After a month of jigsaw puzzle piece imagery (Autism Awareness Month) I happened upon this fridge magnet that read "I'm not a complete idiot, parts of me are missing." Sarcasm aside, it reminded me of "Fringe-TV's" 'Walter Bishop' and made me wonder at how so many of my favorite characters have been outcasts, absent-minded professors, aliens, or robots in search of their humanity. In short, people looking for "parts missing." Such is what I identify with? Why?
Then came the episode "The Last Sam Weiss:"
"WALTER: I know what it’s like to feel unequal to the task required of you. To feel incapable. I’ll never be the man I was, but I’ve come to embrace those parts of my mind that are... peculiar and broken. I understand now that’s what makes my mind special. (studies her for a moment) I wish you could see yourself the way I see you. You have no idea how extraordinary you are. If you would embrace that, there’s no end to what you can do."
These thoughts are to that person who wrote that dialogue –from someone who has often felt unequal and incapable. After years of putting my peculiar 'self' down on paper trying to understand (and writing a pretty hefty memoir in the process), I'd come to the conclusion that I would never be the person I could have been had I but been born with all my perceptual parts intact. ...And that was, just, well, that.
But your insight, dear writer, came along just as I happened to discover Temple Grandin. Someone who, after much difficulty living with her own specialness now revels in being extraordinary. Someone who had been taught by her mother, as my family had once taught me, to "see as they see."
Perhaps that kind of sight-training is the best guide for anyone's passage into a 'real world' filled with more dimensions than can be perceived. To make that world your own is to accept what you lack. Embracing who that makes you will reveal what you still can be. I salute that 'Walter' in all of us. ...Thanks.
