Becoming aware of what is around you.

I awoke from my unconscious state bewildered and confused. I cannot remember the feeling very well. It was somewhere between losing sight of your mum in a big shopping mall and waking up quickly from a groggy deep sleep.

Trying desperately to remember what happened, looking about the room, I freaked.

I remember trying to run from that room, out the door, down the stairs and out into the world, just keep running I thought, until something jogs my memory and lets me know I am ok.

Well that didn’t happen. I made it all the way to the floor. Ouch.

The next few hours were used trying to comfort me and let me know I was amongst family and friends. That everything will be ok, just relax, you’ve had a bad accident and so forth.

So far I hadn’t said a word to anyone. I had figured out who was who by now. Not by remembering who they were but by how they addressed each other and their interactions with me and everyone else in the room. I just lay there and kept quite. I didn’t want anyone to know that I didn’t remember what had happened. I just wanted them all to go away and leave me to myself. It was a dark and miserable time.

The next few weeks were spent mostly at home recovering from the damage I had been inflicted with. I figured out that I like music and that I could play the guitar. What a strange feeling it was to pick up a guitar and play it without really thinking about that I was doing. Reading and writing also came to me without really thinking about it.

I have never shared these things with anyone before. It was like being transported into another realm, into another body, completely foreign to me but being able to control it and do the things that it could do.

Unfortunately the things that didn’t come back to me were plenty. I didn’t remember or understand how to interact with other people.

Returning to school I was extremely shy around the other kids. I was unsure of how to act around them. I was unsure of who I was friends with and I lost a lot of friends who I later found out were good buddies of mine.

I began to get rather introverted. I liked sitting by myself at lunchtime and looking at the kids play. I would create large fantasies in my head of the things around me. I started to become, or maybe I already was, quite creative. I also liked climbing trees.

I took an advocated role in disliking schoolwork and my grade plummeted. This didn’t impress my parents whom insisted that I pick my grades up or risk having to repeat the year.

So I put a little more effort in, knuckled down, did as little as possible to get by and generally cheating my way through the rest of primary school. I recall one test we had to do which pretty much determined which class we would be put into, the smart class or the dumb class (the school would never admit that they did this but they did).

Well this test was quite long and I decided, after doing half of one page, tick any random box (it was a multi choice test) and finish up. Then I spent the rest of the hour and a half drawing on a spare piece of paper we were given.

The results were I ended up in the dumb class. Which suited me just fine because I could muck around with the other kids who couldn’t sit still and learn all day.

I gradually became friends with two individuals, Fin and Simon, who thought it would be fun to get me to hang out with them and then run away half way through whatever we were doing. This lasted a few months until I became better friends with Fin.

During these interaction I learnt about the subtle movements and expressions that people made. I didn’t know what this was at the time, more that I knew that I could tell what people were thinking or going to do or how they felt. I started picking up the delicacies of an interaction with another person. I was starting to become aware of what was around me.

Learn, discover, enhance your ability to distinguish what someone is thinking, feeling or planning to do and you will have a lot more success with interactions and relationships.

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Tags: autism, discovery, helping the world, Life, matthavok, mind, Mind wax, personal freedom, you mind, your mind