How do you tell someone that all the things that make life so hard to navigate are the very same things that make them so amazing?

It used to be easier. Even last year, when she went to Boston to take part in a study about girls with autism, she didn’t really ask about her Autism. She just generally believed, as do the rest of us, that autism made her amazing. You could ask her for an explanation and she would usually launch into a rather disjointed but incredibly adorable speech about her awesome, sparkly brain.

This week things changed for her. I am not sure when, or why, but all of the sudden, she wants to know some serious detail about what autism means for her. So then, what shall I say?

Kate’s expressive language is far stronger than her receptive language, so while she can talk your ear off, she doesn’t always comprehend your message. You can ask an expert about the finer details but, for Kate, I imagine it’s a lot like this:

Kate hears the words you say and then each of those words goes into a different compartment in her brain. Then, she must access those words and put them in an order that makes sense. This is my best guess. I could be way off, but for now, this is how I imagine it. Somedays, she can organize those words quickly but on other days, when she is all out of tokens, as we say, she has a much harder time making sense of everything.

Now, on top of this communication issue, there are a number of other things that make up Kate’s version of autism. She’s excessively overconfident, she has little concept of her body in space, she knows no strangers (which can be terrifying as I’ve often said) and she has low tone, or very little muscle tone which makes her pretty uncoordinated, but only in the cutest way possible.

Sure, there are other things that I could mention but that’s enough for now. You get the idea. Right? In order to explain her autism to her, I would have to explain to her why things are often confusing and frustrating. And, while she has every right to know, she isn’t quite able to fully understand yet, so we end up in a more confusing state than when we began.

So, you can see how this isn’t easy.

She has questions, and rightly so.

I worry that I don’t have the answers, because the answers are really all inside her fascinating brain. I hope she can tell me someday, but for now she will have to do with my rudimentary explanations.

How do you tell someone that all the things that make life so hard to navigate are the  very same things that make them so amazing?

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