Blog from the Middle Spectrum #3

Blog from the Middle Spectrum #3:
“Abnormal” in the Spotlight

I sit up in bed, the tingle of excitement spreading throughout my body. I almost drop the book in my hand, but I refrain. My heart beats faster, and the smile grows wider on my face. The book that was in danger of falling has given me one of the greatest answers I have ever discovered in my life. I turn my eyes back to what I was reading:

“Van Gogh’s art became bright and brilliant after he was admitted to an asylum. The onset of epilepsy may explain his switch from dull to extremely bright colors. Seizures changed his perception. The swirls in the sky in his painting “Starry Night” are similar to the sensory distortions that some people with autism have. Autistics with severe sensory processing problems see the edge of objects vibrate and get jumbled sensory input. These are not hallucinations but perceptual distortion…” (Grandin 214)

Two years ago I started writing a play called “Beautiful Insanity”. One of my main characters is named Vincent, and he is a painter in an insane asylum. I loosely based him off of Vincent Van Gogh. During the time when I was writing the show I was doing all sorts of research on Van Gogh. I became an expert on his life. I read biographies on him, looked at his pictures online, and recorded any History Channel programs on him. In every single resource I had looked into I had found different reasons for why he was ‘crazy’. One said it was because of his lead based paint. Another said it was because of the medicine they gave him at the asylum. And yet another mentioned him having syphilis, and that making him go mad. None of those reasons settled right with me. Van Gogh had been an ‘odd’ child when he was younger. His mother mentioned him going off in the fields by himself for hours. He was a loner and not of average intelligence, while his brother Leo, was brilliant and made a living off of being an art dealer. Also Van Gogh was not good socially, though he did have one true love in his life. None of the reasons mentioned in these sources made sense. After I finished writing my show I stopped doing research, but if I found something interesting on Van Gogh just out of the blue, I always looked into it.

Now, out of nowhere, I had found an answer. I felt like I had discovered a great scientific fact. But that was not the case, though it is a curious find. I thought of it again, and I laughed to myself.

Van Gogh was autistic.

I leapt out of bed and bolted upstairs to tell my mother. I had finally figured out why I felt like I knew Van Gogh so well. I understood, at last, why I was interested in and could connect with Vincent. He was autistic, my friend, my brother in mind.

There are more out there, not just Van Gogh, who are autistic and we didn’t figure it out. Einstein was probably autistic. TS Eliot was said to be autistic. Even Earnest Hemmingway had odd qualities that would be classified as autistic. All of these men are brilliant, and all were said to be strange. No one could figure out why, but researchers have now. These gifted, brilliant people were on the autism spectrum. It is a blessing in a way, that back then, no one knew what autism was. If that were the case, these people would’ve been known for their autism, not for the beautiful things they created or found. No, instead, they are considered eccentric geniuses.

It is said that genius is an abnormality, but a great one. And that makes perfect sense. Most gifted people, though not autistic, have a hard time socializing and thinking outside their own world. They have the same gifts as an autistic savant, like having amazing memory or being really good at calculations. These things are not normal, but “abnormal”. It is sad, how some see that as a negative. Is being abnormal, being a little bit odd, a bad thing?

I remember a girl in my fourth grade class. She was one of the more popular kids, a queen bee. She was pretty, and surprisingly smart, for a fourth grader. Everyone thought she was special. She hated me though, and she made sure it wasn’t a secret. She would walk by me, and stick her nose up, like I was a disease and she didn’t want to catch it. She would tell me she was smart, making sure I knew it, and that she was perfectly appropriate in her actions. She was cool, not ‘weird’ and ‘off’ like I was.

Like I said, genius is an abnormality that is related to autism. Who knew that me, that smart girl, Einstein, and Van Gogh had so much in common? I guess we all caught the disease, no matter how much she tried not to catch it.