This I Believe about Autism: All the World Around Us Is Alive

An essay by Celia

Every autistic person has a unique way of experiencing and making sense of the world. Through our This I Believe series, members of the Embrace Autism community share the beliefs, experiences, and moments that have shaped their lives.

In this essay, Celia reflects on a lifelong connection with the natural world, the search to understand communication beyond words, and how receiving an autism diagnosis transformed not only how they understood themselves, but how they understood life itself.

All the World Around Us Is Alive

I excel at communication. The old poplar down the street will agree. When the wind blows, its silvery leaves rustle like thunderous applause, soft silver medals dancing, flashing in the sun. I stand quietly next to him, rest my hand on his trunk, and suddenly I can’t feel my skin anymore—just the bark, rugged and welcoming, absorbing my entire body like a warm bath. The sheer joy and meaning conveyed in this experience are impossible to put into words. I suppose a very rough translation might be: ‘Hello’.

This language has always felt natural to me. As a child, I knew each tree in my school playground personally. Every day I would greet them in a whisper, so as not to be called loony by my classmates. They (my classmates, not the trees) rarely included me in their games – except as a forfeit: whoever lost would have to pretend to be my friend. Trees didn’t do that.

That subtle difference of treatment stuck with me as an unsolved mystery. Many years later, I started a PhD in cognitive linguistics, in which I decided to study the animacy hierarchy: I wanted to understand what exactly made humans treat themselves as supremely animate, and almost all the rest of the universe as inanimate.

Take a perfectly ordinary sentence: The boy said hello. Then replace boy with tree, and see what happens. Linguists will call it anthropomorphism, i.e. projecting human characteristics onto an inanimate referent. They’ll say: it’s a metaphor, because trees can’t really talk, you know.

To me, trees do talk. Not in the way humans do, obviously. But in their own, unique way which any verbal language, whether poetic or scientific, can only awkwardly evoke. This, if anything, should lead us to acknowledge the limits of humanity, rather than its supposed superiority in an animacy scale.

I was convinced that, if we could define animacy as something beyond human interaction, something that unites us with non-humans too, then it would actually enrich our understanding of language, and cognition in general.

Before I could finish that thesis, however, I was swallowed by the great wave of burnout. I couldn’t speak, think, read, or indeed do anything besides lying in bed. Had I become inanimate? Honestly, I didn’t know. That time was by far the hardest in my life, but also the most enlightening. At age 31, I received my autism diagnosis.

You might say, well, this is how the story ends: at last, I’ve understood why my supervisor kept reproaching me with analysing metaphors too literally, or giving immoderate importance to inanimate objects over humans! Except it wasn’t a final lesson, but a new beginning.

It’s ironic how autistic people can sometimes be akin to trees, from a neurotypical point of view. You can’t have a conversation with them; besides, they don’t feel empathy! In a society which values only certain modes of communicating, behaving and living, it is no surprise that autistic – and, more generally, disabled—people are considered ‘less’. It is no surprise that birds, trees, rivers, the ground we stand on, are considered even lesser. But I am autistic, and I can tell you from experience that this hierarchy exists only in your mind.

I believe that all the world around us is alive. Wonderfully so.

Especially in these troubled times, it is crucial to explore other ways of communicating and interacting, not only with our fellow humans, but also with other living and non-living beings. Autism is one of them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, the old poplar has called me.

About

This essay was awarded First Place in the Embrace Autism This I Believe Essay Competition. Congratulations, Celia!