sigh
chant mistress
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2001
- Posts
- 10,248
April is National Autism Awareness Month
Go to a cafeteria at lunchtime in any grade school in America. Hear the noise, the laughing voices, the conversations flowing all around. Focus on one voice, then another, and laugh at the jokes of your tablemates, or at the cavorting of the class clown two tables over.
But then stop trying to focus and open your senses fully and let yourself drift. Don’t follow any particular conversation but listen instead to the cacophony as a whole, without the mental filters we automatically use to deaden background noises, which allow us to focus on just one item of interest at a time. Hear a snatch of conversation here, half a word there. A laugh cuts through from across the room and the buzz from the fluorescent lights waxes and wanes its electric pulse.
From outside a horn honks but then the monitor claps for attention and barks out instructions but you don’t hear them because someone is sniffling across from you as someone else closes her lunchbox with a click. And suddenly everyone is rising with a babble of incomprehensible noise, heading out to wherever you’ve all been sent but you don’t know what’s happening. You missed what you’ve been told to do and stay sitting instead, frantically clinging to the last thing you were doing that you knew was right.
Anxiety rises, your heart rate increases, the babble grows louder and you become more and more lost with each passing second. The monitor comes to you because once again you’re refusing to do what you’ve been told and her instructions bite with harshness but they’re just a part of the jumble you’ve found yourself spinning through.
There’s no way out of this now. The meltdown is coming.
Welcome to the world of Autism.
May (oops, I mean APRIL!) is National Autism Awareness Month.
http://www.autism-society.org/site/PageServer
Go to a cafeteria at lunchtime in any grade school in America. Hear the noise, the laughing voices, the conversations flowing all around. Focus on one voice, then another, and laugh at the jokes of your tablemates, or at the cavorting of the class clown two tables over.
But then stop trying to focus and open your senses fully and let yourself drift. Don’t follow any particular conversation but listen instead to the cacophony as a whole, without the mental filters we automatically use to deaden background noises, which allow us to focus on just one item of interest at a time. Hear a snatch of conversation here, half a word there. A laugh cuts through from across the room and the buzz from the fluorescent lights waxes and wanes its electric pulse.
From outside a horn honks but then the monitor claps for attention and barks out instructions but you don’t hear them because someone is sniffling across from you as someone else closes her lunchbox with a click. And suddenly everyone is rising with a babble of incomprehensible noise, heading out to wherever you’ve all been sent but you don’t know what’s happening. You missed what you’ve been told to do and stay sitting instead, frantically clinging to the last thing you were doing that you knew was right.
Anxiety rises, your heart rate increases, the babble grows louder and you become more and more lost with each passing second. The monitor comes to you because once again you’re refusing to do what you’ve been told and her instructions bite with harshness but they’re just a part of the jumble you’ve found yourself spinning through.
There’s no way out of this now. The meltdown is coming.
Welcome to the world of Autism.
May (oops, I mean APRIL!) is National Autism Awareness Month.
http://www.autism-society.org/site/PageServer
Last edited:
for sigh and aaron you both have such a wonderful bond
