Many times as a nonspeaking autistic I was angry because I wasn’t like everyone else. Time has enabled me to be proud of my autistic self. Yes, life has its challenges, but doesn’t everyone else have challenges, too?
The autistic boy wanted to be like everyone else. He wanted to be able to talk to his friends, drive a car, and have people realize how smart he was. He was envious of others because things seemed so easy for everyone else but was challenging for him. “Why is my life so hard?” he lamented. “I want to be like the others. Their lives are so easy.” The autistic boy cried himself to sleep that night.
God felt bad for the boy that night, so while he slept he erased the boy’s autism. The next day, the boy woke up and realized autism had disappeared. The boy could talk to his friends, drive a car, and people now thought he was smart. “This is awesome” thought the boy. “Life is going to be great now.”
But autism and the boy began to miss each other terribly. The boy missed his keen senses and his unbelievable abilities. And he especially missed his synesthesia when music played. The boy realized that life is what you make of it. So he prayed to God to be changed back to his former autistic self.
The next day autism had returned and the boy was happy! Once autism had been a burden, and now it was a blessing. So the boy learned how to ride a bike instead of a car. He learned to communicate using a letterboard and could finally talk to his friends. And because of the letterboard, people now saw how smart he was. The boy realized that life’s challenges are what spurs you to make your life better.
From Gregory’s blog, The Autistic Mind Finally Speaks
- The Autistic Boy Who Became Typical - October 1, 2021
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Were I to ever wish for the complete eradication of the autism within me, I most actually lose more than I could potentially gain as a result of become a full-fledged neuro-typical. Talk about making a ‘Faustian bargain’ on my part. As a matter of fact, a high-caliber autistic author named John Elder Robison chronicled this unfortuante real-life experience in a 2016 book aptly titled ‘Switched On.’ ‘Switched On’ chronicles Robison’s participation in a 2008 Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation study under Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard University. Robison claimed that TMS put his brain into a meditative state. Robison wrote that he felt more emotionally attuned to his environment and had an easier time reading people’s emotions. However, the effects eventually faded. Additionally, the treatment caused Robison to feel more sensitive to his wife’s depression and to a subsequent divorce.
I meant ‘unfortunate’ AND NOT ‘unfortuante.’