Autism and Liminal Space
When I was a kid, I used to walk home at lunch because I avoided the school playground at lunchtime. There was far too much social activity to process. On the way back to school, I would take the 200 bus.
Waiting at the stop, I saw the bus arrive; I knew I should hail the driver and the bus would then stop so I could get on. But the association with the movement that I must make to raise an arm and hail the driver, the actual physical process, carried no weight. I did nothing.
When the driver did not stop because I had not hailed him, I just watched the bus pass, feeling powerless to influence events. Without being over melodramatic, I can say those experiences traumatised me, and that feeling of helplessness and dejection at not being able to hail a bus is still there as a painful childhood memory.
Get over it, you say. True. I have. We all do in time.
I know now how to hail a bus because I have learnt to give weight to the relevant mental associations. See bus, lift arm to engage the driver, bus stops. What to do when I get on a bus is another matter. It’s another unpredictable world in there. To get there I have to pass from one space to another, from certainty to uncertainty. And this transitioning between the known and the unknown lies at the heart of the neurodiverse experience of the world, a life on the threshold…
