About six months ago, I was sitting in the waiting room of my therapist's office. She was a member of a large mental health practice. Seated in the middle of the floor was a young woman, say 16 or so, who was rocking back and forth, and repeatedly picking at her T-shirt. Her eyes were closed, or nearly so. I watched her closely. Nearby, seated in chairs, were a man and a woman, whom I believe were her parents. They glared at me. I smiled back, and returned to observing the young girl, consciously putting on the kindest expression I could muster on my face. The parents seemed to relax, understanding (I hope) that I was not watching the girl because I thought she was a freak, but because I thought she was a human being - a person I wanted to understand. Inside that girl is a spirit, the same as mine. Inside her is a mind, one that works differently from mine, but probably not all that differently. When I went in to speak with my therapist, I immediately told her what I had seen in the waiting room. She told me, as I suspected, that the young lady was autistic.
I am a writer. As such, I am fascinated by people, and the stories of each person. As time has passed, I have tried to educate myself about autism. I learned a lot from Temple Grandin. Her words have opened up a whole world to me, given me a new and different way to see the world, and to view my own experience of it. And so I would like to write a story with the main character being autistic.
I need a lot of help. I need to deconstruct my own world view, and reconstruct one that is consistent with autism. Of course that is very hard, as autism is not one thing, but rather (1) a group of behaviors identified by professionals, and (2) a way of experiencing life and the world as a primary subject, which one or several of the aformentioned professionals has identified as autistic.
So I hope I can establish a dialogue, ask some questions, and hopefully not be regarded negatively. With the help of the good people in this virtual community, I may be able to craft a really good story that helps the world-at-large understand the world inside that young lady who so fascinated me. That world has value. I could feel it.

Welcome to AFF.

I love the thing about the disabled dog. It made me laugh out loud!

Let me explain a little more about my post.

Stephen King said about how his stories arise that they all started with "What if...?"

My "What if...?" is this: What if someone won the Powerball Lottery four times in a row, and saved the earth from destruction by predicting the orbit of an asteroid, because that person had an extraordinary sense of numbers? That person would be wide open to hatred out of envy, and then adulation for saving the world.

Just as Stephen King, or any good writer, is able to get inside a character, and make people care about that person, so I need to get this character right.

When I was growing up in the 50's and early 60's, the words "spastic" and "retarded" were diagnoses. We never, ever, as children, saw a person in a wheelchair in school.

This grew out of a deep cultural bias against anyone with a physical or mental difference from "normalcy". The dominant notion was that if a person was physically imperfect, they were morally imperfect. That bias stretches back to antiquity.

Things are better today. But there is still a long way to go.

One thing is certain. The more people find out about each other - how much we are alike, the better we are able to not just tolerate, but appreciate the differences.

In reading posts on this board, I have found that many autistics have come to the same sin as NT's. Face it, the world is a mean place. For everybody.

The only help we have in this mean, mean place is from each other. Labels and biases keep us from joining hands in an effort to survive and flourish.

So I ask my first specific question.

How would an autistic person know whether or not his/her parents loved them?

How would a non-autistic person know whether or not his/her parents loved them?

Acceptance. It is very painful to feel that your parents would love you (or would love you more) if only you were 'normal'.

Secondly, I do hope you realize that the majority of auties are not savants?

Vendaia, you may find it helpful to read some stories that include, or are told from the point of view of, autistic characters.

I have a collection of such stories on Ventura33's Neurodiversity Page, and you can find more links on the Autism in Fiction page of neurodiversity.com.

As for winning the lottery, because the number combinations are totally random, no amount of mathematical skills would improve a person's chances.  (Best not to waste one's money on it!)

How would an autistic person know whether or not his/her parents loved them?

As much as I would love to answer this I can't help but wonder what people here will get out of helping you earn a living, if that is the goal of your conquest?

I ask because after reading what Mr. Haddon did to his main character in his book 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' where he gave all the romantic ideas that people have of Autism as the personality forgetting that there should have been a person in there too, I am left with the concern of what happens to those here who contributed to your work if you paint Autism in a bad light?

Brightman, it seems fairly clear to me that Vendaia is not a professional author, but a student trying to improve her writing skills and her understanding of autism.  That is to be commended.  Yes, she appears to have some romantic and inaccurate ideas, but when a person is making a sincere effort to learn, she shouldn't be criticized too harshly for ignorance.

...is that if you're writing fiction in the hopes of making money, you're in the wrong business. I write because I love creating characters and having them tell their stories to me. So the remark about making my living made me chuckle. And as for making autistic people look bad, in all my writing, I try to make characters as real as possible. How do I know if they are real? They start to talk and act "on their own". In other words, the story surprises me. It may not go where I thought it would go. It doesn't make any difference if a character is autistic, anymore than if she's a redhead. My basic assumption is that people are all pretty much alike in their capacity for emotion. The reason we care about characters in fiction, and each other in reality, is our sense that we are all alike on a basic level.

As for winning the lottery, and randomness.... I majored in physics in university. I have been fascinated by randomness since I came across a table of random numbers in the CRC Math Handbook. I could go on and on about randomness. But the basic fact is this: a random sequence of numbers has no discernable pattern. The key word is discernable.

How that figures into the story... well, just wait and see!

By the way, I live in a household with a seven year old boy diagnosed with Asperger's. I love him a lot. I'm sitting talking with his mom about his educational program right now.

Meanwhile, I am here doing research on how autistic people deal with emotion and emotional communication.

To answer one question:   How do I know that my parents love me?

I can answer for myself only.   It has to do with trust.  I know I can trust my parents even when they have made mistakes.

Are you a horror writer?

Dear Darkcode,

That's the question... But as an NT, I can make a good guess. The question I am all about here is emotional communication. Since it's tough for enough for me to figure out emotional states of others, I wonder how it is for someone who hasn't my ability to discern the semantic of body language and tone of voice.

As for being a professional writer, or a student... I could cite experience, but that's not the point. That I don't know stuff, shoot, I don't even know what I don't know! Finding stuff out is what get's me out of bed in the AM!

Vendaia to answer your question personally, how would I know my parents loved me - I wouldnt. They could/would say it, but it was just words.
It didn't really mean anything.

The difficulty goes both ways.  Autistic body language and tone of voice are often confusing to non-autistics.  Sadly, there are some parents who do not know whether their autistic child loves them, just because the child's voice and body language don't match the parents' assumptions about how a child shows love.

Dear M,

Nope. I am just a writer. Not that I haven't read my share of horror yarns.

My last completed work is a screenplay adapted from a novel "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin. It is currently in development by a production company.

As for your statement about trust... That's good. Can you tell me more about how that trust comes to be?

One of the things I've seen with Marshall, the 7-year old with Asperger's that I live with, is that his mom, who is great, talks to him a lot, and explains in words what she is feeling, and what others may feel. So it seems to me that she is decoding the emotional communications for him. I might note that he seems to have no trouble expressing his emotions. And too, friendly appropriate touch (patting) gets through to him just fine.

One of the "symptoms" of autism is that a child does not seem to respond to expressions of maternal affection as expected.

Now I'm guessing that a good analogy would be, say, red-green color blindness, to smile-frown expression blindness. In the case of color blindness, if I am expected to respond to traffic lights innately, and I run a red light, I could get a ticket, or even killed. But if I learn that the light on top means stop, and the one on the bottom means go, I'm cool. So I'm not keying my response to color, but rather position.

In red-green color blindness, both colors look gray. At least that is my understanding. So in the case of smile-frown blindness, what do those expressions look like? What is the alternative key?

Am I making any sense? Am I even close?

So if it doesn't "mean" anything, does that imply that you do not feel the need to be loved? What about touch?