As a child, my autistic wiring brought me incapacities to function
in ways that come naturally to most others. As an adult, it brings
me high functioning abilities in areas that do not come easily to
most others.

When I meet other AS children, I feel a familiar resonance.
Many of them feel like an un-tapped power house maintained by a
keeper that knows little of the controls and functionality of its
facility. To exasperate this perplexity, those we learn and mirror
ourselves with typically know little about our facility because they
are not wired in the same manner as us. Herein lays the biggest
disadvantage to our differences.

To master the controls of my facility and put to use my capacity
required several key elements;

1) A safe place to conduct observation of the world and those in it.

2) Alone time to download and channel information.

3) My natural ability to analytically process combined with a "tool"
that helped me cope and make sense of worldly information.

4) An understanding of my strengths, weaknesses and gifts.

I was like many autistic kids are today; highly sensitive to sounds,
smells, touch and tastes; I had great difficulties regulating myself
in chaotic or a stressful environment, so my way of coping was to
primarily disassociate myself from everyone and everything. As
incapacitating these sensitivities can be, the Grace I see in many
of us is in the abilities and gifts that often co-exist along side
these weaknesses.

I was a scientist in the rough; wired to solve problems; intense
focus abilities with certain subjects; attention to details and
memorization skills. Combine all this with a preference for
routine and order in a chaotic world and I was pre-wired to make
this world and my ability to function within it one big scientific
experiment. Do I sound like a child you know?

My point is; I see in many Autistics the ability to ease the areas
of our discomforts. If caregivers assist by providing a favorable
environment with tools that work with our strengths, we can work
toward functioning at our highest capacity and make use of our gifts
or strengths that are often not present in people classified as
neurotypical.

For me, if I had not found a level of comfort with the world, my
gifted ability to memorize complicated technical data and
systematically run math calculations in my head, would never had
bore fruit as it did for my successful career in engineering. Had
I not observed, systematically classified and labeled the vast
amount of emotions that drive people's actions, I would not be able
to intuitively "read" people with the accuracy I demonstrate today.

Solving the problem of my discomfort with the world required an
environment that was advantageous to putting my strengths to work
combined with a method to organize the enormous amount of
information the world expresses. I will talk about the method that
worked for me in a future article, but I believe the first step for
any autistic is to know specifically what comes easy and naturally
to them. In doing so, when tools are suggested you will know if
that solution resonates correctly for the difficulties you are
working to overcome.