What is autism and what are the characteristics associated with it?

Transcript: Evelyn

Autistic Characteristics and Experiences

I like it. It’s like a little superpower. Or I think of it like, like, some superheroes have their superpowers they’re really good at and then they all have, like, a setback—like, ummm, they might be, like, driven by donuts or something. And mine is, like, noise or like all my senses just feel, like, heightened. I like the sameness of every day, like knowing each class is 50 minutes long except for lunch, which is 30, and band, which is an hour. And I like knowing that it’s not gonna change, ever; the whole day’s gonna be the same length; and that the bells are gonna ring the same times each day.

It feels like the world’s ending, umm, when there’s a change. Like if I know there’s probably gonna be, like, a change and I’ll, like, that day pack the exact same lunch a few days in a row to, like, add some sameness to my day. Or I’ll wear my favorite outfit and don’t care what it looks like. Or I’ll spend, like, hours in, umm, learning about my special interest, watching people play random songs on their trumpet, or watching deadly shark attacks.

I don’t sit with anybody at lunch. I, like, sit by myself in the back. And, umm, I don’t really have any friends at school. All my friends go to my church and are in, like, ninth grade—like the whole youth group. But I’ve struggled with, like, making friends, pretty much since kindergarten. And I, like, don’t really understand how to be a friend, like what they want to talk about. Like, I spend most of the time just trying to, like, I made up myself a friend the other day. And I wrote down a bunch of facts about them. Or I’ll, like, make up my own friends that aren’t real and just create them for myself, which isn’t, like, as much fun as a real friend. And I know people are, like, something like opposites connect or something. But for me, it’s like I need to be the, like, pretty much the same to connect. I need someone to be interested in one of my special interests and to not care if I talk their ear off.

Transcript: Evelyn

Self-Expression through Poetry

So one day we didn’t have, uhh, we had a sub in ELA, and I really don’t like subs because I don’t like change. And we had the sub and she was, like—so in ELA all the lights are off, but we have, like, fairy lights and she had the fairy lights on, half of them were blinking, like, every millisecond, half of them were blinking every two seconds, and then the lights were on—so it was really crazy. And I was just angry. So I wrote a poem when I was finished with my work. And it wasn’t an angry poem. It was just how I felt. And then my librarian—who’s the best—found the poem, and she read it and she’s, like, she started crying. So I thought I did something really bad, like I thought I made her cry. I felt really bad about making her cry. And she’s like, “No, it’s happy tears.” So then she told me that I should start writing more poems. So every day I’d write, like, three poems and then go show ’em to her. She’d keep ’em in a stack. Then she told me to turn ’em in on Canva so I can, like, print them out and then the library’s gonna be able to check it out now.

This one it’s called “Autism” and it’s, like, I’ve heard a lot of people described as robots with autism. But for me, I’m like, like, umm I guess, a very creative robot then. But it says:

Like, we’re not all mathematicians who act like robots. We’re also, like, creative poets who find their joy from words and love words, like learning their meanings. And we’re not all the same. Like, some of us might be interested in sharks and some of us might be interested in pigs, but we’re not all people who could solve the Rubik’s cube in under 12 seconds or find out very hard calculations using mind power.

Transcript: Joseph and LaTonya

Mom: How would you describe yourself? Joseph is what?

Joseph: Smart.

 Mom: Smart. What else?

Joseph: Kind.

Mom: Kind.

Joseph: You’re grateful.

Mom: You’re grateful.

Joseph: You wonderful.

Mom: You’re wonderful.

Joseph: Awesome.

Mom: And awesome. Good adjectives!

Joseph: You stupendous.

Mom: Stupendous. Alright, so that’s how he describes himself. Um, I would say Joseph is . . . he’s a hard worker. He starts a task—and I don’t know if it’s a pro or con—but he has to finish it before he can move on to something else. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work if you’re on, like, a time crunch and you’re like, “Hey, let’s go.” He wants to finish the task that he’s working on.

Um, he has great attention to detail. So before he left school today, his assistant principal was asking him, just naming off comedians, and he could name the movies that the comedian had been in. Um, he has a super large DVD collection at home. I thought, you know, when we clean up, we can just push them away. But he organizes them by production studio. It’s very different. So I think his attention to detail is one of his greatest assets.

He’s shown me, um, he’s very empathetic. Um, I think it comes from his attention to detail. So we could be across the mall and he could hear the cry of a baby from way far off, and he’s drawn into that. Whereas everyone else, because of the hustle and bustle of the day, we really don’t tune in to things that are not right up on us or are happening directly to us. He pays attention to what’s going on around him.