Category Archives: strategies

Guest Post: Running Toward Myself

This essay by my friend, Dillan, is about his love of running. For him running serves many purposes. He channels hyperkinetic impulses. He gets fit. He interacts with others. But here he describes one more thing– the mental benefit. He mentally gets liberated from autism while running. How lucky to get a respite from autism.

I encourage people to exercise. Living with autism does not mean we must not exercise. It helps in every way. But respites can be found in many things, in music, in swimming, in learning- simply in moments when joy breaks through the symptoms.

 

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Dillan’s Introduction:

I have experienced many challenges in my life with the autism that takes root in my actions, my thoughts, and my feelings. However, I have also been blessed with gifts, and I am going to talk about one of them today. I wrote this essay for my college applications, and it means a lot to me that you will also read these words about the times when I can leave my autism behind.

Running Toward Myself By: Dillan Barmache

It would be easy to write about autism. I always have that inspiring story in my pocket, The Boy Who Had Autism and Learned Anyway. In this moment, however, I want to talk about the moments when I can separate myself from autism, even if it is only for a short time. Those moments come when I run.

I am on the cross country team in the fall. I run track in the spring. I wake up early in the summer and run miles just because I want to. I am fast and my legs are strong. My body moves with certainty and obeys my commands. That means more to me than it does to many others because in almost every other moment of my life my body is a mess. The chasm between what I want my body to do and what it does is huge and everyone who spends more than five seconds around me can see it plainly when I run my hands through impulse patterns and babble in nonsense noises. So, when I run, those moments of control are like air to the drowning man. My body goes exactly where I want it to.

My most ambitious event was the time I ran a half-marathon with my dad. He and I trained hard. This was, after all, the longest run of my life. As we trained, my dad would strain to keep pace with me. I would wear him out with my voracity for the trail, eating up the ground beneath my feet. We trained until the day came when we had to go to downtown LA and put our feet to the pavement.

You could think that a run like this would be easy. I’ve established how I love running. I’ve talked about being good at it. However, I have so much more to consider when it comes to an event like this. I would be surrounded by strangers. I had to sleep near the event in a strange hotel room with none of my familiar comforts. My routine was crumpled up like a piece of scratch paper and tossed away. To a person like me these are major, catastrophic concerns. My parents have to constantly wonder how I will react. Will I be able to handle it? Will I break down and freak out and have to be pulled away into a quiet room where the strangers’ eyes won’t see my weirdness? I felt not just my own anxiety, but the anxiety of my parents as they tried to plan for every problem and prayed for the things they can’t control to just go smoothly.

Just before the marathon the runners gathered at the starting point. The buildings of downtown LA loomed over me. They closed in like giants and all of us gathered runners were packed in together. I did feel the energy getting wild inside me. I felt my control slipping. I felt the autism that wanted to take over and become everything my parents and I feared. Then, the signal came and it was time to run, and none of it mattered anymore. The threat was over the instant my legs started moving, because then I knew exactly what to do. Run and run and run.

I finished the half-marathon just like the waves of people around me did. I was part of them and I fit seamlessly among them. You can’t imagine how rare that is for me. I am always either the odd boy off to the side with special needs, or I’m the miraculously intelligent boy everyone is shocked can do anything but flap my hands and repeat simple words. I’m always different. I’m always other. But when I ran that day I was just a runner. I was just Dillan.

 

 

 

The Internal Autismland

The frustration of having autism is matched sometimes by the frustration of the parents of an autistic person. It takes so much work, perseverance, and motivation to fight on the bad days or moments when Autismland swallows their child whole. My poor parents say it is remote and far away expressions I make in those times. How I annoy others when I’m in Autismland is a problem.

Choosing to stop or escape is not always possible. My parents or aide have different strategies to pull me back to reality. I exercise or think. They make me do one or both. It helps a lot forcing me to think when my brain is sliding into sensory heaven. It is a struggle between my senses and my mind. If no one helps, my senses usually will dominate when I’m in one of those moments.

Now, I realize I’m no picnic during one of those episodes. The horrible thing is I bug others then, but I don’t change in the way I want because I don’t have the control I need when these episodes occur. Other times I get easy control over myself. It may need lots of training, like sports and music skills. I notice jumping jacks help me reset my mind too. I think the difficulty is the intense OCD aspect. It is hard to resist sometimes. It is scary too to be at the mercy of stims or impulses but I am appreciative when people persevere in helping me regain control of myself and return to Normal-Land.

Touching the Void

I watched an amazing movie yesterday called Touching the Void. It’s not a new movie but it is new for me. It tells the true, incredible, epic, survival story of a climber named Joe Simpson in the mountains of Peru. He injures his leg terribly. It is a break that makes his leg unusable. The weather turns bad and he and his partner are exposed on soft snow they can’t hang onto. The snow blocks their vision and the partner accidentally lowers Simpson over a ledge. He is hanging in the air pulling his partner off too. The partner decides to cut the line. Simpson falls into a deep crevasse.

From there I can only tell you he endures super-human challenges. I watched how he did it. First, he focused on what to do, not on how he felt. If he panicked, he re-focused on his task rapidly. He had no one but himself to rely on, but he was thinking constantly, not in self-pity but on how to keep moving forward. One strategy he had was to make small goals that he had to achieve by a certain time. Once he reached his goal he immediately made a new one. This kept him moving forward all the time, but with small goals he could achieve, rather than a seemingly impossible huge goal. In this way, inch by inch, he crawled off a mountain to life.

I couldn’t help reflect on autism when I saw this. Working out of a neurological illness is kind of like being in a crevasse. I see that small, steady goals, an absence of self-pity, and focusing on thought, not emotions, works on that too. Simpson may have survived by true grit but it’s a lesson I can learn from.

Noticing Our Blessings and Defeating Sorrow

Life is hard to predict. Even harder to count on.  Since horrible things can happen without warning, I think we really need to live each day like it is a gift.
 Inside I get sad and edgy and I know I must fight it. My limitations irritate me so much. I lose myself in rotten resentment. Bad idea. I’m not helping my life in self-sorrow. I stop seeing my blessings in those moments, but I have so many blessings. I just have to notice them.
I may be disabled and non-verbal, but I am lucky too. I have a good family. I am cared for by many people. I have free will to communicate and to learn. I am loving my liberation inside as I climb out of autism’s silence. I am into nature and music. God gives me breathe each day.
Can I feel gratitude for the small miracles too? I must because small miracles add and add and add to a great gift. Living in recognition of our gifts is a weapon against sorrow. Those if us who get sad often must focus on our blessings.
I love delicious food and I’m lucky I have tastebuds to enjoy it. I love water and I’m lucky to swim. I love music and I enjoy it every day. Should I focus only on my illness and feel miserable? No, not ever. We must choose life in the belief we can make it better.
It is easy to make life worse. Hard to make it better. But if our life is precious to God, which I believe it is, then I must see it is an obligation to be good to our own selves as well as others. The belief that it must be perfect to appreciate our gifts is sort of juvenile. I’m hoping to get better at this.
I see some disabled people who fight so incredibly bravely. I am so inspired by their attitude. I see how they fight on and on. I see it and I know it’s not easy for them, but do they really have another good option? There is another option, but it stinks. Anger, resentment, and self-pity are horrible options. I think if we have one chance with our lives, we’d better live to our best in spite of our challenges.