 introduce a person who traveled here from Michigan, came in last night, it's four degrees in Michigan, and she came to a beautiful place. Professor Leanne Holliday-Willie, who holds a doctorate in psycholinguistics, was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome when she was 35 years old. Since her diagnosis, Leanne has focused her academic research on females with Asperger's syndrome and communication skills for people on the spectrum. Leanne is the author of the new book, Safety Skills for Asperger Women, How to Save a Perfectly Good Female Life, and the author of the international bestselling books, Pretending to be Normal, Living with Asperger's syndrome, Asperger's syndrome in Adolescence, Living with the ups, the downs, and the things in between. Asperger's syndrome in the family, Redefining Normal. She's also the senior editor of Autism Spectrum Quarterly. She's a blogger for Psychology Today and a consultant with Brains, the Behavioral Resources and Institute for Neuropsychological Services. Leanne has been featured in USA Today, The Associated Press, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, Autism One Radio, Oxygen TV, several NPR stations, and many other media outlets. Professor Willie received her EDD from Mississippi State University in 1988. Though Professor Willie loves helping others understand Asperger's syndrome, her professional employment happens at Kirkshire Farms in that question facility she owns and operates. Please welcome, warmly, Professor Wiley. Light right there, isn't it? Dang. Lights, a little, maybe, don't, okay. So I'm Leanne, well, nope, hold on, okay. I'm Leanne Holiday-Willie, and it's nice to meet you all. Thank you to our very gracious hosts and to all of you who have come to see me from the land of cold ice and lots of lakes. My daughter's always say to me, you should know by now, and I'm gonna get this wrong. I think we're in an island, but I think Michigan's a peninsula. Whatever it is, I'm coming to you from there. So I know it's attached to things, but that's up in the UP, so. My presentation is about how I have been able to move from a person with moderate Asperger's syndrome to someone who today would not qualify in the DSM-5 as having Asperger's syndrome, though I was diagnosed by Tony Atwood, who's a very brilliant clinical psychologist from Britain who now lives in Australia, and he had to meet my parents, look at my old records, study my early influences and my early behaviors, to really get a diagnosis at 35, because by then I was able to really fake my way in the neurotypical world, and I had ferreted out all the little clues and all the social skills that made me look really successful. What I was never able to do, and I'm still not able to do, is erase the anxiety and the confusion that comes from doing all that. So when I talk to you and I come up here and I sort of look like anyone else and speak like anyone else and have decent communication skills, the fact is that inside, I'm having to consciously work on my hard drive to say, do this, do that, do this, do that. It's none of it is intrinsic, none of it comes naturally, but I've mastered it, and I've never heard the word recovered before addressed to autism. I find that quite interesting. I wouldn't say that I'm recovered so much as I'm happier and more able to do what I wanna do without going home and circling and fetal position in my closet. So I was able to get a doctorate and get married and I have three daughters. One is on the spectrum, one has an official, my twins, one is on the spectrum and one has an ADHD diagnosis, but they do manifest behaviors in very similar ways. In fact, the one who is more socially inept has the ADHD diagnosis and the one who is more socially keen does not. I think that's my own version of home therapy that made the difference there. I took my daughter who was like me and I gave her all the tricks of the trade that my father had taught me, his mother had taught him. I have a cousin with regular autism. It's our families in genetic studies. I mostly work with the Brit, Simon Baron Cohen, Francesca Hape, Uda Frith, Dr. Gould, Dr. Judith Gould, I don't know why, but I do some with Yale, but for the most part I'm a British, okay, whatever. So I do my things with them. I'm kind of their bug under the microscope. So it's their work that's helped me become pretty comfortable in my skin. I wasn't always that way and I'll share with you those stories now. So my intent is that you'll have heard these great speakers tell us what autism spectrum is, some of the new promises and developments and neuroscience behind it all and then I come in and say, okay, this is how it kind of feels. Mind you, when you've met one of us, you've met one of us. I'm very different from someone else. My father would talk like this and say, why did you write that book in so many words? I could say it in 10 words, do it again. You know, we're all, and my daughter that's on the spectrum just doesn't talk. She just looks at you and smiles and she's gorgeous. So she just smiles and everyone says, oh, isn't she nice? No, she's not nice, but she has a look that's very nice. So she's not. So this is me. Oh, that thing about lying, I don't lie. I don't know how to lie. I didn't know that I was supposed to know this at four. I don't understand. Here's my thought, okay, here's my bias. Theory of mind. If we all said what we were exactly thinking, we wouldn't have a need for theory of mind. If I ask you if I look fat in this outfit, I don't want you to say, I don't care if I look fat or not to begin with, but I want you to say yes or no. If I say, am I speaking too fast? I don't want you to say no and then whisper to your friend, I can't understand her. I only, but then my mother, my mother who's nothing but neurotypical will say to me, Lee and Willie, the truth may set you free, but it doesn't set me free. So that's what happens to me in my life. So this is my beautiful horse. I have four. This is Charlie and we met. I was matching eyes. This is on the cover of my new book. Is this a new book? I don't know which one. I think it's crap. I don't even know what book it is. One of the books I wrote, Safety Skills Maybe. I don't, oh, it's the new edition of Pretending to Be Normal. That came out in a new edition. Okay. And I'm now doing a book on movement and how it affects people on the spectrum. We're doing yoga, Tai Chi. We're going out into the holistic. We're coming back in with equine therapy, hippotherapy. So you have anybody that is really interested in writing a chapter. I get to be their boss and I would love, because I know California and New York tend to be the big spots in America for our research. So if you have anything you'd like to share, hit me up on ASPE News at Yahoo and maybe we can get together. So there's the stuff. All right, so who are we? This is sort of the layman's version of who we are. We're not bound by class or gender. We do find out that people in minority groups are not diagnosed as readily as the middle class white kids are. We know there's a myriad of reasons for that, stemming from everything from possible fear of authority or run-ins with authority figures who have done the profiling or whatever. And also English as a second language can interfere with that. And so can the fact that a lot of kids who are from minority populations maybe don't make it to school as often. And by minority populations, I mean like ESL kids. You know, and they're working and they're doing it. I sound like such a bigot when I say this and I don't know how to say it because it's from research. I want, my bottom line is I want all these kiddos and all these adults in our group. I'm just telling you reasons why social scientists have said they think we don't get these kids. And it's a shame because it's nothing other than finances and finding them and making them feel loved and supported. So if there's no reason why we don't have these kids and these adults in our group, they're there. We're just not finding them or they're not finding us. So anyway, we're capable of lovely lives. You know, I have a real big prejudice about, I'm gonna say it and I shouldn't, I promised my husband I wouldn't say this, but he's not here. And with all due respect to people who want to cure autism, I would love to help the children and the adults who are really struggling in life because of autism. I have relatives who cannot go to the bathroom when they need to, they just drop, drown, go. I know what it's like to have a child who throws the dog off the stairs. I know what it's like to have a knife pulled on me. I understand how difficult more severe autism can be. I also understand that my brain works in a way that's fascinating. I understand that my father who was never a part of any group who was beat up most every day of his life helped design the F-15 airplane and helped Gus Grissom survive his first failed Gemini trip. He tried to tell Gus what to do for a second and Gus died. I think there is something to be had in our brain and I am not one that's gonna tell you to get rid of it. However, I will be one that says help us fit into this society, help us be the best we can be. And like Temple Grand and I just, that's my theory. So I don't wanna be a brat about it. Just when I hear things like that from wherever I go and I hear it everywhere I go, I think of my dad. And I think of how they wanted to take him out of school and how they wanted to put him in a special institution and not send him to college. And he was one of the most brilliant men in the world and it makes my skin crawl. So I have to do that for my daddy because there's no one better in the world than my dad. So that's my little speech. We have a neurobiological difference. Clearly you've heard a ton about that these past couple days or these past couple hours. I'm gonna try to pull this away when I cuss. Cuss. So a peek inside, I say an ADS mind. This is inside my mind. My real experiences that came. I used to out my daughter. I might out her in this slide, but normally I don't because you could figure out which one she is. So subjective rules make no sense. How do I know how to behave? Okay, this is me, the little boy without shorts on. That's not really me. But as a kid until I was about 10 I saw no point in wearing a shirt because none of the boys were a shirt. So why would I wear a shirt? No girl in Europe wear shirts. So who's decided that in America we must wear shirts? I'm philosophically a poet. Not now, I wouldn't bring these babies out for anything. But back then I didn't see why I would have to be in clothing that was tight and restrictive and disgusting while the boys were running around half naked. So this would be me. And I remember when I went to my first teen party at the pool, we do have pools in the Midwest even though it's a two month opening. And I would be like taking my top off like, oh wait, no, hold on. Cognating, top stays on, memorized, top stays on. Okay, then you're a little older and you go to a skinny dipping party. No, top stays on. Oh, you're not cool. We're 18, we can skinny dip. Top stays on, the rules have changed. So I never quite fit in. Big deal, I did or didn't take my top off. That's not a big deal. But when all of these things add up it does interfere with your quality of social life and your quality of life and your quality of happiness. And those are the things I would like to help our kiddos with and our elderly more than I think we tend to do. So I wasn't sure how to behave. My daughter went to, I found a pit bull in a car. The car was turned on, the pit bull was trying to get out. She was at a gym, she flipped out. She's 24, she's actually in politics. So that's a little, hmm. So she was banging on the window, couldn't get the window open and was trying to break it. Well, these two big bodybuilders come out and they're like accosting her. How dare you, my dog will tear you up. My daughter has a pit bull, she's not afraid of pit bulls. She starts having a huge confrontation. Somebody calls the police. The police come and my daughter is having a fit. Long story short, the policeman tells my daughter to leave to go in and wait and speak to her later. And he said, it is wrong to have your dog in the car, but it's nice weather. And my daughter said, it's illegal to have a car running while no one's in it, that could hurt a child. She trumped the policeman. The policeman didn't like that. You can see where this is going. About three months later, my daughter had to go to the bathroom, she has no bladder control and she was at a tailgate. She was not drunk, she was on a college campus. She dropped her album rent. She got arrested, it cost her $2,500 to get that a sponge from her record. And I said, you know, if you would get a note from your doctor saying that you have bladder issues, that would be, they would throw it out. She doesn't want anybody to know. She doesn't want anyone to know, she has any differences. She said that she's on the autism spectrum two times in her life and both times we're in defense of my father. So I'm just taking off my shirt. She's getting into, you know, a breakdown fight. She's been beat up, she's been black eyed, she's been strangled, she's been abused. It does interfere with your life. Reality or pretend, if you're old, you'll remember this. Do you remember P.F. Flyers made you run fast and jump high and I heard this commercial over and over and my goal was to be the fastest person in the fifth grade and I finally talked my Scottish, very cheap father or as he says, frugal into buying me P.F. Flyers and I'm telling you what, I was like supersonic fast. I think it was probably because I had the placenta, placenta, what the hell? I had the placebo effect. And that's disgusting. And, but I did, I worked well with it and then though, so I'm saying to my dad, no dad, this is real, my time is faster. So I saw a commercial for Wonder Bread, which made you grow. So I wanted to be five eight and I'm only, okay, I'm five five and a half and that half is essential. So I got to, I ate this entire, I was eating loaves of Wonder Bread every day and making my dad measure me every day. And I never grew and he waited me out like a good ABA guy, he waited me out and eventually said, see, it's not helping you. So, you know, you can't, he taught me statistics. I have dyscalculia, I can't do mathematics, but I can understand research to sign and I can understand the concept of probability and statistics, I just can't calculate them. So, you know, I learned the hard way what propaganda was. Again, why is this a big deal? Because at this age, I'm 55, I still go through life saying, is that true or are you telling a joke? Is that, are you being, is that an idiom? Do you know where that idiom came from? I know where that idiom came from. Do you know that is an idiom? What do you know about English? Because I'm a linguist, they're gone. I've lost them, they've left the room. So my friends are few and far between because I don't wanna talk about the color of their dress or the black and white, golden, red, whatever the dress, who gives a shit dress. Sorry, I had concussions too, so I'm using that now. I've had major concussions many times with my horses, so I'm allowed to curse. So you begin to feel sort of like a fool and sort of like you're not smart. And that's no fun because the only thing I take pride in is I have a decent intellect and I have a decent sense of humor. So when those things are stripped from me, when I miss a joke or when I have not used or I've not understood a part of speech or a conversation or I've left in the middle because it was boring or whatever, I've told the truth that apparently four-year-olds don't know to not do, I'm left alone. And even though I was, and I'm not bragging here, I'm just giving you an example because this means nothing to me. I was on the dance courts all through high school. I just got elected to my high schools and it's a huge high school in St. Louis, Missouri. Hall of Fame, I'm like, oh, I'm getting letters. We thought you had it all together, you were the smartest, funny. I was just doing what I could to make people laugh at me and not beat me up. And I used my humor and that got me through. Now those folks that knew me are reading my books and saying, you know what, now that you mention it, now they're spilling how weird they thought I was. But because I was funny, I got away with it. So I taught my kids to use their repertoire of jokes. And I have books where I memorize the jokes and I tell them. And then I took speech and drama from the time I was like five till I was in community theater as an adult. And that's what taught me comfort in front of crowds. This is way easier for me than talking to you one-on-one. I could do this all day. You wanna have drinks with me and I start to hyperventilate. I'll have to take a pill to get through it. And so that's way more difficult. I learned about vocal content and prosody and tone and articulation and eye contact. And I told Dr. Atwood that I could not be on the spectrum because I didn't think I was. And I said, I can't be. I make really good eye contact. And he said in his English voice, he said, no, you don't, Leanne. You stare like a wolf and that's criminal and frightening. And I said, no, I'm staring at, I'm making eye contact. And he said, that's staring. Eye contact is a give and take. So now I tell my every conversation I have unless it's with like my husband who is weirder than I am. I just, I'll stare. And then when I'm talking, I look away. And my head is saying, you're looking away. And I'll say, I'm looking away. Oh, did you hear that? I'm looking at you now. So my internal voice is always external. It's always external. So you hear what's inside and out and sometimes they don't match. So it's really, because I'm talking about me, not you. And you're like, right, okay. So routines are never routines. I did this because I feel like my life is in a house of mirrors or a house of glass. And it's very creepy. I cannot stand to the point where I'm in marriage counseling. I'll be home at noon. Noon 05, noon 10, it's one o'clock. I've watched three Judge Judy's. It's now 430 and he's still not home or my daughter's not home. I have, I'm calling, I'm legitimately calling hospitals. 9-11 you can imagine when I couldn't get ahold of anybody. These are the things that affect us in daily life. You get a call from the school. Now this is me as an adult, pretend you're a kid and you, well, we, all of a sudden that got on me. Pretend you're a kid and the recess is canceled or your teacher didn't show up or the person that you thought was gonna ask you out for the Valentine's dance asked your best friend. Every kid deals with the anxiety and the confusion of those times. But for us, we don't have a quick rehab. We don't have a quick excuse, escape, second plan. It's that plan or no plan. So we can have a meltdown, a breakdown, a disappearance, loss of self-esteem, all those things. Again, each little piece is what makes your life harder. It's like playing Jenga. You've taken another little piece out, one on its own, eh, two, eh, but when you start to pull off little pieces of you, you lose who you are. Then you overcompensate and you become somebody who says when the boys say to you, okay, I'm gonna rip that lie down. When the boys come to you and say all the fun girls put out and you get the definition of put out and you go, well, I'm fun and they go prove it and you do. And then you find out that that's not what all the fun girls do. Well, you didn't know that. And now you're at the doctor and now you're having date rapes and now you're, that's my experience. I took things literally. Boys, predators from business. I had somebody go bankrupt on our farm. It's a half a million dollar farm. My husband's a professor. I'm a writer and a writer. We don't make money to pay for a home, three kids, college education and a half a million dollar barn, we don't. So, you know, our dilemma is I get involved with people and I can virtually, every one of my experiences is proven that I will be hurt, either physically, mentally or emotionally. And I cannot think of one where that hasn't happened, except from my father. So, gosh, I'm so glad the doctors today were talking about sensory integration dysfunction. This is the one thing I cannot cognate my way out of. Thank you, God bless you and I love you. You can do what you can to wear soft clothes. I understand I can do some of that. But for the most part, the world is full of sensory integration. My horses and I are one because I spirit and move faster than they do. So, my horses have to take care of me because I'm spooking and then they're like, what is it and we're off we go. So, iron, I love heat and my dad said I would touch the stove and he kept saying hot, hot, hot. Yeah, hot, hot, hot. One day I put the iron on my wrist and it sizzled up and I have a big scar there which later turned out to teach me right from left. But it, I don't, it didn't hurt. It hurt, but it didn't hurt. I mean, I felt it, but it didn't hurt. I have, I had a colon resection. I lost like 22 inches of my colon, the leaky gut stuff. I didn't even know I was having a colon attack. I was throwing up and I had the signs, but I didn't know. I had natural childbirth. My twins were each almost seven pounds. My daughter was 10 pounds. I'm just like, I don't want medicine. Just get this thing out, pop, pop, go, you know. So, I don't, I have that weird pain syndrome where I have had self-interest behaviors because I have to do something to feel it. Just to feel my body and earth. I want to jump off of here to feel my legs. I have a weird sense of my body and space. Well, now that's caught up with me and I have arthritis and headaches and my neuroimaging wasn't good and the kitty cat's me spooking. Huh, and the noise. Oh, my Lord have mercy. Hearing my voice in my head makes me want to cut out my vocal cords. I cannot stand the vibration that I'm hearing in my jaws, in my head, it's the most annoying. And I was going to be a broadcaster. I know I have a decent voice, but I don't like to, I don't want to hear it. I want to shut it, you know, I want to close it off. Noises don't go away. I can hear rattling of dishes as loud as I can hear people talking. So for me, it's an auditory processing. I can't separate foreground from background. That's extremely annoying, especially when you have kids. You're trying to be a good mom. You're in the front car of your massive suburban and they're in the back, all three talking to you at once and all you hear is Charlie Brown noises. You know, I can't understand them and it makes me very uncomfortable and it makes them very angry and then they start throwing things at my head and then it's a whole nother kind of day. So there's the tags from the clothes. We talked about that. My mother said in the first few years that she would take me places. She said she'd bring three or four outfits because by the time we got to where we were going I would always be stark naked. Because in the 50, well, I was born in 59. In the early 60s it was still the scratchy, the scratchy dresses and the girls. I couldn't wear pants until I was in seventh grade. So it was the skirts and I liked tight clothes on my, you know, it didn't work. So forget just the top. I was like nudist camp kid. And then that little guy is a gallbladder. My husband wants, these men were asking me if I knew we were at a volleyball tournament and the women don't hang out with me. So I was hanging out with the guys and they were asking me if I knew this doctor they played golf with. And I said, yeah, he was my surgeon. Oh, what'd you have done? And I said, well, I had a colon resection. Do you want to see my scar? I was telling them they acted interested. So I was getting very involved in the surgery. My husband pulls me aside and he said, that's disgusting. A, nobody wants to see your scar. And B, nobody wants to hear about such an embarrassing surgery. And I said, well, that's not true because Katie Carrot just did a thing on colons. And I think it's good to be a spokesperson for gastrointonitis and what do I have? Diverticular disease. I think that's good. No, they were embarrassed. And now you can embarrass the whole family. So I went into the janitor's closet after hearing this and stayed there the whole day and missed my kids playing because I thought I was doing a good thing. And I was mortified to have anyone tell me you've just embarrassed the whole family. Now in hindsight, I have of course come up to those men and said, did I embarrass you? How much damage did I do to our friendships? And I have made my husband apologize profusely. I don't know who's telling the truth, but I don't care. I'm right to tell you about what can happen to your body when bad things happen. It's like not mentioning breast cancer. Of course you do, duh. So the man from the south, which is my husband, can just suck it because that's not how it goes. And yes, he'll see this and go, oh, here we go again. So special interest and other, what does this say? Special interests are not often appreciated, supported, or encouraged. So that would be my husband on the left. Let me ask you something. They're golfing, it's windy, it's rainy, they're probably gonna get electrocuted and they'll talk about the 18th hole, the 13th hole, like it was the first coming of God. And you'll think it's fabulous if you're a golfer or a baseball player or a brilliant scientist and that's fantastic. But my father, the man on the right, designed a steam engine kit that went into his car and saved considerably in gas. And this was in the 70s when we had to stand in line to get gas and the oil companies were really tight. We weren't being able to buy our product. And all he wanted to talk about was how he was gonna change the environment. He's an old farmer and turned engineer through back in the day. And this was a 67 cougar, the lights used to go on and off. Remember, they were really cool. They go, they had a door that shut over them and that was really cool. Day one, he disconnected that because that's just a potential problem for, you know, I'm not gonna have that on there. So all the coolness of this car was slowly stripped away. But, you know, and no one wanted to talk to my dad about that, it could have, those sorts of things, Priuses, we want those now. But somehow golf is okay, but toilet bowl water with color drops in it is boring. Me talking about my horse's feet are boring. What, who gets to decide that? This is why I can't ever find that I want to be in the normal world, the typical world, because I think why isn't what my dad's doing far more interesting than what you, how far a little ball went. I defy you to explain that, you cannot. You can say, oh, golfing is good for the body. All right, great, let's talk about that. No, you just want to talk about how you got a good shot and almost got a hole in one. I don't care. And I like golf, but who decides? Who decides? Unfair. So this is me at parties. The first thing I do is I do, I used to self-medicate very heavily with very toxic non-prescription drugs and I didn't do them at parties. I did them so that I could get to the party. And I would drive myself to the parties, fully loaded on God knows what. And then as an adult, I realized that was not only illegal, but it was unhealthy. And I went on medication per my physicians. I'm now winding off of a couple of them and I'm a little uptight, so you might see a little nerves that wouldn't normally be there. But I run to go to parties and the first thing I want to find is their pet because that pet is going to come to me and be nice or tell me the truth or look me in the eye and say, get out or I'm going to bite you. They don't lie. They don't pretend. They don't talk behind your back. They don't talk in subtext. They don't use linguistics and words and vernacular and jargon that I have. Okay, I went to Texas to meet my husband and he kept saying, what do you want to drink? And I said, I don't know. What do you have? And he said, well, I have Coke and I have tea. And I said, oh, I don't really want Coke and I don't really want tea. I'd really like a root beer. And he said, well, I said I had Coke. And I said, okay, yeah, but I don't want Coke. And he said, well, you just said you wanted root beer. I said, yeah, I want a root beer. And he goes, well, I said I had Coke. And I said, yeah, I know you said you had Coke. I don't want Coke. I want root beer. So apparently down South Coke is vernacular for, I call it soda and Michigan, they call it pop. Okay, whatever. It just, you know, I don't even order it anymore because I'm afraid it's going to be a whole nother thing. And now they serve TLC, THC, THC in Washington. So watch me order that and not be able to find my way back home. So I'm just staying clear of it now. And he told me once he said, well, yeah, that doggal hunt. And I said, you said you didn't like dogs. And he said, I hate them. I said, well, who's dog hunts? And he goes, what do you mean? I said, you just said that doggal hunt. And he goes, yeah. And I said, well, where is it? I love dogs. Where's the dog? I like hunting dogs. Where's the dog that hunts? What are you talking about? He didn't even, some people use idioms and vernaculars so intrinsically that they forget other people don't speak that way. So I ask you, when you think about theory of mind, I'm supposed to be the one that can't read people. People that use vernacular and idioms are not reading me. How many times did I have to say, I want a root beer before my husband or any of his family members were able to say, oh, you want a soda? Pop, what do you call it up North? No, how many times did I have to say, where's the dog that will hunt before they realized they were using an idiomatic expression that didn't resonate with me? So I have to double dip. I have to go into the tiny bit of autism that I have left and work my way through that and then say, okay, I'm down South. What are the words? Now, anytime I travel somewhere, especially if I go overseas, I learn some of their catch phrases so that I am not so far behind. So who's doing, I'm like trilingual and I get upset sometimes. And I know I shouldn't, but I kind of get upset when people say, well, she has autism. She doesn't understand. You're not speaking correct English. So non-verbal inaccuracies. This is something we really talk about in non-verbal learning disabilities. And there was a time when NLD was really, Dr. O'Rourke was big into this and we were getting some good money and some good finding behind NLD. And the main difference between NLD and say Asperger's syndrome was sort of looking towards the math land and saying that we weren't, that NLD kids had spatial relations problems and they had more dyscalculia, more problems with time and sequence and left and right and direction. And that certainly fit my profile. Those are the things that I haven't let go of in the little bit of autism that I have. And so I think that non-verbal, what is it? It's over 80% is our non-verbal communication. I have all my degrees are in communications and I think I studied that which I did not understand. And so when I look at people and I try to do those faces, I can see, you know, Baren Cohen, who Dino is related to, well, shh, no, this is gonna, never mind, it's gonna be on YouTube, I'm not gonna say. Okay. Non-verbal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I take Dr. Baren Cohen's mind blind reading test and I can narrow the face down to two or three. Like I know it's, say for example, aggravation, sadness or anger. But I can't, meh, so it's a two thirds, one thirds a guess if I can get it exactly right. I may hit it, I may not. It's kind of a luck of the draw. So I'm close, I'm not going that's happiness. I don't, the idea of rewards I find very interesting. I didn't realize that I was looking at people who smiled to anticipate a reward. To me, I'm gonna investigate that with my own self. I'm always everybody's insect under the microscope. I didn't, I look at people that smile and my first thought is what do you want from me? But see, I've been conditioned to not trust that smile. I've been conditioned to not trust those things that say we welcome you, come in. Cause that usually ends up in a rape or a bankruptcy or someone hurting you or beating up your daughter or saying your father's a loser. So I'm very conditioned against two friendly people. And I feel bad for that because there are nice good people but I never know who they are. And so every time before I travel I used to call my dad, now I call my counselor and he gives me a list of rules. Don't sit by men, wear a wedding ring, sit by security, don't, and it's not that I'm as hot, it's just that there's predators out there. And the travelers know that and I ran into a guy on the boardwalk yesterday that kept following me and asked me if I was married and blah blah blah and my friend Susan, my new friend, I guess I can't call you friend. Okay, she said maybe the guy was schizophrenic. I didn't even realize that and that has totally blown my mind because now I can look at people that have approached me in a more nurturing yet standoff way instead of I need to be nicely in and talk to this poor man, goes he's just trying to be a nice guy. No, it was probably gonna be a kidnapping. I was probably gonna be kidnapped and put in a trunk of a car. That's where my mind goes now because I've had so many bad experiences with people. So this is how I, this is me every day. I'm not sure. I am smart enough to go through the possible outcomes. I can do research studies with the best of them because I can think of all the possible outcomes. I'm a fabulous problem solver. If I do say so myself. My father taught me we would go to airports and we would watch people and we would go through. What do you think? Are they married? Are they boyfriend and girlfriend? Are they employee and employer? Are they strangers? And we never knew but we would go through the wise and what fours. So I know in my head to say, here's the problem. Here's five possible outcomes that I can come up with. So I start to correlate. It could be this, this, this, this. Okay, if it's gonna be, he's angry with me. I need to look for red face. Oh, wait, that could also be embarrassment. All right, narrow it down to that. Do you see what I'm saying? I have to take my hard drive and narrow it down to where it might be. And then I make my best guess. I'm the hypothesis. I never know for sure. I will never ever. I say to my husband all the time, are you lying? Are you lying? Are you lying? Are you lying? I will never know. And I think he does lie. So I, you know, I won't. The motor skills challenges, are you old enough to remember to ninkling? That used to be a big thing we did in gym. And how cool is this? It's two bamboo poles. And you put them together and you're chink, chink, chink, chink, chink, chink. It makes a great sound. I couldn't do this to save my life. Instead of having a big IEP, I was not in special ed classes. Total inclusion in the 60s and 70s. I had excellent verbal skills. So there was no chance in the world I was gonna go into any kind of special ed class other than the social worker who knew that I had personality issues. So I couldn't do this. So my gym teachers, who I cannot give enough credit to for helping me, came to me and said, you know what? You can't do that. How about you announce it? And I'm gonna, they didn't say you can't do that, but they said, hey, Leanne, would you like to hold the microphone and say, and now it is time for chinkling? And so I was the announcer at all these things. I did other things for gym. I had to try it. I had to attempt it. But after 10, 15, 20 minutes of stopping class, going to the nurses, breaking my, you know, my knees, all that, they came up with a way for me to be involved. Why don't you walk around the track five times and come back and announce? I was in, but I wasn't in, but I was part, but I wasn't pulled out. And how wonderful. And I did things, my dad put me in dance, he put me in horses, he put me in swimming. And I got the bilateral coordination and the crossing and the midline and all of those OT things we talk about. I just didn't do it under pressure in gym. So my motor skill challenges remain. I can ride horses and I can ride them pretty good, but I can also fall off really quickly. And I have lots of plates and pins. And so I'm trying to speed up. The linguistic folly. George, I'm, where are you? Where's George? When am I done? Oh, I'm good. All right, I thought I had tense. I told you. What time is my clock going to say? 2.30. Okay. 2.30, geez. 2.23. All right, I'm going to, mm-hmm. Love numbers, love them. So linguistics folly, this is my bailiwick. I dig words and I love them and they're so much fun to play with. And a lot, oh, I didn't wear my glasses. The first one says, hmm? Why do I hear? Why do I hear people talking? What is it saying to that? I don't even know what that means now. Why do I hear people talk? Why did I take my glasses off? Will you bring me my glasses? What the heck? Let's go to your hot. I can read that one. Your hot. Okay, I took that. I was working at a bar in Midwest, Missouri. Hot, hot, hot, hot. Thank you, thank you. And I was serving beer and I had spilled all over myself because of my, oh, gracias. Because of my lousy, you know, eye hand coordination and all that kind of thing. So I'm wearing a white T-shirt, no bra, because bras are disgusting. And so I now, setting that background for you, I had all that background too, but I didn't understand the ramifications of it. So with that background, someone says to me, you're really hot. And I said, I'll never forget this. And I said, you don't know how hot I am. I'm super hot. But see, your laugh, I had no, I was hot. And I wasn't hot. I never was hot. And so I was like, yeah, I'm hot. And luckily, but seriously lucky, the guy that took me to prom was a football player and a good friend of mine. It was kind of a pity date. And he played for the New Orleans Saints. So he's a 662.60. He's one of the doormen there. And he's overhearing this and he comes up to me and he said, Leigh Ann, no. No, you can't tell that guy you're hot. I said, well, we don't have air conditioning in here, Brad. I think it's pretty obvious. This is honest to God how my brain is in normal gear. This is how I would think. And he said, but that's not what he thinks you're saying. What constantly, a whole another world through the stained glass. He explained to me what he meant. And I said, but he's gross and he's drunk. Why does he think, ew, am I that gross? And so then my whole self-esteem goes down and I know that's judgmental, but you know, drunk, so you're not good. Well, God, now that's judgmental. Okay, so he says, you stand by me, puts his arm around me and he says to the guy, you know, leave my friend alone. She's with me. I look up and I say, Brad, I'm not with you. And this big clump of claw on my shoulder, which I knew meant stop. And so the guy left and whatever waited for me. Brad took me home, lectured me. And it took a friend up here, a nice guy, to sit me down and say, look, I got a long list of stuff. You need to wear bras. You need to bring a t-shirt to change into. Don't put yourself out there. If you dress in a certain way, guys are gonna think this. Girls are gonna think this. Bosses are gonna think this. Your teachers are gonna think this. If you act in a certain way, if you, and it was the first time, and I was like, I guess it was like 22. It was the first time I went, wait. And I guess it was a theory of mind awakening for me. I thought, if I wasn't saying, here's my number. I'm sassy in bed. I thought they would know, which who knows if you are not anyway. I would be like, you know, if I wasn't in making an invitation, why would they think I was sending a message of an invitation? If I want something, I'm gonna tell you. I'm not gonna put on a little nonverbal skit. I'm gonna tell you. I thought that's how everybody did it. I don't know how the brain ferrets out what's fake from not fake. I really, I don't understand how that's even, I don't believe the studies. I just say that can't be true. Stop it, shut up. Otherwise that means I'm so far behind. So that's one little story. I took it very literal. Well, in linguistics, it's also the tone of the prosody. And this one I do well at. It's not what you say, and we talked about that a little bit today. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And I can pick up on this one. I can pick up on sarcasm. I may have to say, was that sarcasm? But I can have some bells go off, you know, if people know how to deliver it. David Letterman, I can't read. I can't tell if he's being sarcastic or, because he's so dry. So he's not, you know, he's, Don Rickles, I know he's being sarcastic because he's so overboard with it. Joan Rivers overboard with it. But some of the comedians and some of the people I know just slide it in. That's the slid in ones, the really dry, witty people that I can't gather. I had a professor once that asked me an opinion and I told him my opinion. He asked and he said, excuse me, what initials are behind your name? And I said, I'm none. And he said, until you have a graduate degree behind your name, nobody wants your opinion. And I'm like, oh God, I thought we were supposed to talk in these seminars. And well, how did I miss, it says in the, so I bring the book to him and I said, but it says we're supposed to have small group discussion and I don't understand. Well, he'd been teasing me. Who, how is that even a funny joke? Last I heard he was working with seals out here somewhere. So he's, you know, you got him now. I don't know, I don't know what his deal was, but that's a joke. Okay, ha ha, it insulted me. So, you know, this is one of those, you can teach kids a lot about this by putting them in dramatic art, by putting them in public speaking, by mirroring in, auditorily what you hear. And I would play tape recorders. I did really well in radio broadcasts because I could think quickly on my feet if it's fax. And I could play back and say, well, this sounds like Jessica Savage, who was a great broadcaster who sadly passed away in a car accident. And I would try to emulate her. And so, you know, that I learned that by, now I'm sweating like a horse. So, oh, I get it. Why do I hear people talking? Because you, oh yeah, okay. So, when someone were to say like, your teacher, this is not me, pretend like you're a teacher and you're saying to the class and you say, why do I hear people talking? We're gonna be the kids that say, because you have ears? And we don't mean smart alecky. We're like, do you not know about physiology and ears? We're in ninth grade. You have ears. So, it's another example of, you know, a lot of our kids get sent to the principal's office and they're kind of diagnosed there because their behavior looks so snotty. And it's really, they're just looking at you like, you teach and you don't know how the auditory process works. And they're being, and then when they get a laugh from that, they keep it up. So, then they're getting like this reinforcement, right, of how, ooh, laughter gets me jokes. Laughter gets me a friend. Laughter, oh, I'm gonna spit out of my nose. That got me jokes. And some of the behavior is simply, okay, it's gotta come off. Simply so that, you know, we can establish friendship circles. But the teacher may or may not hear that. So, one of the things I try to tell to, I do consulting with teachers and school groups. Again, not my day job, but once a week I try to donate my time and efforts to that. And by donate, I don't always mean free. I'm trying to, I'm using the word I give. I don't even know what a better, I need a thesaurus. I work there, take that. One day a week in the field to try to, you know, give back a little and whatnot and use my graduate degree instead of just my horsemanship. So, I consult with them and I try to say, don't take it personal, it's not you. I remember when Dr. Atwood met with my mom and he explained to her why my father wasn't emotionally connected and he wasn't physically connected. And my mother said, and I wasn't either. And my mom, still not. And my mother said, I always thought it was me. I thought you guys didn't hug me and hold my hand and whatnot because it was something I did. And I would say to her, well, did you see dad and I holding hands? Did you see dad and I hugging? Did you see me ever hug a boyfriend? Did you see dad? No, mom, it's not you. It makes me uncomfortable to hug you. You're thin and you're bony and I don't like that. I'll hug a big person or a normal sized person, but a thin little person, I literally feel like I'm gonna break them. It makes me like, oh, don't be too, oh, you're gonna break a bone. You know, and I really do feel that. You can feel their bones crack under your skin and I don't go for that. So I don't, I am not doing that. And so bless her heart. I try to tell people it's not you. You wanna use theory of mind, folks. It's use your theory of mind. Get in that kid's head or that adult's head or your husband's head and what are they thinking? They're thinking I don't wanna hug them. So of course they know that. So of course they're not gonna take it personal because they know I'll break their back. It doesn't dawn on us that you're crying in your room saying no one hug me. I don't wanna be hugged. So don't be, you see what I'm saying? It's a dichotomy there. So that's a linguistic, you know, this isn't meant to upset anyone. Word, comprehension, social language, tone. These are my favorite things. These are the layman's terms for my linguistic nerdiness that I won't put on. But one of the lexicons I have at the barn is, I wish that was my barn, but sadly it's not that nice. But you can look it up under Kirkshire Farm and see more of my horses if you're so inclined. It may be my special interest. So I will say it a few more times. My horses are in there and I like to play. I like to have fun with words. I am a writer and not just nonfiction. I write a lot of fiction and I enjoy writing articles and whatnot. So I'll say, oh, the horses need their necklace and don't forget their bracelets and the kids will stare at me and I'll say, what? Oh, you don't even know what a halter is. You don't know what a lead rope is. Those are called bell boots. And I'll say, well, I know that, but I'm just, we wear a necklace, they wear a halter and every time I say halter, I think of a girl in a halter without, and so, okay, get the halter and the lead line. I have to, no one wants to play word games. And we're kind of, our little community of people on the spectrum do have fun with words. You'd think we didn't because it's such an instrumental part of language learning, but words, once we get a picture for them, oh my goodness, the fun we can have. And we will make up words like spectacular anus and just put words together and pictures start exploding in my mind and we all giggle and we start to upgrade the next word and the next word and the next word. It becomes our own lexicon and we own it, but you know what I've noticed? And all my studies in autism are anecdotal. I don't try to do research in the field unless it's in my field and that's language. Otherwise I don't step out. I'm not qualified to step out of that. So I stay in the language area and one of the things I notice is in our group, we understand each other's weird language. But when we go out to your world, it's like that dog, that's just a dumb one. Ours are much better. So we get cocky with it, but it's fun to exchange that gift I think. So the assumptions, you're like me and you have good verbal skills and you're a little weird, but you're making good grades and you're quote unquote popular even if you don't understand the concept of that. And you're getting along fine and you're making a C or a B average. You know, you're not gonna get support services at least in most of the states and in most parts of the world. You're going to be told to just conform in A, B or C. You're not gonna have UCLA at your back door helping you. You're gonna be out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with a cowboy to talk to, which in bad, but still. So these are the assumptions that I actually had on my report card. It wasn't quite this nasty, this kid is lazy, but it was similar enough. Some of these are true. Why must that coworker be uncooperative? I've never had a full-time job that I've been able to keep long. I've never gotten a tenure track. I have really good teacher evaluations because I'll answer the phone at midnight to help a student. I do mastery learning. Don't yell at me. I like mastery learning because that's what I had to use. And so I'm very good with students because I get to talk and they have to listen and they can't interfere. If I go to a meeting and I think it's dumb, I'm the one saying it's dumb. There goes your evaluation. So I understand that, but I can't seem to stop that impulsivity. I feel it coming out of my mouth and I go to grab it back in and it's out. So I have never held these jobs, which is crushing to me because I went to school and I fought long and hard to get these degrees and now I can't teach. And it's really sad. Are you just plain stupid? That one makes me mad. That one makes me want to have a cat fight. I think my neighbor is emotionally disturbed. I actually overheard people saying these sorts of things about me and how could my husband pick me and how did I have this friend from our small town because she was very popular and nice and why would she spend her time with me? And I looked around and I thought, they're talking about me. And I was maybe from here to the screen away and I thought, you don't think I can hear you. You're not in a soundproof room. So I got online, pretended I was my husband and got him interviews all over the Midwest and we moved because I was, I became home one day and I said, you have four interviews with this college, this college. And he said, what are you talking about? I said, I'm not staying here. And he said, well, I'm full professor tenured. I'm staying and I said, I don't care what you are. We're not staying here. These women hate me and I'm done. And he's like, well, how did you pretend to be me? Okay, dear so-and-so, signed Dr. Willie. Not really hard, you know. Hello. So he did get a job and he's in finance. So do you want to guess how many, well, I don't care if they hear it or not. They all know I think this. How many people in the finance department and the accounting department do you think may at least have a toe in the water of autism? We talk about engineers and computer scientists and a lot of actors and actresses. Those finance guys are right up there with you. So there, we fit in fabulous with those guys. So you're just making things up to get attention. When we left Missouri, our daughter had been diagnosed from the University of Kansas and she had two full day vows. It was two six hour evaluations with Neural Psych and a developmental peed and OT and speech language, everybody that you could think of. And they said, we didn't get anything out of it first and we were worried about twin talk. She was just turned six. We were worried about maybe low IQ and by the end, by the, I don't know, the middle or the end of the second day it all started coming out because my daughter wouldn't talk. So she would just sit there and just stare. So she was in effect failing everything but not showing her strengths. Sally Ann, she got involved and got mad because she took the little thing out of the Sally Ann basket and threw it and they started seeing, oh, here comes the real girl. And so I came to this experimental psychologist at the university we were at and I said, yes, we got good news. Meredith has Asperger's, oh my God. All right, I just said her name. Well, that's okay. I said, my child has Asperger's syndrome and she's fantastic and I'm so excited to hear that because half of my family was going, Team Aspie, Team Aspie. And so he said, this is so ridiculous. You guys are just saying this. May you're making this up to get attention? And I thought about that and I thought about that and a couple of days later I thought and I said, you know, if I wanna get attention, I'm gonna say I have something really cool, something like I'm an alien, like I'm from a third dimension, like I'm God in female version. I'm not gonna say I have a form of autism to get attention. Were you insane? And then my husband by then said, yeah, we gotta get out of here because you're not making us any friends. So we've got to move. And it just, I kind of championed for my daughter and my dad, no, no, no, no. You don't get to talk about us like this. I'm almost neurotypical and it was hard work to get here. We can do it. You are the people that are helping us do it. If there was no point in what you're doing, what are you doing it for? If there was no end game where we were going to be having a better quality of life, why are we here? So I'm not making it up to get attention. I'm making it up to say, look how cool this can be when we work with this kid and she has this unique personality of the best of all possible worlds. That's pretty awesome. And that was my intent. I'm a little hostile about that statement because it was about my daughter and you just don't mess with my kids. So and my favorite, that lady is just plain rude. Okay, that part is true, but, you know. I don't know why that's true, but it is, I am rude. That boy in the grocery line sure is spoiled. You've seen those kids. One thing that Dr. Atwood taught me and my father certainly taught me early on. He said, I don't care what your issues are. There's no excuse for poor behavior. You do not get to slap your grandmother. You do not get to kick the pews in church. You do not get to cross the street without someone holding your hand. That's a no. And it was a no and no meant no and meant no and no and there was no, you knew that that was no. It may have taken him years, months, weeks, days, hours. I don't know what it took him, but wrong was wrong in my house and there was a clear line. Now I'm told that's rigid thinking and that's black and white thinking, but for me, I needed that because if he said you can cross the line. Okay, here's an example. I went to New York and I called my husband and I said, so yeah, up here in New York, you can run when the sign says don't walk, you can run. And he said, no, you can't. And I said, I'm telling you you can, I'm watching people run. And he said, you know, you can't. And I said, I am telling you, people are running. And he said, does the sign say don't run? And I said, it doesn't have to, it just says don't walk. And he said, that's not true. And I said, I'm running now. And he said, you can't do that because at home you can get a ticket for jaywalking. So I know no walking means stop and wait to the light. New York, everybody's crossing, they're going. Well, I talked to my friends from New York and they said, no, we're just rude. You know, we just want to get there. We're just in a hurry. We're just fast. We just know we have time. We're in a fight between the taxi drivers and us. Now I go to Chicago, Midwest, New York sentiments. My daughter lives there. Every time we go, I'll be there tomorrow. I say to her, is it, and I'm like a race horse ready to go. And she's taller than me and she has long arms and she'll be like, no, stop. Or she'll be like, come on. I don't know what to do. They're running, walking, stopping, moving there. They have no rules. They're just, they're wild cats there. And so I can't generalize New York run. Missouri, you better not. Chicago, it's up for grabs. I don't know, but it's cool. When you see, no is no. I know you do not throw a fit in a grocery store. Your dad's going to pick you up. You're going to sit in a car until you've learned why you didn't go in that grocery store and you're going to try again. And if you throw a fit back out, you go. And again and again and again. I don't mean to be cruel, but this is how I train my horses and it works. So I'm not, I don't care what tool is in your toolbox or what you use to help your kids. I say use whatever you. I was raised with my dad's version of ABA. He didn't, you know. But for me, no excuse for poor behavior. That having been said, when my daughter would have issues, I would often take a moment to educate people and say, my child has sensory integration difficulties. My child has literal language problems. My child has a small form of autism. You know, I'm DSM4. So things were a little bit different then. But and I would make these comments so that people would know it wasn't intentional and then I'd take her out. I never interrupted with other. My dad taught me a long time ago, don't disrespect the rights and privileges of others. And so, but what's happening to me now is when I'm out and about and someone's letting their kid do that, no matter just their naughty that day or whatever, I have a fit because that's wrong. So now I'm like really rigid in that. And that's not what I don't think about my dad. Well, it probably is what my dad intended but not what the world intended. So how would you feel? You know, that's, are you on the outside looking in? That's me in the middle. I'm just like, I fit in. People accepted me but I didn't want to be fitting in. I didn't want to be asked to the parties. I didn't want to be expected to show up or come or be on the beach at a certain time. I wanted to be alone. And Susan was gonna do something with me last night and I wrote her and said, you know, I'm going to, I did go to bed early because I'm three hours ahead of you guys. And I was so, I knew she'd get it. She'd be like, oh yeah, other people take offense to that. Oh, you don't like me. What did I do? No, I just, I'm nervous. I just want to cuddle by myself in this corner of this room and play heyday for a while. That's a game on the computer. And so that's okay with me but my daughter takes this to an extreme and that becomes a worry. So in this regard, I'm not rigid thinker. And do you scream? I scream a lot. In fact, I have nodules. I used to have a really nice voice. And that sounds bragging. I don't have a lot of things I do well. I did used to have a really nice voice. And now I can hear that little, which is okay, don't shake your head and go, yeah, I hear it. No, you're supposed to go, no, it's beautiful. I'm kidding. I have no pride or ego. You can say whatever you want at this point. But yeah, right? You can feel it. You can, teachers, we all, every teacher has it. So you know what I mean. And I was a teacher for a year in elementary school. High school, in college for 20 but not in nine. So these are just a cutting. I'm a recovering bulimic. Maybe three times a year, I slip. I do self-interest behavior. I don't like to talk about it because it has such a bad connotation. So my therapist suggests I not really talk about it. If you want information on that from me, I can email you but I don't wanna, I have bits of panic attacks when I wander there too far. So I got by with a little help from, you guys, support, advice, help, guidance, assistance, my animals, neighbors, call my mom and dad and say she's in the sewer again. Call the fire department. The fire department would come, Leanne, Leanne, I'm down here. Okay, we're throwing the hose down. The community supported me. They knew where and what I was about to. Now, I don't know that you can do that but we sure could in the 60s. Books, this is the bookmobile. Raise your hand if you had a bookmobile. Is it the best environment known to mankind? Oh my Lord, my teachers were sure. My first grade teacher said you couldn't read beyond the blue label. Forget that, I wanna go read the horror stories in black and I was a very early reader. So I don't know that I understood anything I was reading but I understood blood and gore. So I would go get that. But I love the bookmobile and books took me to places and showed me things that I didn't know are possible. Bibliotherapy, if you will, using books to help me in cognitive and in behavior therapy showed me that there were other ways to believe and think. And my mom would always say I know what you're reading because you don't talk Southern so you're not Southern. What did you just read? Why are you wanting me to make hot dish? We're not from Minnesota. And I would sophisticated echolalia of the book into my real life. And if the book, like one of the characters broke their arm, I'd say to my mom, I think my arm's broken and she'd wrap it in flour and let me go to school with flour and band-aids on my arm saying it was broken. Of course it was off by third period but I became the characters in my book. I can see where you would say that is some sort of psychosis or some sort of, one person did accuse me. Shouldn't say accuse me tried to diagnose me with multiple personality disorders because I kept saying what personality do you want me to use? And I was earnest. I said, do you want me to be the small town girl? Do you want me to be the professor? Do you want me to be the elementary school teacher? The ingenue, which that's a complete waste of time and joke. What do you want me to be? And they said, well, our voice is talking to you. What do you mean? What do I want you to be? And I said, well, I'm not sure who you want me to, how you, just tell me what do you want me to be like? Well, you're in therapy, be yourself. And I said, right, which one? I get that now. At the time, I was trying to comply with the rules of therapy. I even said, do I have to lay down on this couch? I didn't, those commercials shouldn't even be on. That's just stupid. I told you about the neighbors. I'd go to the neighbors and say, can I play with Heidi and Penny? Heidi and Penny were dogs. And Diane and Steve lived in the house and they would say, you sure you don't want to play with the kids? No, I'm good. I want Heidi and Penny. Civic groups, my dad was the Girl Scout mom and we went to Camp Carlage and Cedar Lodge and it was wonderful because my Girl Scout teachers would say, you know, you're part of the group but you're not really getting along with team A. So how about you help me and Mrs. Smith and we'll do the, the adults in my life always brought me in. I think it might be because they saw my dad was raising me and they might've felt they needed a female figure. Whatever they did for whatever reason, they saved my life because they taught me adult skills like we talked about earlier, adult skills and so that didn't translate into childhood skills but it gave me survival skills and that was neat. I didn't hang around with kids anyway. That's Blaze, my first horse. I had ponies, that's my first horse. Notice I'm dressed in boys' clothes. My dad, I was 13 there, like I said, my first tall horse as opposed to ponies and my dad took me to a store and my dad shopped with me. So where do you think an Asperger's syndrome father would take his daughter to shop? In the boys' department. So I only wear boys' clothes. Aw, I love that horse. And my dad got me a pool because I loved water therapy and it wasn't a big expansive pool, it was an above ground pool but getting in the water and doing water therapy was instrumental to my peace of mind and to my anti-anxiety. One day the pool broke, my dad came out and said, looks like we'll need to get another pool and get in the car. So we got in the car and by that night I had another pool up. He was keeping ledgers and notebooks of me and what helped and what didn't help. He was like Freud but not a creepy Freud and I was his patient. I love stimming and repetitive movements but lucky for me, I guess if you would, I didn't do a lot of, I do hand wringing but I don't do any of this. Ring my hands, which many of us do, I rock but I learn to say when people say you're rocking, I say, oh I know, I just love holding my babies. See, I can learn that. Give me a standard and I'm on it, I can fake it. Just give me it, give social script me but then don't take me out and say, you don't have a baby in your arms so why are you swaying? Then I'm like, what, why'd you, you ruined it and I will have that discussion. So my dad kept the basement open, my mom wanted to fix it for parties and stuff like my dad and I are gonna have a party please, that's not even in the scheme of things and so we kept it open and I could roller skate 365, I could hula hoop, I could run, I could jump rope. The whole basement was my indoor playground. So again, even though I wasn't doing much in PE, I had a full plate in my daily routine that involved the horses, playing with the dogs, riding my bicycle exactly 10 miles, carrying it if I went beyond and going up and down the driveway if I went below until I hit 10 and roller skating was awesome. I can't do, what's the one thing, the one skate? Oh yeah, roller blades, who invented that? That's not right because at least roller skating you had a chance, now my kids are struggling on stupid roller blades. Sensory deprivation, do you remember forts? You'd put up like outdoor, see what you young people are missing on your computers? I could play heyday under there and have the best of all possible worlds. So you take the backyard stuff and you turn it into a fort and you guys, when I was in there I was convinced no one knew I was in there. They had no idea I was in there. I thought it was like an invisible cage, not like literally invisible but like no one saw me come in here, no one would guess I was in here, no one would ever know. So I can sit here and observe and then my neighbor Steve would come over and jump on it and I'd be like how'd you know I was in here? Well you're in here every day but I don't know, lucky guess. So, but I loved it because it gave me this little feeling of being behind the curtain and watching the world. I in my head am Shakespeare and I can watch you and direct you and if I had my druthers you'd all have strings on you and I would puppet you. Cause I like to play with you but I don't want you to play with me. I wanna play with you and tell you what to do and where to sit and how to behave and I wanna direct you. And I wonder how many directors, let's think Steven Spielberg, and we don't know for sure but he did have an autism diagnosis. I wonder how many aren't on the spectrum cause I love telling people what to do. My teachers, I actually made this thing in the front, this little outfit for a class only I couldn't do it cause it involved way too much fine motor and I couldn't read the directions of a, have you ever tried to sew? That's hard stuff. And so my mom had to sew me in it before I went to the fashion show and so the teacher took one look at that and said here's the microphone and MCed that as well. So again, nice community of teachers but they were good enough to say, all right, what's your strength? Oh, you know, you like to enunciate, you like to help other kids. You're the one that shows the new kids in school where the gym is and the cafeteria and how to, you're sort of the, you're the student government type, you do that. And I didn't need an IEP. They pulled me out of math and put me into remedial math. They put me into AP English because they saw I had a strength there. I was just either very blessed or it was the free flow early 70s where we all just, you know, peace out and got along. I don't know why I was so blessed to have this environment. But those teachers, I said, I can't take a shower in front of other people. I can't stand water on me. I have to be totally submerged. The teacher said, well, then never forget Mrs. Blake. Junior high, she said, well, you're gonna smell and I said, okay. And she said, are you okay with that? I said, well, everybody smells that perfume is disgusting and sweat's disgusting and, you know, deodorant's disgusting. So I mean, it's just another, okay, well, you're gonna smell. And they told me the consequences. One kind of icky thing, when I'd have my period, I'd have it irregularly and I never knew I couldn't keep track on a calendar when it was coming. And I have a lot of testosterone in my body and I would have my period and I would stand up and my friends would say, you need to go to the nurse. You know, here I am like 18 years old. I could have been like, you know, today I probably would have been mean girl right out of the school. But back then they'd say, Leanne, go to the nurse. I'd get to the nurse and she'd say, oh, again, girl, go home and they'd let me out of school to go home, get a new pair of pants. I never, I had a hysterectomy at 35 because I was done. I said, gut me, give me a tummy tuck, let's call it a day. And it was the best thing I ever did because I couldn't do it. Oh, I just have so many sad stories about that. Isabella Hinalt is a fabulous sexologist in Quebec. And she wrote a chapter in a book I edited and she's wonderful, difficult conversation to talk about. I don't like doing it because I have three daughters and it embarrasses them. So if you'd want to contact on that, she does beautiful, non-embarrassing speeches on that, but she might be quoting some of the stuff that I do, so look out. You doctors in the building, now I didn't know, to confess, I don't look at people's resumes before I come here, the other speakers, because I'm quickly and easily intimidated. And I'm glad I didn't because I wouldn't have shown up today if I'd looked at these two ladies. I would not have shown up. So I didn't know it was gonna be a lot on ABA. I'm totally fine with that, but my modus operandi tends to be CBT with a lot of ABA looking. And the man I work with is one of the only pediatric neurologist in the state of Michigan. So he handles the neurology part. So I have a good team that I work with and rely on when I do any of my consulting. I don't do anything without running it through all of those people. So CBT is the stuff that makes the most sense to me. I'm like Dr. Atwood who taught me, put in your toolbox everything you can that you think will work, and then you individualize to the student. And I think we all agree that that's probably the way to go. So I like the emotion body. And for me, it has to be very literal. It has to be very logical. It has to be pragmatic. It can't be very abstract. It has to be taught, retaught and memorized. So I'm a combo CBT, ABA. Don't eat all those. And what are they? Okay, see, I had a bunch of concussions. My husband and I both had our neuroimaging done. I think I told you. And we're gonna be in a home in about six weeks. I, there's not a lot going on up here anymore. And I've forgotten some of my language. So forgive me for sounding like a, whoo, that's a terrible sound. I apologize. So this is how I like to do it. And then this does make the most sense for me. But again, there is a lot of other little elements put in. One of my early psychiatrists said to me, instead of going by a label, today you're Aspie, tomorrow you're not even anything. The week before that you were social anxiety, whatever. Let's just say you're having a hard time understanding people in small talk. How can we help you with that? That opened a door for me because it allowed me to, I look at my cousin who has autism and I think we're nothing alike. We are, but we're not. And so I felt I was ripping people with autism off saying, look how easy it is. I came from a different spot. So when you have the umbrella term autism, that makes me very nervous because I think we need the phenotypes and I think we need more specific definitions of what each area is. I'm linguistically challenged and so sensorily challenged more than any, okay, and anxiety more than anything else. So I like to say, for me it must be a pragmatic problem solving solution or it will go right over my head. Abstract stuff freaks me out. Although I am philosophical if I do say so. So even after to support you guys, there will be challenges. My dad would say, he used to always say, put your thinking cap on and for years I looked for that dog on thinking cap. And I'd be like, dad, that's not funny, where'd you put it? So there is no real thinking cap, but put it on and then start to analyze your life and your situation. You guys, I have to do this every day. I can't find my ticket back to Michigan tomorrow so my husband is sending it to me. I mean I lose, my dad used to say, you're an accident waiting to happen and you would lose your body if it wasn't attached to your head. So worrying won't, this is kind of my little pep talk end. Worrying won't stop the bad stuff from happening. It just stops you from enjoying the good. I'm done saying I'm deficient. I'm done saying I'm gonna embarrass myself. I'm done saying I'm not smart because I'm not a scientist like my father. I'm done saying I'm done. I wanna just enjoy the last two years of life I have left. I want to ride my horses and I just want to smile and be happy and that's what I want for my kids on the spectrum. Take a deep breath, my dad used to say, if it's not gonna kill you, move on. And then he'd say, and by the way, even if it does kill you, life will go on without you. And then the reality, if you ever had, and I know you have had a memory that sneaks out of your eyes and rolls down your cheek, I cry a lot. A lot of people in the spectrum don't feel that emotion. I don't cry because I want to. I cry because I literally have leaky tears. I cry easily when I'm laughing, when I have to tinkle, I just cry. But when I'm very sad, I do cry badly. I cry horribly, screaming. It's like purging for me. I'm an all or nothing kind of brain. Okay, we're either gonna go to a dance party in a minute or bring in, you know. Trust is like an eraser, it gets smaller and smaller and that's what I'm saying about my smiling people and being around men. The people that got me, one was a friend quote unquote and one was a policeman. And they're not supposed to do bad things to you and so I don't trust people anymore and I don't think that's ever gonna change. Out of difficulties grow miracles. The miracle of all that is, it's not gonna happen to my kids. My daughter was beat up very badly, as I said and there's a lot of issues related to that and now every time she dates somebody at 24 I meet the potential mate and I look him in the eye and I say nobody's ever gonna hurt my child and you will hear from me and every attorney in my FBI friend should my child come up hurt and I sound like this really bad ass person and well you know what, mom is here. The other two are like don't open your mouth, don't come here, don't meet him, don't talk to him but this one I get to just say nope, not gonna happen on my watch. Got our big dog too. Keep calm and carry on. My dad said this way before it was cool but he was a World War II vet. No one has everything figured out, right? We all make mistakes. Donald Trump's been bankrupt what, 52 times? You know I mean everybody stumbles and falls and makes a misstep, every single human. Intuition is your best friend, nurture it, develop it, embrace it, we're finding an anecdotal studies and now some people are doing neurology studies and other studies to say that our gut speaks really loudly to us. I don't wanna say seventh sense, but in our sixth sense but in a way it is maybe, you know if we are not tuned in socially as naturally as you guys are maybe something else speaks to us and maybe it's like that mother's intuition, you know when your kid's sick maybe or my dad's intuition was fabulous, he knew when I was gonna sneak my bicycle out, he'd come home and catch me and I think I'm now listening to my gut and yesterday I said to myself don't go out, you're gonna meet somebody that's gonna scare you, don't go out but I had to go on that wharf and look at those sea lions. So I went out and a guy did scare me and I ran home and I thought how did I know that? I don't know, I don't know, whoo! Those are my people and my babies and because of them I have tried extremely hard to make myself as close to neuro-typical as I'm comfortable getting because I don't want their families and their employees and their employers and their friends to not wanna come to our home, to not wanna be part of their lives because I am a little different. My Southern relatives are often embarrassed by my Yankee behaviors, that's what they think it is, here's your Yankee. I want to fit in when I need to and I wanna be me when I need to, I like being bilingual. So I have a self-affirmation pledge that I wrote for people on the spectrum, I included some supports for you guys that just my teacher education, language support, social interaction, nothing you won't have thought of on your own but I just compiled them for you. I have a hard time with perseveration as most of us do so I established a little support group for that. General supports, these are all in books and things I've written and now my daddy. My daughter saw him fall and saw him take his last breath, we had to take him off life support. If we all realize that every, you know, people say that if you're on the spectrum you can't have emotion and you can't love anybody and what do you work the society in that? This man would have given his left arm to anyone. In the 60s he drove around, he took African Americans to work and Jewish people to work and poor people to work and he sat by the people that worked in his laboratory, it was never a good old boy, he was never one to dismiss anyone, he had a little fit when two of our African American friends weren't being served at stake and shake, he had a fake heart attack and broke everything. He stood up for the little guy and he was beat up every day and had to go to a psychiatrist to prove he was okay enough to handle top secrecy things during Vietnam and it makes me ill that anyone would think someone so wonderful and so kind and so gentle and he was the only friend I ever had and now he's gone and it's been five years, he told me he wanted to be cremated and go wherever I went and I left him home this time but I wear him in a locket, I'm trying to, I sleep with his ashes, it's very creepy but he said he wanted to be with me. So in his honor, I hope that you look towards the people that elderly were growing up, help us as we get older, look towards your neighbors, your friends, anyone who's different and give them a hand or a note or a book or a letter or whatever support they need to let them know that we're all humans and we're all in this together and because of all of us, we can get through anything. So thank you very much. Thank you. This is him.