A Basement Recovery Room versus Crow's Nest

Two years ago I graduated from Colorado State University's Human Development and Family Studies Master's program. Graduation is usually a time of great celebration and pride. Here I am outside the Alumni Center. They had an old graduation robe that seniors could put on to get their pictures taken by Cam the Ram. Of course I had to go for it :) 

I enjoyed sitting by my friends during graduation. One of them was joking that he looked like one of the kids out of Harry Potter in his robes. Of course we laughed. 

Behind the smile I had, there was a lot of pain. My mom was worried about job prospects for me and she also noticed I had spent more time cranking out pages for my thesis rather than cranking out sweat on the treadmill. I remember walking up to my friend in Moby Arena with tears in my eyes saying, "You know how your thesis was on body image and self-concept? Well, My self-concept just got shot down." My friend understood and gave me a giant hug before we all lined up together. 

After graduation, my mom had a bit of a meltdown in my apartment over my job prospects. She didn't like the idea of me staying in Fort Collins post graduation and going to El Paso on a summer mission trip. 

While other kids were celebrating with their parents over dinner, I tearfully went to the first safe place I thought of: Newsom Hall my old undergrad stomping grounds. One of my friends was still in the process of moving out. His father graciously let me sit on the empty bed and cry as they moved their belongings out. They both prayed for me and were very nice and didn't probe much. 

After they were checked out, my friend invited me to watch a movie with the rest of the Reynolds Team. I came to The Quad and sat in the basement watching the movie. I just didn't want to be alone. I was trying not to cry, but I was anyway. I did enjoy the movie, but sometimes I would cry thinking about my mom's worries or just that graduation night wasn't the happy moment I thought it would be. 

In contrast, Temple Grandin (played by Claire Danes) is portrayed in her movie as going up to the Crow's Nest on her graduation day. She has a smile as she's stepping up the ladder and opens the door as a symbol of her confidence that she could successfully go on to college. Her mother is cheering her on during this moment in her life. In her book The Way I see it, Dr. Grandin says that praise from parents and teachers for tangible major accomplishments like graduations or completing large assignments or projects helps boost the self-esteem of children on the autism spectrum. 

Looking back on that day two years ago, I faced great fear of uncertainty rather than high expectations on my graduation day. Instead of climbing up to some sort of "crow's nest", I was in a basement after a good long cry. According to her movie and her books, it seems like Dr. Grandin knew she had talent to offer to the world and was ready to go on to the next step with the support of her mother and Mr. Carlock her teacher. I wonder if Dr. Grandin draws on this love and support she initially felt whenever she speaks at current graduations or remembers her own. 

    Yet though my own memories of graduation bring back a degree of sadness and fear, I can still draw on the love and support of my discipleship team. Knowing they were there for me that night in the basement of the Quad to support me gave me a glimmer of courage amidst my anxiety and sadness to trust God with the next chapter of my life. 

An Explosion of our Thoughts

I have more empathy for Dr. Grandin's co-authors and other staff than I did this morning. Today I typed up some notes from one of her lectures to give to a teacher who works with a vocational training program in a high school here in Fort Collins. 


I didn't realize how much she jumped around in her lecture - even though she had a slide show - until I started organizing her points into main categories. Oh man... It wasn't impossible, but I did have to work on it. 


Seeing her thought process through my notes made me smile. Though I am not a purely visual thinker like she is, I had problems organizing my thoughts. I would write essays that had good content, but the organization was terrible. Getting yelled at to make sense only made trying to organize my thoughts even harder. I would get scared that what I was saying or writing didn't make sense, and the impossibleness of the task was affirmed if I was yelled at. 


Over time I learned how to write an outline and I saw how others organized their thoughts through reading books. Noting how authors described things and transitioned scenes or ideas gave me a template on how to organize my thoughts. I progressed in my writing as I went through school with the help of teachers who helped me in this area as well as encouraged me to express my ideas in writing. 


Now to tie this in to Dr. Grandin's writing: I only know her through books and lectures. I see the progression in her writing as she has improved in organizing her thoughts. I am grateful that she never got yelled at (as far as I know) for not organizing something perfectly and she had tremendous support from her staff and other writers as she began her writing career. Her brain is an explosion of thoughts - of amazing images. She has others help her piece together into a coherent whole she can present to the world. 


I have had that support through my latter years of high school and throughout my years at CSU. My mind can still be an explosion of thoughts, but I am learning how to put them into a coherent whole as well. Through this process, I hope to share what God has done with my life to reveal the hope He has to offer to individuals in a broken world. 

Truth, Logic, and my Emotional Connection to God

I have always had a physical reaction to music. Mom has stories of how I could clap in time to the music on Sesame Street and how I would move my body to music when I played the piano. Therefore, it was easy to take that reaction and be able to worship with my whole being. People always comment at how I'm always moving during the music part of church.

However, the emotional connection with God came gradually. Even during The Rock, I danced around and stuff mostly to blend in at the beginning. When people got really passionate and emotional during prayer, I didn't get it at first. It might seem odd to people who know me now, but it's a process.

Here is the process:

Much of my early Christian development was focused on learning about God. I first had to learn about God as Creator. This is the most tangible example of how my emotion process to worship worked, so I'll use this as an example. I first had to learn that He was Creator. This meant that I had to learn about why evolutionary theory didn't work and why the idea of an intelligent designer made sense. This was logic.

The next thing that happened was experience. As I went through my biology classes, I saw the complexity of the cell and organ systems in the human body, I realized that an intelligent agent was behind it. This reinforced the logic. I could see and experience it.

Once I was convinced logically and experientially that God was Creator, I felt happy. Someone made me. Therefore someone cares for me. I am not alone. Someone made this world and made it to make sense, therefore, curiosity about the world glorifies Him!!!!!! That excited me because I enjoyed learning about His world anyway :) Then the happiness and 'eeks' flowed out!!!!! When we at The Rock first sang a song that I recognized as a song to our Creator, I went up front. I was a little nervous because I knew it was going to be loud, but I just felt like I had to jump around and praise God as Creator because I finally realized He was Creator and He showed me - He graciously showed me even though I denied it to His face for so long.

I believe God had to teach me physical foundational truths of His presence and how He addresses the larger problem of evil and sin before He began teaching me more about how to have a relationship with Him. Getting concepts about Him as Creator and learning apologetic tools to explain His existence to others tapped into my intellectual side. I got excited about those things first.

However, having a relationship with a largely abstract Person was different. I would see my friends cry at a prayer meeting because they "were feeling their hearts drawn toward Jesus" or longing for Him. I could understand crying for a friend in a biology class that needed to know Jesus because I could see the inconsistency of studying God's intricate creation of the cell and not acknowledging Him for it.

I only really started to get it after my sophomore year of college when I realized that The Lord's prayer started out: Our Father. Somehow God was a parent to us. Back to logic. As I saw in the Bible of how God cares for us, guides us, has rules for us, comforts us, gives us strength and encouragement, I realized those are all things that competent parents do for their children. Trust formed out of that and I would ask Him for simple things. Seeing tangible answers to prayer like having little circumstances work out built that trust and thus reinforced my praying. After trust and that experience that was built on logic finally allowed me to feel God's love.

Why do I draw out this diagram and explain things the way I do to break down my thought processes around my emotional connection to God? Because Dr. Grandin says that she doesn't feel the same awe toward God or scenery He's made like other people due to her autism. That made me wonder for a long time if a lot of my reactions were contrived in an attempt to be neurotypical - especially before I knew I was on the autism spectrum.

Yet I know I have an attachment relationship with God. Recently I read an article about adults with high-functioning autism / Aspergers Syndrome / PPD-NOS who completed the Adult Attachment Interview. They were able to be classified in the usual way and came out with a variety of attachment patterns. Therefore people with autism can form connections to people. Dr. Grandin talks about her mother and Mr. Carlock a lot and I can see from her history that she trusted them growing up and saw them as attachment figures. Therefore logically, I know it is possible for me to have an attachment relationship of some sort with God as He is indeed a personal God. An all-knowing Creator who wants to connect with me will do it taking into consideration on how specifically my ASD affects me because He knows how it does. He knows exactly how my DNA is sequenced and how that affected my brain. That just makes logical sense. I came back to that when I was asking myself if my emotional connection was real.

I realized that I needed more of a logical / intellectual base to have that initial emotional reaction, but once I did and my intellect was convinced of the truths about who God is, the emotion I feel toward Him is indeed real.

Escape and Connection through Music

One of my Pandora stations is Journey. Yes I'm old -  27 years old - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! =O I'm getting old!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway... listening to these really back-in-the-day (Ok, 80's and 90's) songs reminds me of listening to the radio as a kid when Mom and I were in the car or when I got my radio in 6th grade and I would spend hours in my room listening to music. 


Music was my escape from life. Life as a visually-impaired kid who was also on the autism spectrum and not diagnosed was difficult. Not impossibly traumatic, but not easy either. I could get lost in the music pretty easily, zone out, and be in my own world. When my favorite songs came on the radio, I would try and memorize the words. Often times, I would day-dream as I listened to the music. Sometimes my day-dreams would reflect the content of the lyrics, other times the music would be a nice back-ground soundtrack to whatever I was thinking about. 


I'd say later I would use music to connect with my own feelings and to help myself shape a notion of God at around 8th grade. This is normal as teens get more into abstract thinking and meta-cognition, meaning thinking about how they think/feel. This is why some songs are clearly 'teenage-angst' songs :D Songs that would put into words what I felt helped me in 'structuring' my metacognition and processing about life. This processing was something that I had to do a lot of times on my own just because not many people understood the way I thought. 


Music became really therapeutic during the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School and later the terrorist attacks in 2001 on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. During these incidents, I was often left to process my emotions by myself, or I would process them in the process of helping another person process her emotions. I also watched the news with Mom as her source of emotional support. Unfortunately, the images from both events ended up getting cemented in my head. According to Animals in Translation by Dr. Grandin images stick more strongly with people on the autism spectrum because some of us can't verbally repress and work through the images as quickly as others.  She mentions she can't watch violent stuff or else it stays in
her brain & she can't shut it off. That was me exactly. Since I didn't have the words, I depended on the music I listened to for the words. Even now, there are some songs I associate with those events. After the September 11 attacks, the song Shimmer by Shawn Mullins and Overcome by Live really helped me put into words how I felt. I would listen to Shawn Mullin's Soul's Core on repeat, sometimes some of the same songs over and over again as I rode the bus to school. I also listened to Lifehouse's Everything and Breathing on repeat in my discman. Before the other kids boarded the bus, I had that time to cry. 


During Shimmer, Everything, and Breathing I began praying, or listening to those songs as a prayer to God to tell Him how I was feeling and that I wanted the world to be right again. Music was my escape and my way of processing, but it was beginning to be my way of connecting to God. I had a basic understanding that God was somehow in control (didn't realize He was Creator... yet), that He sent His Son Jesus to the earth, and that He had set out standards of right and wrong for us to follow. 


God knew that music was how I escaped my world when it got too hard and how I processed things when I had no one else to turn to. This is why I was able to connect to Him even in the "loud blasted-out" environment of Summitview's college group The Rock my second week at CSU. I could sense somehow that these students were singing to Someone real, and the words were really powerful. The band did a cover of the song Flood by Jars of Clay. During that song, I acknowledged that the secondary PTSD from the September 11 attacks and my feelings around my transition to college were overwhelming me. I began crying. Connecting to God would save me from the flood of my emotions. I prayed for Him to become real to me to help me. 


Instead of it being a numbing agent, I use music to connect to God. It's not my only means of connection, but it's a large part.  When I realize that a song embodies a theological concept that was trying to grasp, and I have that 'aha' moment, I get really excited! For example, I really like the song Our God because it embodies the concept of a sovereign Creator who is involved in His creation and will be victorious over all the pain and sorrow. When I connect to God through music, I am not just singing to the air, I'm singing to a real person, and I'm not listening to wishful thinking. I'm listening to Truth. 

I Sort of Feel like Super-Nerd...sort of!

This seems like an odd title for a post about a career fair,  but it's true. I felt like Super-Nerd...aka Dr. Grandin.  Here's why: I shared my experiences (so far) about my career and what I did and wished I did so that these graduating seniors would be able to do what they wanted in the helping professions. Just telling them to go for it made me smile because that's more encouragement for them. There was a guy who wanted to be a gym teacher and was sort of unsure.  But when he heard that UNC had a program and he could get experience at sports camps and that kind of thing,  he got a bit more perked up.
Just being able to use my experience to encourage others makes it worth it. Even though I am not at a master's level of employment yet,  I shouldn't take what I have for granted. 
Talking about the easy typical stuff will make it easier to talk about the difficult stuff for others' benefit if that's what God wants me to do.
I also realized that I don't have to wait to be at Super-Nerd's level of fame to make a difference.  God wants all of little me and what I'm doing now.

God is Greater than what He went through

Recently due to some instances at work, I have felt a bit blamed and stepped-on for things. I can take it unfairly or I can say, "God is sovereign and I should forgive my people and obviously be upfront and honest when need be." Additionally, I've told God that I really really don't want to do what He seems to be calling me to do and just settle for something less to please people in the here and now.

Today is Good Friday, and like many of my Christian friends, I've read passages dealing with the crucifixion. Jesus was stepped on (probably literally) and the high officials - both priests & those in the Roman government used His case to appease the people and to maintain or gain political popularity. "If we let this guy go, our popularity ratings will be shot in the polls next week." would be what they would say if they were politicians today. So, He's been there as the guy-powerful-people-push-under-the-bus very very unfairly.

He also had a moment where He could've walked away. He could've chosen something different. He even said to His Father, "Lord, take this cup if You are willing, but not my will but Yours be done." He's been there when He had to do something painful but eternally worth it. He had to let his disciples down - for a little bit because they were all thinking, "What the -!!?!? Oh, this isn't good - aw, man, now what!?!"  for the rest of that day and that Saturday.

It's nice to have a God who sympathizes with us in those moments of being walked on and in doing what the Father wants even when we really really don't want to. It's nice to have a God who has felt extreme pain, defeat, loneliness, shame, etc. that was felt on the Cross.

Yet Our God is greater!!!!! I imagine He rose and looked around at the suffering / death / evil, and was like, "What up NOW!?! You want a piece of Me!?!" Ok, maybe not like that, but He is greater than all the pain and sufferering He took on which was all the pain and suffering of this world.

This is why Good Friday is sobering but is still good. Sobering because we remember what Christ went through, and good because we know He sympathizes and He has and will ultimately overcome it all!!!

Our God is greater
Our God is stronger
God You are higher than any other
Our God is healer
Awesome in power
Our God
Our God

:)

Nerdy Geeky Brains!!!!

So both my grad school friend,  former advisor,  and I have no idea what's going on for our meeting in an hour!!!  I blame our specialized and under-connected nerdy geeky brains!!! According to different studies and images of Temple Grandin's brain,  there are less connections between parts of the brain in autism and some specialty areas get very developed. 


My former advisor and my friend are definitely NOT on the autism spectrum, but if nerdy / geeky normal people have some traits that are still within normal limits,  that means their brains might have some mix of over and under connectivity that allows the geeky nerdy traits to happen. This includes being able to code interactions, but forgetting about meetings and such ;)  There's a reason for the "absent-minded professor" jokes :) 


Dr. Grandin and I have more extreme versions and variations of that. This is why we're on the autism spectrum.  But it's nice to know even certain normal brains resemble ours!!!!  Maybe that's why nerdy geeky people keep coming back to or staying in academia!!  Similar brains think alike!!!!! :D