Kansas

 I'm doing a bit of a blog reset, which I've done from time to time, which means I'm starting anew in that I'll write as if everything is new. I'm also going to be sharing these writings directly to X and Facebook as both platforms now make it almost impossible to get traction if a link is going of their platform, so for now I'm going to start a small series of my five most important concepts...

When I started writing my book, I had no idea I'd be creating concepts that would make it easier for others to understand the autism spectrum. The title of the book is Finding Kansas and today I want to start a series of my five most important concepts and to which the concept of Kansas is #1.

For those on the spectrum, we will have an area of defined interest, knowledge, or an activity that we will do to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes this works great as I've been waving a flag since the age of three and I made it to being the chief starter of the Indianapolis 500! Other times, well, maybe I should've been doing homework instead of waving a checkered flag to cars driving by near where I lived. 

That's an activity, but often times, when our defined interest or knowledge, we will do whatever we can to steer a subject to our intertest. Now, take this small bit of knowledge about having this area of defined interest or activity and leave it at that. How would you describe that to a person? How would you relay that to a person that doesn't know about autism? How could you put it into words that will make them understand the need? Enter, the Kansas concept.

What if you could only speak and make sense of the world when you were within the borders of Kansas? When you're within the borders you don't walk, you glide on the verge of flight. It just makes sense, you don't over process things, facts are facts, and all makes sense. Now, venture off to whatever state you want to be the opposite of Kansas, and things don't flow. You're asked a question, and you have the answer, but you think, and think some more. The other person gets a bit antsy and says, "come on... think harder!" to which thinking harder never results in anything beneficial when under the gun of the question, and you say, "I don't know." You had the answer, but processing for us on the autism spectrum can take longer. This does not imply that we are slow, far from it as we are processing a world of a fourteen-sided chessboard and trying to calculate an infinite number of moves.

Growth can happen in Kansas. When the clattering of the sound of life is reduced, things can make much more sense. My second-grade teacher knew this, somehow, years before Asperger's was a diagnosis. She used my love of auto racing to springboard my interest in the world. By asking where the track of Silverstone was, I took an interest in learning about new places, cultures, and she opened my eyes to the world around me that wasn't simply a racetrack.

With each year I am on this Earth, I grow more astounded by the power of Kansas in my life, and I love hearing stories from others that found their way through their Kansas. An important thing about this concept, one of which I didn't know when I wrote my book, is that "if you've met one person with autism, you've only met one person with autism." What I just put forth, might be opposite for the next person you come across. This, too, makes it so confusing for those that don't know or understand the autism spectrum to grasp what it all means, but through concepts I hope that it becomes just a bit more clear.