Come On, It’s Easy! Why a Simple Task Took a Year to Master
by Donna Williams
We have a post office near us, one of the few and only shops I regularly go into, and it’s caused some challenges for me.
It used to have overtly bigoted people in there who would be abrupt and roll their eyes and ‘tutt’ and stuff like that when I didn’t get my money out or didn’t work out my purchase or have everything sorted before I came to the counter or when I couldn’t understand my change or left it behind or forgot to collect my purchase or tried to send something half addressed or or or.
Then, fortunately, those people left and new nicer people came and they were kind but when I had challenges the man would say, “Look, it’s really easy.”
But it was never easy.
I send parcels.
To send parcels at the post office you have to come in the door then NOT line up.
Instead you have to go to a different standing thingy in the centre of the room and find the label to declare what’s in your parcel, write on it then remember to take it with your parcel over to the counter by joining the queue… at the end of the queue.
Sounds easy doesn’t it?
OK, so I finally achieved it after trying for one year… yes, one year.
So why was this so hard?
OK, try coming in the door and remembering that BEFORE you do something you have come to do, you must do something else.
This may sound logical to you but to me it’s completely boggling.
As soon as I come in I assume I should line up because that’s how to get served and I’m there to get served at the counter.
So the idea of putting on hold what I’ve got to do WHILST I do something else, doesn’t exist in my world I’m afraid.
When I do the something else, I forget why I’m there.
If I remember why I’m there, I forget the something else I’ve got to do first.
Get it?
Then, after months of patterning to go and do the something else FIRST I still had the problem of not walking across the room straight to the front of the queue.
As you probably know, this doesn’t win friends.
But tell that to a dyslexic for whom the end and beginning of the queue are only kinaesthetically in “relation to the door of entry.”
So what happens when you don’t come in and join the queue but have to join it ONCE you’re inside?
Well, that’s when you look at the long line of people and take the most direct route.
This is of course logical as when one comes in the door the end is always the most direct route, so try teaching the body that once you are already inside the shop this isn’t the way to the end of the queue.
No can do, patterning overrides, after all it is a form of intelligence and in the absence of the same visual processing as others this is my most reliable sensory navigation-body mapping.
So here I am, trying to sequence without sequencing, trying to be directional with a dyslexic brain in which left and right, beginning and end are in relation to where I came in and otherwise random, and you have something not so easy at all.
Finally, the other day, after a year of trying and guessing and getting it wrong, I finally “did” this illogical, chaotic, new system and felt very clever regardless how stupid I must have seemed to have taken so long to learn “such a simple thing.”
But as I stood in that queue at the right end, smiling to myself, I knew I’d done what others in that queue hadn’t done. I could walk in their shoes, however foreign, in a world in which almost none of them will ever find a use, worth or reason for walking in mine.
At the counter it was like I’d won the lottery, and the nice people smiled nicely and served me like an ordinary and equal person, and we joked about how taking one year to learn this simple thing “wasn’t so long.”
Donna Williams was born in Australia in 1963 and grew up in the inner city with more labels than a jam jar: deaf, psychotic, disturbed, autistic. Donna grew up with “dysfunctional language” and came to understand sentences around the age of nine. Unlike those who “think in pictures,” Donna describes herself as a kinaesthetic thinker for whom movement, pattern, theme and feel give definition to her world.
As well as being an artist, sculptor, composer and screenwriter, she is also an internationally best-selling author with 9 published books in the field of Autism including four text books, a renowned international public speaker, a qualified teacher, and has worked as an autism consultant for 8 years working with over 600 people on the autistic spectrum.
Her first of four autobiographical works, Nobody Nowhere, spent 10 weeks at number one on the New York Times Bestseller List, sold over half a million copies worldwide and has been published in over 20 languages. Her second book, Somebody Somewhere (the second of four books in her autobiographical series) also became an international number one bestseller. Her life story is currently under option by a Hollywood film company.
She has been the subject of three documentaries, appeared as Person Of The Week with the late Peter Jennings on ABC, been featured on The Connie Chung Show, and was known for a number of interviews on Peter Gzowski’s CBC “Morningside” program.
After 13 years living in the UK, she now lives back in Australia with her husband, Chris Samuel, where they established the world’s first international self employment service for people on the autistic spectrum atwww.auties.org.
Donna can be found all over the web, but www.donnawilliams.net is a pretty good place to start.
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