(No, I don’t mean the doll!) Today I "met" amazing Amanda Baggs, a 26-year-old woman with severe autism (considered low functioning) who has filmed and edited the You Tube video you see here.

I suspect that if you spend a little time with Amanda, as I did this morning, watching her video and the CNN newscast about her, as well as reading her writing, you will not only be amazed by Amanda, but amazed by how Amanda gives you hope and raises doubt in your mind at the same time.

For example, Amanda can’t talk, she lost that ability as a young teen. Yet, if you meet her on the Internet, through her writings, you would never label her as “autistic”. Amanda offers interesting insights into how her own autistic brain works…not thinking in words, for example. Or how much energy it takes to engage in the social activities, like waving at a friend, that we take for granted.

And that concept struck me…the “how much energy it takes” concept. I watch that unfold for LuLu all the time. I know that it takes an inordinate amount of energy for LuLu to perform daily academic or social tasks that others of us take for granted. Plus an enormous amount of energy to stay focused, calm down when frustrated, and get un-stuck when she's obsessing on something. Non-autistic or neurotypical (NT) people like you and me both learn these social behaviors quickly and by observation, and do them in an almost automatic way. It's nearly impossible for us to fathom the level of effort those who are not NT go through trying to interact with us socially. Amanda describes it as a foreign language.

In the questions and answers on the CNN site, someone asked Amanda about the idea that she puts forth in her video that autistic people comprehend MORE of the world around them than NT people do. This is in direct contradiction to our belief that autistic people are “in a world of their own” or don’t take in the environment. Amanda’s response was enlightening:

Comprehension works differently for me than it does for most people. I take in all the information, but it takes a conscious effort to take it in in the way that non-autistic people consider understanding. It takes work to understand what people are saying, otherwise they sound kind of like running water. I comprehend more reliably by noticing patterns of sensation than I do by engaging more traditional symbolic thought. My body does in fact respond to what is around me, but it's not always the specific responses that others seem to expect. For instance when Chris came in, my turning away and looking out the window was in fact a direct reaction to her presence, and not something I would have necessarily been doing if she hadn't come in, but she interpreted it as almost a non-reaction because I did not react in the same way a non-autistic person might. In fact one of the things that strikes me every time I see an autistic person is how much awareness they are indicating by reacting to various things around them, and how oblivious most other people seem to that awareness.

How oblivious most NT people seem to that hyper-awareness! That too, spoke volumes for me in watching LuLu. She notices so many details about a situation that I would never notice…and remembers them for years. The color of walls and curtains, the music playing in the background, the numbers of tiles on the floor. She will be the first to point out if a piece of furniture has been moved or associate a person with the saying that was on their t-shirt the last time we saw them, even if last time was 5 years ago. So, being in her “own world” doesn’t seem to apply. Yet remembering the contents of a conversation that's not novel to LuLu or even sustaining that conversation for more than a sentence or two is something she finds nearly impossible.

Amanda gave me much hope; after all, she is living independently (although the energy it takes to engage with the outside world is enormous. Yet, I have two nagging questions after “meeting” Amanda Baggs. The first is “Is LuLu autistic?” And the second is “How much of that is a disability vs. a different ability?”

To be continued…