I sat in my office chair and committed myself to one of the dangerous things I could do at the time. Sit down and ponder. Thinking is dangerous to me. I tend to say it when joking around, but as I have mentioned in the books I’ve published and in some of my keynote speeches, the mind can play devious and mischievous tricks on people with autism. No denials in that statement on my side, I have said before there have been multiple sides of Tyler McNamer and we ended up fighting with each other because of our differences.

One topic he mentioned while I was sitting there was the idea of “The Perfect Year.” I cooperated with myself and let him speak on what he meant by that. He brought up separate days we happened to be in areas where we saw a couple of familiar faces that we used to see at school. The opportunity could not have been any more open. They were right in front of me and I encouraged myself to go up to them and say hi.

But I couldn’t.

Why did I do...

You are perfect just the way you are.

It can be a common struggle for people who have autism. Wanting to escape from the diagnosis and be perfect. Possible to escape indeed and become someone else, but you still have autism. In this case, it can be very difficult to want to be perfect and to make no mistakes; Truth is, there is always going to be mistakes. Another truth to this is everyone that does not have autism also makes mistakes.

There is one thing I have always wanted to try out and see if it may work. Whenever mistakes happen and children know that they have made a mistake and beat themselves up for it, the idea that I came to mind is a series of videos of people making similar mistakes. Reason why I wanted to see how the strategy play out is so the children can understand that it it not just them that makes similar mistakes, a lot of people can relate, but one of the key parts of these videos is how do they handle these mistakes. Now that I think of it, if I...