How my mom’s autism helped me unravel my creativity
Zyana Morris is a passionate health and lifestyle blogger who loves to write about prevailing trends. She is a featured author at various authoritative blogs in the health and fitness industry and currently, she is associated as a blogger for Centra Care Florida, an urgent care center in Orlando and neighboring cities including Conway, Longwood, Orange Lake and others.
Many of us have this strange perception that people who lie in the autistic spectrum are to be cared for and looked after and they are not as good at understanding and empathizing with the feelings of the people around them. It’s a well-known fact that no two autistic people share the same characteristics and probably the one I was associated with was different from others like her, but my experience leads me to believe otherwise. Autism might have a latent power that many of us refuse to acknowledge or even explore, a power, which might be of great use to the people around them and one which could finally dispel the notion that autistic people are dependent on others for support and are sort of a burden.
I work as a freelance blogger and I write on various topics ranging from marketing and tech to even healthcare. For me, writing is more than just work, it’s a passion, a desire to create, a vision to tell, a will to express, but surprisingly I didn’t even know that I ever had the talent in me or even if I liked writing when I was younger, but sometimes there is a light that guides us to our real aim and makes us find out that why we really are here. For me, that light has always been my mom, who is an autistic person. She was the reason I found that writing it out was what would lead me to glory and I believe that this is the perfect place to firstly, thank her, and secondly and more importantly, make people realize that autism is not a difference to abhor but a difference to value and cherish.
When I opened my eyes in this world, I found out that my mom would never look at my eyes directly and let me feel the bond that I have with her, like every other child in the world. Growing up with her was immensely difficult as she never hugged me of like being touched, I always thought that she doesn’t love me and this feeling was what made me cry through many sleepless nights. I took her differences and started mistaking them for strangeness.
She never experienced the same things as us and even on joyous times like Christmas, when everyone was busy with putting up the sparkling decoration, me and my Dad always first sat down and made sure that everything we use in our decorations was safe enough so that my mom could be kept safe from any mishap. Life was passing on and I started accepting the reality that my mom is like that way and would forever need our help in doing each and everything. I also accepted the reality that my mom would have no significant role to play in my progress, but Thank God I was wrong as things were about to take a turn which I never expected them to, leaving me surprised as this beacon of light shone on me and lit up the way that I never knew I had to follow.
She had difficulty understanding different commands and what we said otherwise verbally, so to neutralize it, we started writing out what we meant to tell her. This helped her in understanding us most of the time and improved things around the house. On Mother’s Day, I also wanted to share how much I loved her and tell her how important she was to me but knowing that she wouldn’t understand if I did that verbally, I instead wrote a small poetry and left it by her bedside accompanied by a little present at night. Despite knowing the fact that she wouldn’t understand what I had written, I couldn’t help it and just did it. What followed, baffled me completely and continues to do so until this very day.
I woke up next morning and she was there, right in my room with a smile that I had never seen before on her face. Not our kind of smile, it was kind of different, but I could feel that she was feeling quite happy. I thought she liked my small little gesture but instead of talking about the gift or why I did that, she just said: “Your write great, get up and write more.” I didn’t know at first what was she saying and smilingly dismissed it. But she wouldn’t relent. For the next few days, she kept on repeating the same sentence and went to the point that I started getting annoyed. I couldn’t understand why she was saying that. She got angry after she saw that I was not doing what I said and started saying the same sentence but this time I could notice sternness in her voice, she was adamant. After seeing that, and just to make her stop doing it, I wrote a single page on how to decorate the house in the perfect manner. She saw that and went to her bedroom. I thought that this was over for now.
At night, my dad came in my room and said “I didn’t know you could write so well,” why don’t you write more. He had that same page in his hand on which I wrote that piece earlier that day. I asked him excitingly “Was it Good?” He replied that it’s great and that I should seriously start doing some more of the same stuff. I started writing and after a few days, I felt that I was happier than I ever was. I couldn’t relent going a day without writing a thing or two. From that day onwards, I just wrote and also took it up as a career option when I grew up. It has left me in a better position than most of my friends who work monotonous jobs and who I see are not happy most of the time. I am and I have my mom to thank for that. She was autistic and didn’t know a lot of things, but I don’t know how she saw what I or any other person couldn’t see in me.
Most of the time, we regard autistic people as being impacted by an illness that makes them seem quite weaker than us, but what we don’t realize is that this difference of connections in the brain bestows them with other qualities that we, normal cannot have. Maybe that’s why we shouldn’t treat them as being ill, we should just treat them as different than we are, and that, in my opinion, is the starting point of the value, love, and attention that the autistic people deserve.
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