Year: 2006

by Casey, age 16, Mississippi, USA

One of my earliest memories consists of me watching the other children play on the playground and make friends with each other while I am sitting on a bench a distance away, flapping my hand around, wishing that I can somehow be a part of their world… and yet I am not sure if I really wanted to be a part of it at all. It is the second week of kindergarten and I am already an outsider in the other children’s eyes.

The week before, I was watching the other children play while trying to block out the noise at the same time. They were all on the slide sliding down a rail and a teacher was helping them. She noticed me standing off to the side and asked me to join them. I hesitantly agreed.

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by d

curious. i first became aware of this when i went to sausalito. i’m
sure it’d been an experience, just i’d never verbalized it,
conceptualized it in this way.

happened again just a while ago, when i went for my lunch-time walk.
this time, camera in hand, towards the embarcadero. which is a bit of
a walk away now.

it might be because of the way i look at things. maybe everyone sees it the same way, just i perceive it differently. seems like an oxymoron, but it’s possible. perception varies in a multi-dimensional manner, it’s not just one way or another.

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by unrulyasides

when you speak, it is fish. and buildings and nylon loop carpet.

you and i sat facing each other across a lunch table at the portland public market in maine. you were opening your mouth and words were coming out: you were trying to tell me a story, and to show you respect it was important i get it. i’d been trying the entire time we were together to listen to you, the way you needed to be listened to. but trying to listen to your words, the confusing sounds against ear and sine-wave variations of speech, i was aware of everything except what you were saying. as you moved your lips, i saw this:

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by Patrick Ridge

My childhood, upon mature consideration, can best be described as catastrophic. I won’t go into the details, and I have heard of children less fortunate than myself, but catastrophic is an apt word taken all in all. The aspect which most stands out for me today is the way my experience was shaped by my borderline autistic condition, Aspergers Syndrome. I will refer to Aspergers as AS for the sake of brevity. For my purposes AS is best described by the phrase “standing behind the door when the instructions were passed out”. After some thirty years have gone by and I have developed some mental and emotional “tools” to compensate for my condition, I can specify a little better what the differences, the symptoms are that created this condition, but for a child of ages five through thirteen I was quite unclear on what was different about me. The effect was that everyone was behaving in a manner similar to each other, as though responding to cues that I was not receiving. Today I know that this is a form of brain damage, neural scarring that has eliminated certain parts of my perception enjoyed by most people. Those parts of my perception that are missing have to do with understanding social cues; the problem is thus reduced to its elemental form.

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