AUTISM AWARENESS: What If?

Over the years I’ve heard things about Luke…sobering things:

“He’ll probably never need some of this typical school stuff — let’s focuses on life-skills.”

“He’ll probably never be able to write his name.”

“He’s not learning 1+1….so let’s not do that one.”

“Best on testing he’s 1 out of 100 among his peers.”

I started to form a picture myself — Luke would be living at home forever, he wouldn’t work (or at least on his own), he wouldn’t learn those typical things kids learn in school.

Lots of ‘he wouldn’ts’.

I wrote in a previous blog…’optimism’ is the number one key to success. Without seeing something beyond the worst case scenarios — you may never take the chances to surprise yourself.

As a writer — I know this. It’s about the dumbest career ever. The odds of success are astronomically low. Everyone tells you you’re wasting your time. You get heaps of rejections But yet…you hold on to some near-delusional thread of optimism. You see something the others don’t. Something maybe you can’t even comprehend. But you know that working at it every day…you’ll eventually, get there.

You ask…’what if?’

This year, Luke’s made some progress. Turns out he can spell words like nobody’s business. He can do math…he just needed a calculator (something about the memorization of times tables and stuff was tripping him up). He can write real sentences on an IPad. He even learned to write his first name…something I long gave up on…and is now working on his last name. The teacher’s make him ‘sign in’ to his class now.

If you squint real hard…you can see he’s got other unique skills.

Will he have a job? Will he have unique skills that contribute to the world?

Maybe. If we have optimism. I’ll give you an example…

He loves explosions and giant monsters and other special FX. He watches supercuts of explosion scenes.

Years ago a teacher/therapist showed Luke one of these Special FX apps — I think Bad Robot puts it out — where you shoot a scene and then it overlays a missile firing or something.

This was probably 5 years ago.

He’d noodle with it every now in then. Recently more and more. He started to get it — blowing up his Stuffed Animals or his mom or just the wall.

Recently, I was watching over his shoulder and realized he had hundreds of videos he created.

Then I saw one where he used the IPad to record another IPad and added a special FX.

It might look like nothing. But what I see with a little bit of optimism…is the inner workings of his imagination, creativity, problem-solving.

Instead of doing what the tool is intended to do…’adding special fx to real-world videos’. He began re-editing his favorite movies and videos.

On his own, this ‘1 out 100’ kid discovered ‘compositing’. Compositing is basically taking one video image and then ‘drawing on top of it’.

In this case, he paused one of his favorite videos, shot a video of it and then added Special FX to it. He mashed up his two favorite things. A giant monster and an explosion.

What if we focused on that skill like we do 1 +1? What if he could be taught some other things that allow him to do this in a next level way”

What if?

Thanks for reading this stuff during Autism Awareness month.

Keep rocking the What ifs…