A Personal Look at Autism Spectrum Disorder
THANK YOU, Tina Brown, for your guest essay to the New York Times. (See below) My husband, of 35+ years, and I, like your son, are on the Spectrum and have other mental health issues at ages 71 and 74, respectively. We feel the bewilderment and intense-to-the-point-of-unbearable emotion that Gus Walz showed at the DNC while applauding his Dad, often in our own daily struggles with neurotypical friends and neighbors. My husband forwarded your article to me amidst a struggle I was facing at my age with a friendship! Yes, the worst time for those of us on the spectrum is not during our school years! It comes afterwards. My husband and I are among the lucky ones, blessed by God to find each other, and to be given the ability to help and console each other. My husband is a retired Psychiatric Social Worker, who helped many of the disadvantaged mentally-ill in his job, as I helped him help them, and as we help each other daily. Coach Walz, we, and all neurodivergents, need you and President Harris to win for SO many reasons, and, among those, to champion the cause.
Guest Essay to the New York Times by Tina Brown
Ms. Brown is the author, most recently, of “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil.”
My Son and Gus Walz Deserve a Champion Like Tim Walz
Aug. 23, 2024
The sight at the Democratic convention on Wednesday night of Tim Walz’s 17-year-old son leaping to his feet, with streaming eyes, a hand to his chest with a cry of “That’s my Dad” was heart piercing.
As the mother of Georgie, a 38-year-old on the spectrum who still lives with me, I recognized him immediately as one of “ours,” a sweet, unfiltered, slightly bewildered-looking young man who wasn’t quite sure what was expected of him in this epic moment of political adulation.
Gus Walz has, according to his parents, a nonverbal learning disorder, A.D.H.D. and an anxiety disorder, all of which they regard not as a setback but as his “secret power,” that makes him “brilliant” and “hyperaware.”
I know exactly what they mean. One of the joys of my life in the social churn of New York is living with a son whose inability to read the room makes him incapable of telling anything but the truth. Once, as my husband, Harry Evans, and I left a pretentious social gathering in the Hamptons, Georgie told the host sunnily: “Thank you very much. No one spoke to me really, so it was a very boring evening. The food was OK. I doubt I will come again.”
“I have never been prouder of you in my life!” shouted my husband in the car. How many times have all of us wanted to say that as we gushed about the fabulous time we just hadn’t had? Then there was the moment he went up to Anna Wintour at one of my book parties and asked if she was Camilla Parker Bowles. And the time at the intake meeting for a supported work program, when the therapist asked Georgie, “Has anyone ever molested you?” “Unfortunately not,” he replied. Georgie teaches me every day how much we depend on social lies to make the world go round. His sister — his forever best friend — and I feel so lucky to have him in our lives. So did his dad, who died in 2020.
And yet for people who are different and have no support, the world can be bleak. Their loneliness can be agonizing. Some people assume the school days are the hardest, but it’s the years after that are the social desert. Having a friendly, forgiving workplace to go to is critical. It’s often their only taste of community and what makes them such reliable and rewarding employees. The work from home movement has been a killer for people with special needs, often depriving them of the only social connections they have.
There’s something of a trend at the moment for certain businesses to say they encourage the hiring of people who are neurodivergent. Sadly, it can be just virtue signaling. Employers like to think that a person who is neurodivergent is some secretly brilliant introvert who writes code in his apartment all day, not the more likely candidate: an awkward kid with a gentle smile who takes time to get the hang of things and talks too much about the same subjects.
One of my son’s quirks is that he likes to wear bandannas and nail polish, and tends to say so in the first five minutes of every job interview. More often than not he’s told that no, that would not be “appropriate.” Appropriate? Being inappropriate is the very definition of Georgie’s condition, and for his family, his most treasured trait.
The most painful thing for a parent is to pick up on the scorn of strangers that her child often doesn’t notice; the whispered insults or titter at the next table. Remember Donald Trump Jr.’s sneer at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference? Referring to Senator John Fetterman’s struggles to recover after his stroke, Mr. Trump said that Pennsylvania had “managed to elect a vegetable.”
“I’d love for John Fetterman to have, like, good gainful employment,” he continued. “Maybe he could be, like, a bag guy at a grocery store.” Is it possible to go any lower than that?
But how could Don Jr. be any different from his father? The elder Donald Trump has never missed the chance to denigrate people with disabilities, and already the MAGA crowd is mocking Gus Walz’s emotional embrace with his dad. “Talk about weird …” the conservative media ghoul Ann Coulter posted (and later deleted).
If the Harris-Walz ticket wins, will parents of people who struggle with being different at last find a powerful advocate in the White House? This voiceless community is in desperate need of a new, mighty champion. Coach Walz, you who have been such an inspiring role model to kids all your life, and were caring enough to offer your own credibility to the role of faculty adviser of a new high school gay-straight alliance. I urge you: please make this your cause.
Synchronicity
The Oxford dictionary describes “synchronicity” as “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”
Wikipedia has a longer definition: “Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung “to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.”[1] In contemporary research, synchronicity experiences refer to one’s subjective experience whereby coincidences between events in one’s mind and the outside world may be causally unrelated to each other yet have some other unknown connection.[2] Jung held that this was a healthy, even necessary, function of the human mind that can become harmful within psychosis.[3]“
As a Bipolar 1 woman who was not diagnosed, let alone medicated, until I was 28 years old, my life was full of synchronicity. I was working as a clerk in Columbia University libraries, cataloging art books. My family did not “believe” in psychiatry nor in mental illness. I kept everything secret from them until I could no longer, when I had my breakdown at age 28. At that point I went for emergency care to the Columbia Counseling Service and was told to stay with my family for a week or go to hospital. I was lucky enough to be able to go to my parents for a week . I had begun therapy with the psychiatrist I would wind up staying with until age 74. But at the time I was all alone. I had a best friend from grammar school who was living in France at this time. She and I corresponded every week. We remained close until she died at age 39. I had a few friends at work, but I lived alone and was isolated. And I became psychotic at times. Synchronicity ruled my life. Parts of a song on the radio, or a program on the TV, a man singing in the street… they all had special messages for me. I thought of people in the street as “teachers” for me to learn from and the people who worked with me, as “mystics,” who understood me, and who were trying to train me.
It was exhilarating when the teachers were happy with my progress but terribly depressing when I did wrong. There were “signs” for me to interpret all over the place. And at work, I regarded every book I catalogued as something that held secrets to help me get mentally well or learn truths about life. I would do my job faithfully, most of the time, but while doing it, I was on the constant look-out for special messages meant for me. I did what I called “readings”. I would find some lesson in each book. One book I was working on held a special secret about the womb and the egg and the sperm uniting and becoming a zygote. I pictured the uniting of the egg and the sperm as fireworks. (Thirty years later, saner and married and actively creating art, and, writing a newspaper column upstate on the side, I created an abstract photograph called “Conception”.) But in the library, I did what I called “time travels.” I didn’t talk to people much during this period. I listened to co-workers and street people, read extensively and deciphered messages. People would come up to me at work to actually talk to me sometimes, to be nice, I guess, and I would leave the world of the womb, and zygotes or some such thing, and talk to them normally as if I were in their world. I was not!!
In other words, to put it in professional terms, I was WACKO!
That is all behind me now and fortunately, though I have had some hard times, but they have occurred within the realm of a marriage, to be 35 years long this May. It has offered me the only stability and deep love in my life. Gone is the world of readings and messages. Gone is the synchronicity. Sometimes I miss it but not the craziness that went with it. Now I have more meaningful, everyday experiences of sanity. There are still some epiphanies, but not like the old days.
Before I close I must add, there was at least one incident that was truly synchronicity… that was not delusional… that felt distinctly like a message from God, the Universe. I was working at my desk and suddenly my scalp felt prickles all over it. I grew alarmed and so decided to go to the reference room for one of my “readings.” Clearly this warranted research. I went to the Reference Room of the library and found a one volume encyclopedia which I pulled off the shelf. In order for the reading to give answers impartially, I had to open it at random and then put my finger on the page. So that’s what I did whilst my scalp prickled. My finger pointed to a picture. It was a print of Christ with a crown of thorns. I was stunned. I felt like it was a message from God. And to this day I think it was. It was a message of hope and love.
Yesterday I wrote to a fellow blogger, Anneta Pinto-Young, at Devotionalinspirations.com, who is a Social Worker and a Christian Minister and recounted this story briefly in response to her post on coincidences in her series on “Hearing God Speak.” She told me something very wise. She said that religion and science have always clashed over these type of things. Sure, I was delusional for much of the time, but I did have occasional experiences like this one. And, she said, that was God sending me a message of his love and encouragement. I felt that then and I feel it today.
Maybe I don’t need the secret messages any more. God’s word comes through friends now and most definitely through my long-suffering husband.
What can I say but look out for synchronicities and see what message there is for you.
MOONSIDE 
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