Susan Senator

Ha! I don’t mean what you are thinking. It sure ain’t Natty’s voice I’m talking about. It’s the Voice of Recovery. Those who are hell-bent on forcing the autism out of their children as if they were exorcists. They chase the cure and stop living. Their entire life’s configuration has become about something being wrong, if-we-can-just-fix-this-life-will-be-okay-once-more. But it isn’t. Life is really messy and unpredictable, and we forget that. Life is like my big weird house, you think you’re buying a Victorian dreamhome and you end up running around worrying about what’s going to break next. Or you enjoy its quirky beauty and keep decorating anyway. In the end, Camus was right. The point was not curing; it was about helping. You have to keep making the life you are handed the best it can be, despite the fact that rats may be dying all around you. Despite the hounds of hell being unleashed now and then.

My own personal demons are about my own career as a writer, as someone who started writing an autism book because I wanted to educate the world about a family like ours and basically tell everyone that it’s not what you think. Don’t pity us. We are fine. Our lives can be very hard because of things that happen with Nat, but also because of things that happen with any of us. If it’s not wiring, it’s plumbing. But it seems like the general public doesn’t buy that. They want miracle stories, they want tragedy and pathos. And they want magic bullets.

Sure enough, every time I look at the Amazon rankings, Let Me Hear Your Voice is always way up there, way ahead of mine. Recovery autism books always do so well. My philosophy is not about recovery, unless you have the flu or some such illness. Autism is not an illness. Autism is not a disease.

In fact, autism can be a gift. This truly amazing item has already traveled around the blogosphere, but it is truly worth another look. Amanda Baggs has put together a fantastic short video on her way of experiencing the world as an autistic person. I watched this, the first part, with her humming and I suppose “stimming” on things, and I found myself feeling at first like, Oh my God this is just like Nat, and I hear this all the time so I don’t really need to watch it. Yes, that is what I thought. I kind of turned away, feeling a little sad and tired of autism.

And then she starts typing, explaining in my language what she experiences as she connects all of her senses with her environment, something I am pretty much unable to do. She also raises the issue that her way of being probably only elicited sad or other negative feelings until you learn that she can use our language, and then suddenly she is a person. Wow. My biases were laid bare. I still have them, I realized, and this video helped me see that. And of course, it makes me wonder about all the amazing things and feelings Nat gets to experience that I do not.

I hear his voice all the time. Now maybe I’ll hear the happiness in it.