At first glance, it doesn't say much. She is pretty, well formed, long hair with pepper and salt. When she laughs, we are already talking about something else. Suddenly, with one, joy bursts into a frank and communicative expression without any restraint. She looks you straight in the eye and expresses her mood.
Virginie is passing through Saint Martin, she stays a few weeks, maybe more, maybe less. She does not have an established schedule around the world. She had been living in Guadeloupe for five years when she was finally able to put words on her ills. After years of wandering and questioning living with the feeling of not being normal, she ended up passing special tests. Before the tests, she didn't understand why her relationship with the other was so complicated. She watched people move with ease in a world which seemed to her, most of the time, meaningless. To explain what she is going through, she offered me this beautiful image: “imagine that I am a 19th century peasant. I am quiet in my little house, I cultivate my land and suddenly, I am parachuted in the middle of a crossroads of Tokyo today. " To better drive the point home, an anecdote which I could attend. We were waiting to pay the bill at the bar, she was standing behind me in a Greek status position (don't ask why, she's like that. Sometimes she does things we don't understand.), Holding her hair up at the top of his head because of the heat. A man approaches her, and imitates her position by asking her full of mischief if it is not too difficult to hold the pose. She stammers something, the man tries different approaches and gives up. Leaving the bar, she asks me if I can explain to him why he came to speak to her like that. What was the intention? Everyone present could have answered at heart "but to flirt with you!" ", This man's attempt was unambiguous, clear, but she cannot understand this kind of social game. Autistic people find it difficult to decode facial expressions and intentions that are not clearly explained. They also have many other peculiarities…
We commonly have a very cinematic vision of autism. The child trapped in his bubble, which you cannot touch and who swings around all day long while drooling, or the slightly stupid genius who can tell you in a quarter of a second how many matches there are in the jar you are holding. To sum up roughly (but not that much), sick and maladjusted people. Autism is not a disease, it is a neurological peculiarity like DYS, TED, HP… Virginie is somewhere on the autism spectrum, precisely on the side of Asperger's Syndrome. She is neither mad nor ill. She does not need you to articulate better (unless you have a big beard and you speak in it!), She does not need that one manages her life for her. It is simply different, "neuroatypical". Up there, in her head, she is not calibrated like you but she has complementary innate skills. "Neuroatypicity" does not prevent people from living, it gives them the extraordinary possibility of approaching things from another angle. Some large global groups are looking for this kind of profile because by giving these people the opportunity to fully express their potential without trying to fit them into the general model, we give the group a chance to enrich themselves with a different vision. , to venture on original and not yet conquered terrain. Virginie is an autistic woman, she sees the world differently but when we see how the world treats her sometimes, surely it is not her the problem. _NB
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