The following post is the first in a series of excerpts adapted from by Katherine Uher.
After school, when the world was finally still, my mind would run wild letting out all the chaos it had collected. It was like a tape recorder replaying audio from throughout the day. I would hear my name being said over and over again in the voices of my teacher, my mother, the kids at school. Sometimes I would hear repeated snippets of conversations. As I finger-painted in the kitchen, words would replay. As I shaped my hair into a Mohawk at bath time, words would replay. I would bounce, click my tongue or strum my fingers to release all the energy more quickly. For story time, the words took a pause, my mind went quiet and my body relaxed. My mother was an excellent reader, she was good at inflecting her tone, which made the stories easy to follow.
Movies and books gave me a clarity that I missed and longed for in the real world, where there was always irrelevant information to contend with. In life I could rarely anticipate what others would think or feel, and do, in different situations. This is called “mind blindness” or a lack of “Theory of Mind”. A common misconception about people on the autistic spectrum is that we have no Theory of Mind (the ability to theorise about what is happening in someone else’s mind) in truth, this is simply another area of delayed development for most of us. I struggled to connect the behaviours and emotions of others to their cause, or imagine how something I did or said might effect someone else. Upsetting people was like running into a wall, I ran into walls a lot, which made interacting with others very stressful for me. Being read to took me out of the equation and, with the help of a clear context and foreshadowing, I could guess at the internal experiences of many of the characters. Being read to gave me a feeling of clarity and containment, of safety that I didn't feel anywhere else.
Listening to my mother also taught me something about how people were meant to emote when they spoke. Through the hours my mother spent reading to me, I developed a great vocabulary and a slightly artificial style of speaking. Lots of adults found it charming when this three-foot-tall child with pigtails and a gap between her two front teeth started theatrically mimicking the hand gestures and speech styles of fictitious, and more mature, characters. But what adults found charming my peers simply found odd; they would laugh and run off in a group, leaving me alone to myself. Which brings me to the other thing I liked about stories: the protagonist was usually a little odd. During the school day I soon started to use books as a safe place to escape into. Even when I couldn't hold one in my hand, or have a story immediately read to me, I would be able to hear the stories in my head. I started to narrate my life as I went through my day. My internal narrator would talk about what was going on around me, making the world safe, isolating the important details for me. My narrator was a guide focusing me on just one thing from each moment to the next.
In the mornings I'd arrive at school early with my mother, who taught down the hall from my first grade classroom. We'd leave our coats on while she switched on the radiator in her classroom and unpacked her hold-all. The room was large and crammed with art supplies, toys and books, most of which she had bought with her own money at garage sales. Behind the softening effect of my mother's efforts was a plain room which hinted at the poor neighbourhood we were in. The walls were painted concrete blocks, most of which were hidden by the many educational posters and displays of children's art. The windows had chicken wire embedded in the glass. The floor consisted of hard grey tiles covered in rugs, beanbags and pillows. Morning light streamed into the room between artwork on the windows, illuminating every speck of dust in slanting streaks. My senses could be both a gift, allowing me to pick up on details others had missed, or a hindrance, pulling my attention away from what I was meant to be focused on.
At eight a.m. the bell would ring and I would head into the crowded hallways to narrate my way to class. The world seemed so busy and chaotic for me that making simple statements such as “... and Kate finally reached her classroom” helped to keep me focused on what I was meant to be doing. Because really Kate didn't just reach her classroom. A mosquito buzzed near the florescent lights, while older kids rough-housed at the far end of the hall, a male teacher with an auburn moustache and shiny loud cowboy boots told them they needed to get to class, some girl with a ponytail so tight it would squeak if you touched it walked by, and a woman wearing a nauseating perfume and a big chunky necklace smiled at the man with the moustache, and Kate finally reached her classroom.
For the next instalment of my story read: Not Allowed to Not Cope