Temple Grandin is a woman of many special talents, of many special talents, and though some may believe that her autism could’ve made her a lesser person, she overcomes the challenges that autism brings upon her. When her senses overwhelm her, when social cues fly over her head and she messes something up, and when people say no, she overcomes that and she presses on. In the movie “Temple Grandin,” that we were tasked to watch, my eyes were opened not to these basic things about autism, but to her mind and how it’s different from mine. As an autistic myself, it was easy to see the similarities and differences. I misunderstand social cues and make a fool of myself all the time. My senses overwhelm me on a regular basis and I lose control when people say no. I don’t see things in pictures—that’s not something that all autistics gain from autism—but autism doesn’t define who we are as much as how we perceive things; it defines how other people perceive us.
In the movie, Grandin’s difficulties with sensation and perception are shown through the display of her sensory differences, her inability to understand social cues, her overstimulation, and her ‘unusual’ comforts. It focuses on her sensory abilities by emphasizing how things glitter in bright lights, on how there’s a painful ringing in her ears when things are too loud, and how she reacted strongly to the strong smells around her. Secondly, it focuses on her inability to understand social cues by her talking too loud for the situation, and by her saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, among other things. Thirdly, it focuses on her overstimulation with her seeming obsession with her squeeze machine. She’s overwhelmed to the point of tears, and so she turns to the fourth thing, these unusual comforts such as spinning or her squeezing machine to comfort her. These things are all common struggles of autistics, and the spinning or feeling of pressure around them soothes them.
Overall, not much is known about what is happening physiologically, but many have said that autism is an abnormal wiring of the brain. Meaning, your brain’s circuitry is arranged differently than normal, allowing your neurons to make connections that they wouldn’t make in normal people. This allows people like Grandin to see things in pictures or be smarter academically than your average person. This is to say, autistics are generally seen as dumb, but it’s not their intellectual abilities that should be brought to question, it should be their ability to communicate their intelligence.
These struggles with communication and expression are something that Grandin showed quite well in her movie. Many times you’d hear her say something along the lines of “well I’ll never be able to understand that” referring to facial expressions. Her response was simply to try harder at the other things, and she ended up compensating for her weaknesses by progressing through school and forgoing anything involving human interaction when she could. This is not to say she avoided it, she just simply didn’t go out of her way to make friends.
Overall, this movie showed me more about autism than I have ever seen in one coherent piece. Though I’ve researched autism a lot over the years that I’ve been diagnosed, it is one thing to know it and another thing entirely to see it. I’ve never met other autistics in person, I’ve only talked to them online and discussed similarities. To see, almost face-to-face, the challenges that I’ve imagined, to see them manifested in a person, was incredible. Not just that, but it was enlightening to the extreme because it allowed me to reflect upon my life and see my trajectory. I never knew about Grandin’s cattle history, and that was one thing that made her squeeze machine make so much sense to me. I’d always wondered how she got the idea, and now I have it.
Grandin is an amazing woman to study, not just because of her autism but because of her talents, among these being strength, resilience, and persistence. However, because of her autism and how she proved everything that was commonly known about it to be ‘wrong,’ many people can know that there is hope for those with autism. And not only that there is hope, but also come to understand that we are not trying to be difficult when we struggle with things—it’s just how we are.