I've made friends with a person in
Guild Wars 2 who is autistic and has Down Syndrome. She's also
epileptic. It's a strange and humbling experience. I get the
opportunity to feed into her, to answer her questions, be patient
with her confusion and be her friend. Video games are one of the few
places where her physical hindrances don't hamper her ability to be
normal as much. She always speaks in the third person, and only uses
simple words.
Today, a friend in my guild (a system
built into the game to allow a smaller, tighter community to be built
around each other, with its own channels of communication and shared
rewards) blocked all chat from her, so that he wouldn't have to
listen to her or her simple English and lack of quick understanding.
The best thing I could say to her was, “perhaps he just needs a
break from Lilly for a while!”, and it felt like such a cop-out.
I am angry for this man's disregard of
her – his rejection of her for her simple speech and lack of
understanding. I understand, though: The eloquence in the words
written here would confuse her. To help you understand, I will
attempt to write the rest of this so that she can understand it.
Our brains all have problems. Nobody's
brain is perfect. Big, important people say her brain has more
problems than other people. I don't agree. A brain isn't more
not-right because the person who owns it can't talk as well with
other people. My ability to speak well means nothing. My brain's
broken in other ways. I can't see into the mind of another person,
but I know that every other mind is amazing. Every mind has the most
amazing story inside. It doesn't make a difference whether one mind
can speak its story to other minds. We all deal with very tough
problems in our minds as well as our bodies.
But this doesn't change the fact that
this friend of mine can tell she is less good at communication. She
still finds herself confused at the humor in guild chat, still has
trouble playing the game. The difficulty is in slowing down to her
pace. I heard from a friend this past week about pacing. A father and
his son are walking from their house to his first day of school. The
father walks normally, and the son is breathing heavily. The dad
looks at him and says, “What's wrong?”, to which the son replies,
“Dad, I can't keep up with your walking!” The father slows down,
because he knows his son needs to be at a slower pace then. With her,
that slow pace is seemingly never-ending.
I heard from elsewhere that a person
who is autistic, or with Down Syndrome, is simply a version of us
that's more humble. That doesn't help her, to simply tell her she's
humble – it's a suggestion that we should consider them to be so.
To be kind. Again, this doesn't help to explain to her. And autism
doesn't seem to have an explanation, or at least not a satisfactory
one. It doesn't change our prerogative, to love justice, seek mercy
and walk humbly. We don't know all the mind's natures: perhaps an
autistic person has the most fantastic mind: the areas that are
damaged in an autistic person leave room for the other areas to grow
further.
I think of the three, humility is the
most important part of communicating and relating to an autistic
person. The communicative skills of a child remind us that we were
once so low – and the fragility of our own, seemingly impregnable
minds.
