Tag Archives: communicate

Learning to Write

As I had written in a previous post, I believed that once Nigel learned to write, that would “liberate him to no end.” Last night I came across a description I wrote seven years ago about Nigel learning to write:

Near the end of the year, Nigel began printing his name. Just a month before, he refused to hold any writing utensil, as he had been doing since age three when we first tried to get him to scribble; he seemed to have an aversion to holding pens, pencils, crayons, and markers. But now, at six, he has begun. Being a bit of a perfectionist, he gets very frustrated with himself because he has trouble making the letter G, both big and small. But he perseveres, and now, just three months later, he writes full sentences, short “letters,” even. (“Dear mom, Mom get string cheese, Love mom” – I’ve tried to tell him that he needs to say “Love, Nigel” on his letters so that the people know they’re from him, but I guess he thinks, Why wouldn’t you know who it was from? I just handed this to you, so you must know it’s from ME.)

He has also started drawing for the first time, which is fabulous. The first things he drew were little cars with smiley faces. I will always remember how happy I was when he started writing and drawing. The first night he did, he came to me and asked me to “write a letter to Tigger.” I told him I was washing dishes and I would do it as soon as I was finished. A few minutes later, I turned around and there he was at the kitchen table, hunched over a piece of paper, writing diligently, struggling with the Gs in Tigger. I looked over his shoulder just as he was finishing, and saw that he had written, “Dear Tigger, jumps note, Piglet and Pooh.” He put it in an envelope because he wanted to mail it to him.

Since then, Nigel has been writing and drawing every day. He went through a sign-making phase. He put up signs all over the house saying things like, “Warning: Do not let mom out of the house” on the back door, “No children allowed” inside the front door of Aaron’s [his father’s] house, “No smoking,” on Aaron’s closet door, “Reward: Do not let dogs out of the cage” on his and Aidan’s bedroom door, and several “Missing: Stuart Little” signs all over the living room when he couldn’t find his Stuart Little video. Currently, he has been drawing traffic lights and houses. He also recently drew an adult male lion and a lion cub, and when I asked him who it was, he said, “Simba and his dad.” I initially thought that Nigel’s writing and drawing would be a way to communicate his needs, but it has revealed more about his emotions and priorities than I ever would have imagined.

Extroverted Autism

By nature, or by definition, most autistic people tend to be introverts. It just goes with the territory. But what happens when that is not the case? Is it even possible that a person can be autistic but also be extroverted? How? And wouldn’t that be the ultimate cruel irony? Someone who desperately wants to be social having a developmental issue that makes the very thing he wants be nearly insurmountable to achieve.

I truly believe that Nigel has struggled with this since toddlerhood, possibly even infancy. Long before he was verbal he would try, always unsuccessfully, to interact with his peers. He couldn’t talk, so he went up to them and laughed, only to be misinterpreted with disastrous results. He would try to interact with adults by going up to them and saying their license plate number. He wanted so badly to connect with people, but they were people in a world from which he so desperately needed relief. He couldn’t go into public places because he did not know how to filter all the sounds that bombarded him and caused him such agony. His sensory issues were so extreme that they – and his social issues – prevented him from being true to his social nature and his desire to be a social person.

So, Nigel evolved. He had to if he wanted to interact with people. Various therapies had a lot to do with his success, but I firmly believe that his drive to be social in the first place is what motivated him to keep trying to connect and caused him to respond to the therapy as well as he did. He somehow, over several years’ time, learned to filter out the sounds that prevented him from going into stores, restaurants, public restrooms, etc. He stretched his cognitive skills to not only repeat lines from videos he’d seen, but then he used certain lines and fit them within the context of a situation in order to express himself verbally. He wanted to communicate. It just took him several years to learn how.

It is truly remarkable what he has achieved. I have a friend with adult ADHD, and he has said that on some level he can identify with Nigel because of his own experience with learning to regulate certain aspects of his behavior. It took a lot of time, patience, awareness, and hard work, but the rewards have been well worth it.

I am an introvert. Had I been autistic, I probably would not have talked. I don’t think I would have cared. I enjoy being in my own head so much as it is that, were I autistic, I would most likely love to stay there. I certainly don’t mean to simplify the complexities of autism and the reasons why some autistic individuals learn to talk and some don’t. Nor do I mean to propose that some autistic people just choose not to talk because they are introverts.  But I can’t help but think that the way we are socially wired – introvert or extrovert – has to affect autistic individuals as well. I don’t think that autism would cancel out a person’s natural inclination to be social, if that’s in his or her personality. I see it every day with my son. He just has to try a lot harder than most people.