3:16pm September 9, 2014

“

I wanted to meet the other autistic people I’d been told about and was surprised to find out that they were few and far between, scattered across the country and across the world. I was in an even smaller category. I had become “high functioning.” Nevertheless, I needed to meet others. I could only know where I belonged in relation to others when I had met the other side of society. I’d met a world of so-called “normal” people — the people I’d aspired to be like. Now it was time to meet people still trapped in the place I had come from and in some ways still was in.

Kath was a solid personality with whom I felt relatively secure. Her voice was rather flat and even, and the pace with which she spoke was easy to follow. She had long straight gray hair and darting eyes, and though I felt welcomed by her I didn’t feel smothered by her involvement.

She had a son my age, and her son was autistic. When I met him, he was running his hands through colored beads. I didn’t want him to say hello or ask me how I was. Those were words reserved for those who wanted to move in “the world,” and her son Perry certainly didn’t.

I sat on the floor nearby and took out a handful of colored buttons and glass fruit. I sorted them into groups, put my hand out to where Perry was playing with his beads, and without a glance and without a word, I dropped them. Perry caught them and did the same back. I remembered my first version of relating — mirrors — but this time there would be no one to say that my version of relating wasn’t good enough. This went on for awhile and we began to modify the game. I had a bell that I jingled to myself and dropped it for him to catch. Like before, Perry repeated my gesture but added another noise to the jingle. I mirrored him. we began following one another about the place in turn, ringing the bell and giving it over as the game became more and more one between two people than one where we were merely incidental to the game we made the objects play.

I sat back on the floor, lining up the buttons in categories. Perry approached, picked up a button here and there and added them to my rows where they belonged. Without looking at him, I knew what he was saying. These “games” had always belonged to me. Now I saw that these “games” belonged to autistic people.

I hadn’t noticed that Kath had entered the room. She was standing there silently as Perry came over to where I was, laid himself out, face down, on the floor in front of me, arms pulled up tightly against his sides as he shook with anxiety.

“Look at me,” I said, reading the same action I’d seen so many times in myself. “Look. I’m daring to be touched.” I had looked straight at Perry lying there as I had said it, tears rolling down my face as I read his behavior as one might a book. I had the tremors from head to toes and wished the Welshman was there to understand himself as I had come to understand myself.

I turned to see Kath crying.

“I never thought he had any language,” she said. “Now I see he does, I just don’t know how to speak it.” She said that she had never seen him look so “normal.” I had never felt I’d understood another individual so well. “We think it is we who have to teach autistic people,” Kath said. “Now I see it is us who have so much to learn from them.“

”

Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere, p. 193-194

This is part of my collection of quotes about what happens when autistic people get together and speak our own languages with each other.  I have a binder somewhere with lots more of these quotes.  I wish I knew where they all were, because this is something very important.  Things like this happen all the time when autistic people – who click well with each other – meet for the first time and magic happens.

Also I played all these games when I was a kid too, and didn’t know they were an autistic thing.

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