Journeys with Autism

This past March, my family and I moved from our 22-acre farm in western Massachusetts to the center of a small, friendly Vermont town. Once we got settled in, I looked for ways to meet people in the community and decided to do some volunteer work. Months before I ever considered the possibility of having Asperger’s Syndrome, I managed to find the perfect volunteer job for my Aspie strengths and sensitivities. 

I began working at a local thrift store. All purchases from the store benefit the local area hospice. People in the community donate to the store an enormous amount of everything you can possibly imagine. The atmosphere is wonderful. Perhaps it’s because the store supports hospice, or because the staff is so friendly, or because the volunteers enjoy themselves so much, but I’ve never been in a store that feels so welcoming and so easy for me to navigate.

When I first began volunteering, one of the staff members asked me to straighten up the children’s area. I soon found out that the children’s area is one of the more challenging places to straighten. Kids being kids, things get left all over the place on a regular basis.

But being a mom, I’d brought order out of chaos before. So, I scoped out the situation and set to work. On certain shelves, I put learning games. On other shelves, I put puzzles and board games. Art supplies went on another shelf, and the stuffed animals got several of their own cubicles, with the top shelf reserved for the dozens of teddy bears that had somehow found their way into the store. There were bed linens and baby blankets, toy trains and dump trucks, rattles, action figures, lunchboxes, and tea sets. After two hours, everything had magically found its place, and all was right with the world.

And that was just one day.

The next day, I organized some of the housewares—plates, cups, glasses, blenders, coffee makers, casserole dishes, pots, pans, and the occasional vintage percolator.

The day after that, I organized the linens—tablecloths, napkins, placemats, sheets, pillowcases, and curtains.

When I came in the following week, the volunteer coordinator said that people on the staff were just amazed at how intensely I could focus and how well I could organize things.

It was music to my ears. I love organizing my loft space. I love organizing our family mementos in boxes in the attic. I love organizing photographs on the walls of our house. Since my diagnosis, I count “organizing the things of space” as one of my most enduring Aspie special interests.

But it had never before occurred to me that being able to focus intensely on objects and organize them were actual skills that people outside my house might find valuable. And yet, they do, every day. In general, when I come to work, one of the managers just gives me a box of donated goods, points me to a particular department, and says, “Work your magic.” My favorite days are the ones I spend sifting through a small box full of necklaces, bracelets, and other assorted treasures, untangling one from another, matching up the stray earrings with their mates, and creating symmetry that will last for, at most, an hour.

Sometimes, I’m so immersed in the process that I lose track of time completely.

Through this work, I have found that I love objects. This realization was a little troubling at first, because it’s always been the bedrock of my ethical system that people are more important than objects. But when I began to explore the possibility that I might have Asperger’s Syndrome, I had to take a good long look at my relationship to the visual world. Working in the store helped bring this issue to the fore.

So, I posed the following question to myself: “Do I think that objects are more important than people?” And the answer was an immediate, “No.” I care about people. I’m a wife, mom, and friend. I’ve worked in hospice, battered women’s shelters, schools, and daycare centers. The problem is not people. The problem is that my senses can get overloaded by people.

So then I posed another question: “Do I feel more comfortable with objects than with people?” And the answer was a resounding “Yes.”

I am very soothed by the aesthetics of objects—how they look, how they feel, and in the case of children’s toys, how they sound. Just holding objects in my hands and deciding where to put them is very grounding. And the thrift store offers such great variety. I see things that have come from people’s homes, things that they have had for years, and sometimes generations. My senses of sight and touch enjoy the ever-changing array of objects. I feel calmed and reassured by working with them.

And, needless to say, I love organizing things because it allows me to create order in a world that can very easily overload my senses.

But the work entails more than working with objects. I also help the customers, and I find that I enjoy it immensely. People need to know where to find a particular item, or where the bathroom is, or whether they can use one of the dressing rooms. Once, when I was working on organizing the jewelry, a customer came over and began helping me. We had a very nice chat.

If I had to help customers without the benefit of objects as a kind of “meeting place,” I would become very overloaded. I could not work on the telephone as a customer service person or in an office as a counselor with a full caseload. I need the anchoring in the tactile world. Focusing on work that soothes me, I can thoroughly enjoy the time spent helping and talking with other people.

I still have to be very careful that I don’t go into sensory overload. Ordinarily, I don’t have a big problem with hypersensitivity to touch, but if there are too many people sharing one of the smaller aisles in the store, I can feel my overload meter start to climb. At those moments, I excuse myself and go to the break room, where I can unwind, breathe, and get a drink of water.

I also take care to limit my time on the floor. After two or three hours, I have to go home. Even on the best day, I’m so sensitive to the energy of other people that if I spend too much time there, I can find myself moving toward overload. First, I start to feel flushed and anxious. Then, the mental and physical exertion of parsing conversations and filtering out stimuli begins to feel tiring. Those are my warning signs that I need to leave for the day.

I used to push myself through these kinds of experiences. I wanted so much to be around people, and I rebelled against cutting my time short. But there is only so much my neurological system will allow me to do before I need to rest.

I try to respect that now.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg