Trapped

I am by no means an expert on understanding autism, and what it must be like to live with autism, but I wanted to share an experience I had 35 years ago while working at Perkins School for the Blind and how it might be relevant to what I am doing now. I was working at Perkins as a childcare worker on a work/study program from college. I had never worked with children with special needs and the only training I received was basic sign language. One of the children I took care of was completely deaf and blind. Unless you were able to use finger spelling and actually spell into his hand he had no way of understanding what you were trying to communicate. I learned quickly how to do this and it was truly remarkable to communicate this way. However, very few people are able to finger spell into someone's hand and it was hard for me to imagine what his world must have felt like. Recently I watched a video piece about a young woman with autism who learned how to communicate via a computer. What came out of her was truly astonishing. She wrote about what her body felt like and wished that her dad could spend one day inside her body to understand how difficult and painful it was at times just to get through the day. This reminded me of all the bad movies we have seen where the main character assumes that someone doesn't speak english and proceeds to make all kinds of derogatory comments about their intelligence. I think sometimes we tend to make assumptions about intelligence based on their ability to communicate. It also reminded me of when my father was dying and had slipped into a coma. The doctor and hospice people told us that we should continue to speak to him because there was the possibility that he could still hear us. I feel this same way with children who are non-verbal. We should make every effort to communicate by any means possible.