Confusion is a state of mind

Last Friday Annabel went for her appointment with the mental health worker which we thought was going to set the official diagnosis in motion. She, the worker, told us rather regretfully that we had to approach Asperger's East Anglia directly and that the appointment was a bit of a waste of time. As you can imagine, this was Annabel's worst nightmare: three months wasted and being told that you hadn't played by the rules! So I spent three days trying to contact the "Adults with Asperger's" worker. (Being a teacher makes simple things like returning phone calls in office hours really problematic!) A very helpful, calm man explained that our GP should have made the first contact. AAARRGH.

Annabel was by this time remarkably calm, but that sort of brittle calm that a wrong word could shatter. Meltdowns are part of the aspie make up and can seem completely unreasonable to onlookers and rather frightening for those caught up in them. What is actually going on is a feedback loop of confusion, ignorance and helplessness which quickly becomes an outburst of extreme emotion: weeping, swearing, temper tantrums and it doesn't seem to matter whether these are public or private. But these only happen when the aspie model of the world and the world itself are in opposition. What helped her enormously to maintain the calm was the construction and mostly hand sewing of some of our Tudor costume. Cloth is predictable, hand sewing is completely absorbing and a well made seam SO satisfying. Annabel can work all day and most of the evening getting a sleeve exactly right and then unpick it and sew it all again because it it didn't hang quite right. What an astonishing accomplishment!

I've tried to get some idea of how the world seems to those fortunate enough to be born with an ASD. In my work I get wonderful flashes of multi sense modalities as when Bess (13) told me that she only liked red beakers because yellow ones were too hot, blue was icy and green was just yucky. Or Ben who had no spoken communication but would happily hold a thirty minute musical conversation with me using riffs and sequences on a djembe. Some of my students have the ability to fit music to films intuitively, and one has a subtle sense of comic timing in Lego animation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaDxG5YbuII

My job is to "educate" these students. This often means attempting to make them fit in with a neurotypical world and perhaps even find a job they might be moderately happy and productive in. I try to minimise the confusion this sort of watered down mainstream schooling brings but I sometimes think I really ought to be spending more time in mainstream education sharing with others the sparkling, enthusiastic and often painstaking world of ASD.