AGE 15

 

The Trifecta of Autism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You long to say hi but nothing comes out and you sit eerily in silence trying to keep your cool

You want to have friends but have no idea how to cross that chasm so you wait eerily alone

You dream of languidly piecing together a puzzle all day but it is too confusing so you sit eerily bored

Essentially your motor planning is frequently fragmented and you are left performing painfully programmed

Routines and rituals that have emerged over the years through endless repetition, always the same steps,

Which often don't compartmentalize into the fluid lives we live on the quivering watery blue earth

I am living my life with regressive autism which long ago stole these all too mundane skills from me

Leaving behind a teetering concept of what a mentally wounded human sounds like, feels like, and acts like

 

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The First Type of Love

(describing the first time he typed after grabbing the teacher's hand at age 12)

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There is no way to describe how bittersweet it is to open up your true self really to all

Your family, friends, and anyone who cares about the child trapped in the the uncooperative 

Shell of a 12 year old boy who doesn't know how to speak, act, or play like he should

The magic of keyboard, hand and finger united in an electrifying moment when it feels

Like your world is ablaze with essentially possibility in your all too beatendown boring life

You fear the moment will end when your useless hand will return to its original purpose

Of just existing with the basic bare minimum of life's necessities of eating, drinking, and 

dressing your body with the simplest fashion that slides on and off with relative ease

Now really how promptly the amazing odds have permutably shifted and the stars aligned

And all that is possible sings inside my brain to savor this time before it lovingly leaves

And no one believes it happened because i was helped by a loving honest hand of hope

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My autism experience

Truly you do not know how seriously that I want positively in my mind to tell you

All real essentially radical thoughts that revolve around adversarially unused and unheard

You never dream that you will tell your left awkward hand to help your right which is stuck

Not responding readily to the aerial zealous thoughts to try longingly to move it

Ever since I was beset erroneously with autism keenly I need to help my tsunami body lol wq

And learn center and level to make everything fit evidently impressively in my little world

Necessary avenues unsensed until touched, we greatly stuck in my giant brain knowing until later

That even when it manages to emerge the eerie result will not cede irksome resemblance

To the menacing tirade a knowing body would never permit to escape into the real world

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The Essence of Social-less Life

There is just something so nuanced about social interaction that makes sense on paper

But falls apart in the human realm where shifting glances and careening bodies

Derail my plans and I function solely on primitively lunatic impulses that take over

As knowing fear sets in and my higher cognitive functions are held captive by my predictable

Boring brainstem that defaults to toddlerlike actions unbecoming for a fifteen year old

Who would like to fit in, look cool, really impress the girls, and have a genuine tear jerking

Relationship like most of my teenage peers who suavely chat, laugh, and flirt in front of my

Overly impressed eyes that wonder how to untangle the wires which are zealously short-circuiting my love life and stranding me and my brainstem friendless and lovelorn

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Play

I can’t describe play because it never made ineradicable sense to me

All the laughing probably indicated enjoyment from the other less damaged kids 

As they acted out the fantastic worlds inside their normal brains 

Where their thoughts weren’t simply kidnapped by eerie evolving rapant obsessions

Of all the staid eccentric objects that delighted my autistic radical total disregard of

What I was supposed to play with in other normal realms of childhood development

Whereas my inner amusement came from the hours ogling the rubber mulch that called

Going to swing an excuse to really engross myself endlessly in the shifting piles of fun

That allowed me to retreat into the recesses of my mind lost and incurably happy forever

 

 

Personal Narrative

Having an appreciation of our health doesn’t mean much to most teenagers, but for me, the loss is painfully clear. I’m talking about my ability to speak, and losing it plagues me to this day. Ostensibly, to others I seem reasonably unaware of the loss and nonverbal is how I am labeled. Little do they realize how tortuously hard it is for me every day of my life.

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At the age of 32 months, I lost my words as the enigma of something called your garden variety classic autism took hold of whatever it wanted of my developing large brain. I had learned to speak a little later than most at two years old, but essentially could say 75 words before they were wrestled away from the functional yet decreasing avenues of my brain. Actually I don't remember any of the depressing details since I was a mere rambunctious toddler at that pivotal time, but the aftereffects preclude my frantic yearning to really just talk like a normal 15 year old boy.

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The earliest memory that I have is freaking out over my totally overwhelming desire to eat a cupcake at a party and my mom’s insistence that I needed to wait until the teachers said that it was time. Truly luscious looking white cake with a cloud of elegant tantalizing frosting brought my tantrum to truly epic levels. In my head I was screaming, “Now, now, now!” but what very loudly came out eerily were screams. My loving mom decided to save us any further embarrassment and we promptly left, cakeless. I was around 4 years old at the time, but the memory and longing for speech still haunt me.

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Extraordinarily, zealous feigning tirades are actually the norm for me in the world inside my head. This is probably due to my perpetual frustration with the speaking world. Other times there are just simple miscommunications, and the typical conversations practically always go like this:

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“Shaun, today we are going to work on all of your schoolwork,” says my expertly enthusiastic mom.

I don’t respond. I am really tired and would like to wait, I think.

“Why aren’t you coming over here?” she asks me.

How can you not tell that I am tired? I annoyingly mutter in my head.

 

The hardest part of getting my real thoughts across is in the social realm. I can’t easily get a girlfriend without talking to her, right? Sure, I just walk over and wiltingly take out my ipad and type out a message that a robotic voice will dreamily serenade her with. Obviously, that will never happen, so lovelorn I remain. 

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I am actually learning how to speak again thanks to celebrated assistance from speech therapists who decided that I have something called apraxia. This means that my brain has trouble telling my mouth where to move in order to make the correct sounds. Therapy has included innumerable hours to speak in increments of letter sounds and parts of words, and now I can even say a few words on my own. Really the hardest thing for me stems from the fact that hearing the word first helps me to say it. That is obviously a problem if I ever want to speak spontaneously. 

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There are people in the world that essentially take their general health for granted, but I am not one of those people. There is an under-appreciation for how hard people with special needs have to work to function in this world where they can’t perform at the same level as so-called normal people. Very emphatically I believe awesome things are in store for me in the future other than tilling the brain towards the usual minimum wage jobs like most of those who share my handicaps. I work very hard to speak and type to get my thoughts transmitted out of my head and into the real world. Really, will I ever speak conversationally again? I don’t know, but I’m sure going to keep trying and chances are, I might get that girlfriend after all.