Susan Senator

“Even God had some autistic moments which is why all the planets spin.”
This enchanting thought came to me from a young reader who works as a peer model to autistic children. Her grandfather came to a reading of mine and gave her my book. This insight of hers took my breath away, and made me think more about autism as a way of being, rather than a disorder.

At each of my events, someone asks whether Nat knows that he is “different.” I think that people also wonder if he is unhappy, if he understands his difference enough to make him unhappy. It is still such an alien concept for people to think that autism is not equal to less than. It is endemic to the culture we live in that autism is akin to a disease, a disgusting malady that steals children and turns them into monsters. I have been guilty of those exact thoughts, during the time that I was first coming to terms with Nat’s autism. I think the monster part is because manifestations of autism, particularly of an autistic person who is untrained or misunderstood, can be so difficult for others to live with. Nat’s aggressive behaviors and his destructive tendencies made us feel as if we were living under siege, in a war zone. It is still difficult for me always to remember that Nat’s mind goes extremely quickly to blind rage and old behavior patterns when the triggers occur. But come to think of it, this is true for me, too. The minute a friend, INF, for example, goes AWOL and is out of communication, I go right back to little-girl mode, insecurity, sulking, despair, just like in my childhood. In those moments I truly believe that I have been abandoned. It takes a lot of thinking and diversion to bring myself back to my center. That’s just how I’m wired.

Same goes for Nat, then. He snaps right back into “Must pinch that stupid person” mode.

But recently, at two different events, people in the audience insisted that our autistic kids must really be unhappy because they know they are different. They cited examples of higher functioning autistics who expressed unhappiness at their difference. I was at a loss as to what to say. My instinct was to point out that anyone can feel unhappy if there is something in their environment, whether inside or out, that is not nurturing them. I am not autistic; I would be considered a well-adjusted, high-functioning human by most standards. Yet I have so many moments in a day during which I feel unhappy with myself because I am so different from those around me. Maybe I’m different from Nat in that I have enough language to talk myself through these moments.

But maybe he is better off than me because he does not have the language to understand what others around him may or may not think of him. Maybe all he has is an occasional frisson, a feeling of discomfort, a shimmer of unhappiness that remains unexplained — and then it passes and he’s fine.

If that is the case, then I envy Nat his autism.