On autism and truly seeing
The art of noticing through an autistic person's eyes.
Chaim Potok would call it “seeing between the blinks.”
He says an artist does this. And God.
I believe my nephew does, too. He sees what the rest of the world misses.
It started with a strawberry. One day we were on the grass in our front yard and my nephew told me he hated strawberries. Not just that he didn’t like them, but he hated being in the same room as a strawberry. He hated how it felt, all bumpy and kind of fuzzy, he hated how it tasted, how it smelled. And I thought, I don’t know that I’ve ever cared about any fruit enough to not want to be in the same room as it.
I realize there’s a wide range of neurodiversity, and that autism is only one of many types, and that autism itself has a wide spectrum, but from what I’ve seen, the ones who truly see, who truly hear (Isaiah 6:9), can be found within this range.
A deep knowing
My nephew has always seen, and always heard. We just weren’t always paying attention. Noises are big and whole for him, and he feels them deep. Beauty strikes him hard, to his core, and he’ll tell his mom twenty times a day how beautiful she is to him. He will look at someone, study them like a painting, then pick out their most hidden quality and show them. “You are so kind,” or, “I love how you are gentle,” and he will be very clear when he doesn’t like things too. But you never guess with him. You always know, and that’s rare.
He ingests books, their words traveling deep as he becomes one with the pages. It’s like pulling out something lodged deep in the hose of a vacuum cleaner, this pulling him out of a book. He takes time to know things, cover to cover.
He believes deep and takes things to heart. It’s a harsh world for people like my nephew, but we need to pay attention to them. Because they can teach us how a strawberry feels and smells. They don’t just taste and move on. They seek, and behold. They keep their eyelids propped open until all the seeing and all the perceiving makes them realize how blind the rest of the world is and they kind of shut down for a while.
That’s when we need to pay attention. Those of us who are autistic are playing a song the rest of us never imagined possible and the only way to let the light in is to listen.
