When he was 13, Naoki Higashida (who is autistic) wrote The Reason I Jump, a book about just this: his own internal experience, how his mind and memory work, how he processes information and emotions, and how he hopes to be received in a world very rarely built to for minds like his. How often, though, do we stop to consider the internal dialogue of someone diagnosed “on the spectrum”? How often do we pause and investigate their actual needs, wants and preferences when building a world in which we expect them to live? The general awareness of the condition typically centralizes around its external, observable factors we busy ourselves with how to “normalize” someone’s inability to communicate or socialize, how to integrate them into an abled society as smoothly as possible. So much misinformation has swirled through media and popular culture over the years that it can be confusing to know exactly what it is, where it comes from or how it presents in an individual. For those with a distant relationship to autism-they aren’t raising a child diagnosed with it, they don’t work in a capacity to serve someone with it-the condition can be a mysterious one.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |