One day, a gorilla touched her soul (My Journey Through Autism):- DAWN
PRINCE-HUGHES
By JENNIFER LANGSTON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
You wouldn't know that loud noises taste like metal, that she sits in a room
with a red light bulb to block other colors or lies on top of a rhythmically
rocking dryer in times of stress.
The college anthropology professor suffers from Asperger's syndrome, an
autism spectrum disorder that she wasn't diagnosed with until she was 36.
It's marked by problems in filtering sensory stimuli, difficulty connecting
socially, obsession with narrow interests and an intense need for order and
repetition.
But today, Dawn Prince-Hughes is personable and witty, with a husky laugh
that erupts in all the right places.
And you would hardly suspect that much of what she learned about interacting
with humans came from watching gorillas at the Woodland Park Zoo.
She's written a book called "Songs of a Gorilla Nation," which chronicles
her experiences with autism and the respite she found in studying gorillas.
After a difficult childhood, a period of homelessness and a stint as an
exotic dancer, she spent her first paycheck at the zoo. For the next 12
years, she found refuge in watching the gorillas' behavior, first as a
visitor, then as an employee and researcher.
One day, as she was obsessively lining up strawberries to feed Congo, a
silverback, their fingers accidentally touched.
"I wasn't focusing on keeping someone boxed out. So when he touched me, he
really touched me. He touched my soul, and that was really a first for me,"
she said.
Growing up, Prince-Hughes said, she didn't realize how odd she was. She had
sensory addictions, craving Alka-Seltzer, the smell of her grandmother's
purse, the theme songs of local newscasts.
She engaged in obsessive behaviors, learning everything there was to know
about Vikings or needing to collect a precise number of lightning bugs or
risk a meltdown.
Classrooms were a nightmare of sensory stimuli, from the fluorescent lights
to the feel of chalk. She spent most of her energy just trying to survive,
putting up filters that most of us are born with.
"So much stimulation streams in, rushing into one's body without ever being
processed: The filters that other people have simply aren't there," she
writes in the book. "One feels as if one were drowning in an ocean without
predictability."
To help combat that feeling, autism sufferers end up building walls in
different ways to help them cope, she said.
Prince-Hughes had trouble recognizing individual faces and would often "look
through" people without responding to them. Her social ineptitude led her to
start drinking in the seventh grade and pretending no one existed.
By the time she first met the gorillas at the age of 20, she had dropped out
of school and bounced around on the streets -- the worst place for an
autistic person to be, she now says.
In typical Asperger's syndrome form, she became obsessed and wanted to learn
everything there was to know about gorillas.
Prince-Hughes, now an adjunct professor at Western Washington University,
admits that she has received plenty of criticism for her views that gorillas
meet the philosophical criteria for what she calls "personhood."
In her view, that includes exhibiting morality, having a concept of the past
and future, an ability to understand complex rules and their consequences on
an emotional level.
In many scientific circles, ascribing human characteristics to animals is
anathema. Her assertion that bonobo chimpanzees can actually speak English
-- if you just learn to understand the accent -- may seem hard to believe.
But Prince-Hughes convincingly describes lessons she learned by watching the
gorillas that she applied with success to her interactions with other
humans.
She describes her time watching the calm, slow-moving animals as a second
childhood, where kids pick up social cues by watching their parents, then
mimicking them.
She learned to acknowledge people with smiles and to invite them into a
conversation with a welcoming sideways touch. She became less tense in
social situations, which improved her ability to read people.
The subtleties of feelings had escaped her until she studied the gorilla
families.
"They gave me my humanity. They gave me the whole range of human emotions
and they also gave me a sense of responsibility," she said.
She figured out that anger often stems from embarrassment and that humor is
a natural response to something that scares you but doesn't end up hurting
or killing you.
She watched how silverbacks cared for their families, settling squabbles and
setting the tone for behavior.
Prince-Hughes now has her own child -- a 5-year-old boy she had with her
partner, Tara, also a college professor. They live in a Bellingham cottage.
That relationship pushed her to seek a diagnosis four years ago for her
previously inexplicable problems. Simply giving a name to Asperger's
syndrome helped her develop strategies to cope with the rages and
awkwardness that plagued her.
It's a normal world she once could scarcely have imagined, although still
fraught with perils.
Social interactions are still exhausting. Brightly lit vending machines are
her worst nightmare. Except for clowns, parades and carnivals.
Since she still needs rules and structure to function, Prince-Hughes lives
by what she calls in her book a code of silverback ethics:
"I remember that my mood can set the tone for a whole group of people.
"I realize that it is my responsibility to protect and nurture those around
me, my family in particular.
"I remember to be gentle in the reality ... that an interesting and
difficult life has given me.
"I affect people."
A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole:-
http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/june_2004/gorilla.html
from Neurodiversity.com :- Songs of the Gorilla Nation : My Journey Through
Autism
Trade Cloth, Harmony, 2004 ISBN: 1400050588
In this elegant and thought-provoking memoir, Dawn Prince-Hughes traces her
personal growth from undiagnosed autism to the moment when, as a young
woman, she entered the Seattle Zoo and immediately became fascinated with
the gorillas. Having suffered from a lifelong inability to relate to people
in a meaningful way, Dawn was surprised to find herself irresistibly drawn
to these great primates. By observing them and, later, working with them,
she was finally able to emerge from her solitude and connect to living
beings in a way she had never previously experienced. Songs of the Gorilla
Nation is more than a story of autism, it is a paean to all that is
important in life. Dawn Prince-Hughes's evocative story will undoubtedly
have a lasting impact, forcing us, like the author herself, to rediscover
and assess our own understanding of human emotion.
Another Book by Prince-Hughes, Dawn
Expecting Teryk : An Exceptional Path to Parenthood
Trade Paper, Swallow, 2005 ISBN: 080401079X
Expecting Teryk is an intimate exploration, written in the form of a letter
from a parent to her future son, that reclaims a rite of passage that modern
society would strip of its magic. Dawn Prince-Hughes, renowed author of
Songs of a Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, considers the ways her
disabilities might inform her parenting. She candidly narrates her
experience of becoming a parent as part of a lesbian couple-from meeting her
partner and the questions they ask about their readiness to become parents,
to the practical considerations of choosing a sperm donor. Expecting Teryk
is expressed through the lens of autism as Prince-Hughes shares the unique
way she sees and experiences.
DAWN PRINCE-HUGHES Ph.D. eBooks:-
http://www.ebookmall.com/ebooks-authors/dawn-prince-hughes-phd-ebooks.htm
Other Autistic Autobiography Books:-
http://www.neurodiversity.com/books_autobiography.html
DAWN PRINCE-HUGHES Wikipedia:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Prince-Hughes
I hope this is useful information in supporting others to understand how as
Dawn Prince Hughes states:- "This is a book about Autism. Specificcaly, it
is about my autism, which is both like and unlike other people's autism.
But, just as much, it is a story about how I emerged from the darkness of it
into the beauty of it."
"I can connect with what Dawn is saying....
I wish I could 'connect' 'with-others' in the way she has done-it learning
about emotion and social interaction in working 'with' gorillas. I struggle
each day with trying to understand this 'hostile-world' I live in and why so
many professionals and other people seem to react to me so 'negatively' and
this reinforces my 'social-exclusion'.
I have this deep need to connect and 'feel-loved' 'with/by-others',
especially professionals and others people, even those within my own family,
friends and social networks, including within the disabled peoples,
survivors and inclusion and indeendent living movements, without feeling
that 'You-and-I' are from different planets which make me feel that I am an
'alien'.
I feel the 'pain and hurt' of 'exclusion' and feeling 'unloved' and a burden
on the system and my family and friends and others, in which they
(professionals and family) don't want hear and they feel more safe in living
in 'denial' and keeping me at 'a-distance' from them.
I crave for 'non-judgemental' meaningful purposeful, loving, equal, caring
and supportive empathtic relationships within my life which I have struggled
to achieve throughout my lifecourse from childhood.
I feel lonely and isolated and 'disconnected' from 'others' and need others
understanding, patience and support and appropraite resources to enable me
to feel I belong within the human-race' as a Autistic/Neurodiverse disabled
person and heal all the pain and hurt I have suffered on the long path of
unhappiness and being misunderstood that I have experienced on a daily basis
in trying to understand why I am 'different' and why my '(Neuro)-Diversity'
is a problem to others."
"Is this too much to ask for?"
"One day, a gorilla may touch my soul, like is touched Dawns and enable all
the suffering to come to an end." Are you that 'non-judgementa"l, loving and
caring gorilla I need to support 'new' positive directions within my life
that heals all the 'scars' I have suffered through my lifecourse journey up
to now at 44 years old?"
Yours
Colin Revell
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live™ Messenger has arrived. Click here to download it for free!
http://imagine-msn.com/messenger/launch80/?locale=en-gb
________________End of message______________________
This Disability-Research Discussion list is managed by the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds (www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies). Enquiries about the list administratione should be sent to [log in to unmask]
Archives and tools are located at:
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
You can JOIN or LEAVE the list from this web page.
|
