seemed more appealing, but they have yet to keep me.
I want so much to find the door that will lead me to a new hall that
will have something that keeps me excited about moving further.
There is never a clear end, but the way though the hall is the
adventure.
She then explained how she couldn’t really relate to people or emotions but related extremely well with animals. This was yet another similarity that made even more sense as she described her ideas. It reminded me of how I used to think when I would watch national geographic movies and animal planet. When I say obsession I mean it in the purest sense. I’ve never once been bored while watching any show about animals. I’m autistic! I think I’m autistic.. wow, that makes a lot of sense. So of course I stayed up all night reading about Autism and of course it made my entire life make sense and described me to a T. I told my Mom and she agreed that I had always had a lot of the symptoms. We both researched it a lot more but found the explanation of Autism pretty obscure. It’s obvious when someone has it when it’s severe, but as someone with it gets more functioning it gets harder to spot. After all, it’s just being shy or not relating well to others – or at all. After all my research I realized that we don’t know too much about it at all.
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