Posted by
Michael on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 7:58:42 PM
Not just autism, but Asperger's syndrome, which I have been diagnosed with for several years, in particular.
Please read it. Not all of the experiences that Tim Page describes fit myself, but many of them do:
My second-grade teacher never liked me much, and
one assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red
pencil with which she scrawled “See me!” broke through the lined paper.
Our class had been asked to write about a recent field trip, and, as
was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things:
Well,
we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville,
Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church
that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published
by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour
of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School
Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then
on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to
our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site.
The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went
through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few days
later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.
It is an unconventional
but hardly unobservant report. In truth, I didn’t care one bit about
Boston on that spring day in 1963. Instead, I wanted to learn about
Warrenville, a village a few miles northeast of the town of Mansfield,
Connecticut, where we were then living. I had memorized the map of
Mansfield, and knew all the school-bus routes by heart—a litany I would
sing out to anybody I could corner. But Warrenville was in the town of
Ashford, for which I had no guide, and I remember the blissful sense of
resolution I felt when I certified that Route 44A crossed Route 89 in
the town center, for I had long hypothesized that they might meet
there. Of such joys and pains was my childhood composed.
I received a grade of “Unsatisfactory” in Social Development from
the Mansfield Public Schools that year. I did not work to the best of
my ability, did not show neatness and care in assignments, did not
coöperate with the group, and did not exercise self-control. About the
only positive assessment was that I worked well independently. Of
course: then as now, it was all that I could do.
In the years since the phrase became a cliché, I have received any
number of compliments for my supposed ability to “think outside the
box.” Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what
these “boxes” were—why they were there, why other people regarded them
as important, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely
within and without them. My efforts have been only partly successful:
after fifty-two years, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my
life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside,
but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.