Síndrome de Asperger

Ainda sobre autismo - mais especificamente, a Síndrome de Asperger - decidi colocar aqui um extrato muito elucidativo do livro Martian in the Playground, de Clare Sainsbury. PS. Lamento o texto em inglês mas eu não tenho o menor tempo pra traduzir isso aqui.


Here is one of my most vivid memories of school: I am standing in a corner of the playground as usual, as far away as possible from people who might bump into me or shout, gazing into the sky and absorbed in my own thoughts. I am eight or nine years old and have begun to realize that I am different in some nameless but all-pervasive way.

I don´t understand the children around me. They frighten and confuse me. They don´t want to talk about things that are interesting. I used to think that they were silly, but now I am beginning to understand that I am the one who is all wrong. I try so hard to do what I am told, but just when I think I am being most helpful and good, the teachers tell me off and I don´t know why. It´s as if everybody is playing some complicated game and I am the only one who hasn´t been told the rules. But no-one will admit that it´s a game or that there are rules, let alone explain them to me. Maybe it´s a joke being played on me, I know about jokes. I would be happy if they left me alone to think my thoughts, but they won´t.

I think that I might be an alien who has been put on this planet by mistake; I hope that this is so, because this means that there might be other people out there in the universe like me. I dream that one day a spaceship will fall from the sky onto the tarmac in front of me, and the people who step out of the spaceship will tell me: It´s all been a dreadful mistake. You were never meant to be here. We are your people and now we´ve come to take you home.

In the next few years, I would work out that the spaceship was never going to come and rescue me, but it wasn´t until I was twenty that I finally found a name for my differences, when I was diagnosed with Asperger´s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. Five years later, looking back at my schooldays, I feel regret and anger for the needless pain I went through and for the energy that I and my teachers wasted pointlessly. If the right people had only been given the right information, more than a decade of my life might have gone very differently.