An E Ticket Experience

The autism experience is not always beautiful.  Sometimes it is very ugly.  There is a beauty in its mystery, but there can be lots of ugliness as it gets played out in physical reality.  It's all about the moment.  The moment you are in.  The Now, as they say in some circles.  Days can be full of enormous highs and devastating lows, from hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute.  Pick a moment, it will be something.  In the autism experience, all moments are something.

It is the cliché of the rollercoaster ride, only you don't get slowly pulled up with that familiar "clank-clank-clank" sound as you approach that first long drop.  With autism, suddenly getting out of bed is the initial drop, and that clanking sound is the thump of your tantruming two-year old leaping out of his crib again at 1am or the hard footsteps of your insomniac three-year old daughter with a history of mouthing and eloping, awake and cruising around the house unsupervised at 2am or crying screams and peals of unknown anxieties from both of them at 3am. 

Like a rollercoaster, the autism experience has lots of fast curves, only you don't see them coming and they're not very fun.  And there are lots of screams, only yours are coming from frustration and anger and not from the excitement of that kickass loop.  If you scream too much on a rollercoaster people just laugh at you, but in the autism experience if you scream too much the neighbors complain, the landlord comes to talk to you and the cops show up. 

Unlike a riding a rollercoaster, though, there is no end to the autism experience, no time to catch your breath before coming to a stop and no platform to step up onto that will take you to the nearest exit.  There is no exit.  You are on it forever.

Every family can relate; I am sure of that.  All family units have their up days and their down days with lots of fast curves and wicked loops and flying turns in-between, living the autism experience or not.

I think the difference is that even as much as we try to establish routine, keep schedules and maintain a type of family normalcy, it's always unpredictable, always on the edge of collapse and breakdown, without precursors or triggers, even when we are mindful of potential precursors and triggers, and even when it is seemingly going well.  We do our best and our best has gotten to be pretty good, all things considered.  It's controlled chaos.  It is Theater of the Absurd, only lived.  It is real-life episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, incoherently happenstance yet truthfully connected.  It's a crazy ride, and if the lapbar is up and you're not buckled in, centrifugal force might send you flying out. 

When I was a little boy, long before FASTPASS and the ride-anything -you-want-till-you-puke policy, Disneyland still had the ticket system, and the "E" ticket was the one that got you into the best rides.  You only had a few of them in your packet, so you had to choose wisely which really cool E ticket ride you wanted to go on.  You always had to make a sacrifice, too, and that was always tough.  Were you going to skip the Jungle Cruise, The Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean?  It was a yearly rite of passage for L.A. and Orange County kids fortunate enough to go there.  I guess we were all supposed to learn something from doing that.

In the Disneyland of Life, I don't know if the Autism Experience would be an E ticket ride, but it sure as heck isn't the Main Street Horse Car either.  It would be a really short line though.  And as far as thrills go, you would certainly get your money's worth.  And it lasts a lifetime, literally.   

So given the choice now between riding the Autism Experience and all the other E ticket rides, I would sacrifice The Pirates of the Caribbean.  It's certainly more exciting than Pirates since they added that mindless Jack Sparrow stuff.  It's just as dark and at bath time, just as wet.  In the Autism Experience we get to look at other people's money as we financially float by.  We sometimes see ghosts, of the past and present (I do anyway), and we always avoid getting into serious trouble as fires rage and the world crumbles around us. 

So, yeah, the Autism Experience is definitely a ride that could be interesting and fun to take with the right mindset.  I mean, what the heck, I might as well; I'm on it already anyway! 

Here's my E ticket!  It's my last one, too!

Maybe I did learn something, after all.  

Thank you, Disneyland!