Innocence re-discovered..

After 3 exhausting days, the WeCAN conference has finally come to an end. I must admit, not all the lectures/ presentations that i attended made complete sense to me. Some topics were too technical for me to comprehend but some were just right. Learnt quite alot of new concepts and managed to get a comprehensive view into the world of Autism (mainly Asperger's Syndrome).

Started to see their situation in whole new light.. just like how we first understood the difficulties of the visually impaired when we blindfolded ourselves ( be it for 3 blind mice or to
experiment). The general misconception is that they(people with aspergers syndrome) are suffering from some incurable disease but the fact is that they are not that different from us. It's just that situations and emotions that we tend to handle quite easily doesn't seem that easily manageable to them. Sometimes even we (so called normal people) can't handle certain emotion and we blow up a mound into a mountain.

For these people, the world is categorized into 2 (to the best of my knowledge, dun sue me, i am not qaulified enough) aspects.. the logical and the literal. If something doesn't make sense to them.. they won't do it. The latter is the more interesting one. It's a simple case of looking at the world in a literal format.. metaphors do not exist on this plane. For example.. today when i purchased a book written by Eric ( he has aspergers syndrome), rather than saying "would you want an autograph?" he said, "do you want my handwriting on this book?" .. though it seemed funny initially, it made complete sense to me later.. No part of my signature is automated to call it an autograph and neither does it have a graph in it.. Here we are thinking we are smart... just call a spade a spade la.. why term it as the device that excavates dirt ? make it short and sweet..
Its such nature of the syndrome, which has led me to believe that they are not capable of being liars.. example again.. prior to buying that book (for which i and yasmin shared cost), he told us that (like a statement of fact in monotone) he still had alot more books to sell in order to break even.. and that he would really like some support.. there was so much innocence in his voice that we decided to buy that book.. he jus melted our hearts not with sympathy but with sincerity. that is when i realised that in certain perspective, it's us who lack in development and not them..

The truth (my perspective of course) is that we are the ones who have complicated our lives to beyond an irrepairable state. Its just so typical of us, what we do not comprehend , we fear. what we fear, we either destroy or keep out of sight hoping it would disappear.. but honestly they are not different from us at all... hmm starting to feel that some of my close buddies could be autistic.

PS: it would be nice to support his quest of breakin even.. the book costs 25 bucks.. jus consider. the author is Eric Y Chen. He is 22 . Its a collection of peoms and his perspectives..