11:20pm January 22, 2015

My family used to go camping a lot around this lake called Square Lake.

It was named that for self-evident reasons: It was centered around a tiny green pond that was square. (In drought years, it was closer to a puddle than a pond.) We ate fish from the lake seasoned by wild onions we found around the lake. I was usually the best fisher, not because I knew any technique better than anyone else. It was just that I liked doing repetitive things, never got bored, and there’s little more repetitive than fly fishing.

Anyway, my brother had this ability that to this day I almost consider magical. I didn’t have it. I still don’t. I have friends that have it. I still don’t. I wish I had it. It’s a beautiful blend of imagination and reality, and it sucks me into someone else’s imagination. For instance, my brother could turn our sleeping bag into a space ship. When I was alone, I tried, but I never could. My mother let me use an old refrigerator box as a spaceship. I loved decorating it. Then I sat a chair inside it and used it to read in. I couldn’t imagine space voyages into it.

My brother came by one day and saw me reading. He picked up the book. “What is this book? About Dying? Wouldn’t it be better to have star charts and navigational aids if this is really going to be a space ship?“

I hate to paint myself as the stereotypical autistic person, without imagination. But real imaginative play was very difficult for me. I loved playing with my brother because he could immerse me in his richly imaginative worlds. And they could be quite elaborate. But whenever I pulled out the physical props he used and tried to make that magic happen, it wouldn’t. It needed something about Jeremy’s mind, to make it go, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what. Until I hit puberty(1), my imaginative play was limited to my more cognitive special interests(2), namely cats and astronomy. I could get other kids to play “cat” with me sometimes, but I could never get them to line up and spin around and orbit each other, not for more than a minute before they’d get bored and wander off. Especially if I was grabbing them and leading them around in circles without explanation.

Anyway, the thing that my brother could do went beyond just imaginative play. It was his ability to envision an entire past and future for the thing we were doing.

Back to Square Lake:

My brother invented a sport which involved scooting down rocky hills on your butt, using your hands to stabilize you. The rocks were sharp and pointy, so we’d put socks over our hands to protect them.

Here’s the part that struck me then, as now, as ingenious:

My brother said “Someday this is going to become a real, competitive sport. And they will have custom-made gloves to protect people’s hands. But the gloves will still be known as ‘socks’, because that’s what we originally started with. But most people won’t remember why they’re called socks, they’ll just call ‘em that because that’s what everyone else calls them.”

And that’s the magical thing he could do. I know some autistic people who do it really well, too. I can’t do it. Still. But it’s beautiful to watch people who can.

TL;DR: I was never much good at imaginative play in the typical sense of the word. I required another person to guide me along. But what truly amazes me are people who go beyond just imaginative play, and into the realm of creating entire past or future histories for the story they’re telling or the game they’re playing. That never fails to hold me in complete awe.

Footnotes below cut:

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(1) At which point, for some reason, I suddenly gained a fantastic amount of ability to do imaginative play. And the way I did it was, from child development books, much like a toddler would. Sometimes having a developmental disability isn’t about doing the same things but slower, it’s about doing things in a completely different order than usual.

(2) I notice that in literature about autism, two kinds of special interests get lumped together when they’re very different experiences. One set of special interests is intellectual, the other is sensory. I started off with purely sensory special interests, and gradually acquired some intellectual ones too, but without losing the sensory ones, and also gaining more sensory ones as time went by. My first intellectual special interest that I can remember is cats. My second was astronomy. Even between those two categories was a leap in the kind of cognition required, because cats was just about being cats,but astronomy was about studying the subject. So I think the line between sensory and cognitive special interests is blurry.