Soul Models by Elizabeth Bryan

Author:Elizabeth Bryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: transformative, stories, courage, compassion, change, life
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
Published: 2014-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Love Means Making Something Grow

“I wouldn’t trade my autism for anything in the world.”

—Temple Grandin

Soul Model: Temple Grandin

Challenge: Born with autism in the 1950s; teased relentlessly all through childhood, passionate about an industry that was highly prejudiced against women.

change: Became an activist, Ph.D., professor, and noted lecturer on behalf of both autism and animal behavior. Pioneered a system for cattle slaughtering that helps over five million cattle per year die humanely.

Soulution: If the things that you do, no matter how big or small, make the world a better place, that’s enough. Like someone that works in a convenience store, just being nice to the customers when they come in—that’s purpose!

I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. In those days they didn’t tell you anything was wrong, so I didn’t know I was different than other kids. I was at the higher end of the autism spectrum, but I was more severe than what you’d now call a mild Asperger’s type, because I didn’t speak until I was four, and I had a whole lot of other symptoms like tantrums, spinning, and rocking. The doctors wanted to put me in an institution, but my mother wouldn’t have it. She insisted on keeping me in normal schools all through my childhood, to make sure I was socialized in the real world. I was good at doing projects, and other kids really liked doing those with me. I remember making things that were fun, like caveman tools or building a tree house. Autistic children need to be shown interesting stuff all the time, and I was lucky because I had that.

Back then, kids were also taught much more responsibility. They had paper routes, they shoveled snow, they worked on a farm, or in their dad’s store. Mother was always pushing me; it was her idea when I was thirteen to get a job hemming clothes for a woman who did sewing out of her house. I was very good at this because it was quiet, and there was not a lot of stimulation. By the time I was fifteen, I was taking care of nine horses. I had to be responsible—if I didn’t feed them, that would have been a huge thing because they would have been hungry, and I knew that.

Puberty and my teenage years were absolutely the worst part of my life. Boys, teenage girls—I didn’t understand them at all. They were like people from another planet; they teased me all the time, laughing and calling me names—it was just terrible, and I was constantly having awful anxiety and panic attacks. In the ninth grade, I got kicked out from the all-girls’ school I was in, because I threw a book at a girl who was making fun of me. At that point, mother sent me away to a special school for gifted children with emotional problems. I got in a fistfight there over teasing too, but something happened and after that, and I switched from hitting to crying.

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