7:15pm January 3, 2012

“Do NTs ever get to have this experience? Where you just wake up one day and are good at something you could never do before?”

A friend of mine.

After I showed her my “Loud Hands” painting, and said how shocked I was that I got it right since I’ve never been able to successfully draw hands that I can remember.

This is a recurring Thing with me. I’ll either completely suck at something, stop even trying, wait years, and wake up anywhere from decent to great at it. Or I’ll never have done something before and then wake up good at it. The latter being how baking happened for me. I have no control at all over this – otherwise I’d be a really good cellist and poet and would always find words for stuff – but when it happens it’s cool.

Similar things have happened to other autistic people I know and according to one researcher I talked to it’s a common feature of autistic learning. I assume there is actual work being done all that time of not doing the thing – it’s just invisible stuff like the internal ordering of perception and movement, so the result looks sudden because nobody can see all the work going into it for years.

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