Recent research shows that eighty percent of autistic women “ remain undiagnosed at the age of 18 ,” and never receive a diagnosis in childhood nor the help that might have come along with it. Today, autistic girls are frequently overlooked in childhood. When I was a kid, not much was known about girls and autism. Although I had to let them go during my twenties and thirties-first because of money and later because of spawning and parenting-they always lurked in my psyche, ready to gallop free. Like Wharmby’s Legos, horses have always been a Special Interest for me. He let go of Legos through his teens and twenties, too worried about seeming “foolish or childish.” But at age thirty, two years before being diagnosed with autism, he purchased the Back to the Future DeLorean, and he has embraced his Lego hyperfixation ever since. He uses the example of his fascination with Legos, starting from early childhood. In his book What I Want to Talk About: How Autistic Special Interests Shape a Life, Wharmby describes how his Special Interests (capital S, capital I) have been with him since childhood. More powerful, more potent, more intense, more important.” “Hyperfixations,” as autistic writer Pete Wharmby calls the intense interests autistic people feel, “are much more than hobbies. And my intense interest in things, like horses. Like it does for many late-diagnosed autistic adults, my entire past shifted into focus. In late 2020, I was diagnosed with autism at age forty-four. And at nine years old, feeling normal is a rare thing for me. To outsiders, Bailey and I are glasses-wearing, strange-hair-having, magnet-school-attending, horse-obsessed losers. She knows everything about horses, and I want to know everything too. I cannot imagine anything more wonderful than that. But Bailey’s family has horses her mother is a rider and so is Bailey. I have never ridden a horse or even spent much time around horses. One of the photo stills shows a racehorse with all four feet tucked underneath its body, a compressed spring of potential energy ready to explode into the kinetic.Īt nine years old, I do not have a horse. Ī late-nineteenth-century debate over whether a horse fully took to the air while galloping was the impetus for the first motion picture, “The Horse In Motion,” filmed in 1878. If you are lucky enough to hear a horse gallop up close, the four beats blur to the sound of a drumroll, brrrum, brrrum, brrrum. When a human child imitates a horse’s gallop, the gait has two beats, one short and one long: ba-Dum, ba-Dum, ba-Dum, ba-Dum. We are horses, blazing a trail between sweet-gum trees, leaping over azaleas, crushing impatiens, bright magenta and white, slipping on pine straw and regaining our footing, then galloping off again. I am nine years old, and my best friend Bailey and I are galloping around my parents’ backyard.
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