Imagine, for a while, that you’re a mathematician.
This is difficult for me to do, math being my nemesis throughout my school years, but you, I assume, are smarter than me, that way...
So, you’re a mathematician.
Long, cryptic formulae written with a healthy mix of numbers and Greek squiggles make immediate and perfect sense to you. At a glance, you can see the underlying algebra in tile patterns and pine cones. You speak the language, spouting fancy terms like ‘cosecant phi’ and ‘radius of convergence’ and, you know, ‘the square on the hypotenuse’ or whatever.
This is not just your area of expertise, mind you...This is how your brain makes sense of the world.
So far, so good?
Now, abruptly (and diabolically), I pick you up and drop you in the middle of a bunch of, say...ballet dancers.
Whoa.
They’re all wearing these peculiar tights and hopping about while turning circles in the air and saying all this French stuff like brise and temps leve and sur le cou-de-pied , what-have-you...
And you with your plaid jacket and pencils and notebooks are so impossibly out of your element, so irreparably different... best case scenario- they ignore you. More likely, you are actually ridiculed.
We humans do not take kindly to those different from us.
Take heart, dear mathematician. Your ordeal is temporary. You can always just walk out and catch the first bus back to your mathematician friends, and go back to socializing over talk of indefinite integrals and asymptotes.
Unless...
... you’re the only mathematician...on the planet ... and it’s a planet that is just one huge ballet company!
You’re born into it, you can’t learn ballet and, you can’t leave. Where would you fit in? How many friends would you have? Would you have a job? Find love? Be valued? The thing that sets you apart has no significance on this planet... People will forever be trying to get you to do plies and fouettes as a precondition to acknowledging you as a person.
Welcome to the mind of an autistic person.
Granted, this is a bit of an extreme example.
But being different is an experience most of us tend to avoid, naturally organizing ourselves into cliques and clubs, gangs and groups, families, factions, races and nations, just so that we have around us, others we have something in common with.
This is how the human world is structured, tied together with types of social interactions that we take for granted. And this world does not quite fit people with Autism.
When you first meet her, you’ll probably see her as a typical 9-year old, probably with a doll under her arm, doodling on paper, humming a song to herself.
In all probability, she won’t acknowledge you, averting her gaze after a fleeting look, and you’ll think... okay, she’s just shy. Some children are.
You’ll say ‘Hello, Shravya’, and that’s when you’ll get the first indication that she’s different. Because in the rare event that she says anything at all, it’ll be ‘Hello, Shravya’ right back at you.
Shravya is autistic, and one of her symptoms is echolalia- a tendency to repeat back words and phrases said to her. Other than that, she talks very little. Using a language as a method of interaction, something blatantly obvious for most of us, is something her brain is just not wired to do. For her, trying to talk is like a mathematician trying to do pirouettes.
And this isn’t a rare, backwater condition. An estimated million people with Autism are added to the population every year.
No apparent causes.
No known cure.
Most will require care and support throughout their lives.
A few weeks from today, I will be running the 121st Boston Marathon. It’s my privilege to be able to use this opportunity to try to raise funds for Action for Autism (www.autism-india.org), a Delhi based non-profit that is deeply involved in autism related research, care, education and support. I hope some of those who read this will find it in their hearts to open up and donate generously to them. At the very least, please spread the word.
Donate at https://milaap.org/fundraisers/twentysixmilesforautism or http://www.globalgiving.org/fundraisers/26-miles-for-autism/
