A Quote by Temple Grandin
I was nonverbal until I was four years old. Back in the 50s, I was the kind of kid they used to just put away in an institution. But then you get the milder autism where there's no speech delay, but they're socially awkward. Those kids were around when I was a child. They were just called geeks and nerds.
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Steve Jobs was probably mildly on the autistic spectrum. Basically, you've probably known people who were geeky and socially awkward but very smart. When does geeks and nerds become autism? That's a gray area. Half the people in Silicon Valley probably have autism.
When I started doing my act, I wasn't married and didn't have kids. I was probably 29 years old. Some people say that's not a kid, but when you're 50, and you look back to when you were 30, you were a kid. You look back on your 30s and think, "I was an idiot!" But I would just do things then I thought were funny. I couldn't have cared less who thought anything about it.
When I was diagnosed, mothers were blamed for causing autism. There was no autism support. They'd put autistic kids in institutions. I had severe autism. But my mom wouldn't accept that. I was put in speech therapy. My mother was always pushing me to do stuff.
The thing is, autism is all different, you know, variables. And you start out with a certain amount of, you know, the point where the differences in the brain are going to just be a personality variant and, like, for very mild Asperger's. But you get into more severe kinds of autism where there's obvious speech delay, obvious abnormal behavior in a two and three-year-old child, you know, the initial neurology is different from case to case. But all children with autism are going to do better if they get really good educational intervention.
I'm seeing too many smart kind of socially awkward kids, a lot milder than I was, not getting employment because they're not learning job skills.
In fact, there are autism clusters, you know, around some of the big tech centers. You take two socially awkward computer programmers and put them together, that can kind of concentrate the autistic genes.
Most of my friends - when I was five, six, seven years old - their dads were working in an auto plant in Detroit until 5:30, and then they were sat in rush hour. They weren't around as much. My dad finished at three o'clock, so he was just around more.
If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old, we wouldn't be able to survive. We would have a hard time surviving if we were transported to the time when dinosaurs were around.
I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.
The word 'geek' today does not mean what it used to mean. A geek isn't the skinny kid with a pocket protector and acne. There can be computer geeks, video game geeks, car geeks, military geeks, and sports geeks. Being a geek just means that you're passionate about something.
I did a pilot for Judd Apatow when I was 20 years old, so 18 years ago. The same year that he did that pilot, he made another pilot called Freaks And Geeks.Judd felt bad for me because I was living in L.A. by myself. Not only did he put me in an episode of Freaks And Geeks, but he was like, "Hey, just come hang out. I'm on set, getting to know everybody." I started hanging with everybody, and they were all either my age or a little younger. Seth and I just got along really well - Jason Segel and I, too - and before you know it, it was a really strong, solid group of friends.
Many people with autism struggle with reading nonverbal cues and acting on them. When you lose that ability to understand and process nonverbal cues, you're at a huge disadvantage socially.
Once we were a part of Equity, we were able to get a salary, and then because we were employing ourselves, we just made sure we were always working. We put in hours to get subscribers. We used to do little shows at rich peoples' houses to get them to give us money.
I did dancing and singing when I was little, and then when I was 12 years old my friends were taking speech and drama at school. They were private lessons, and I started doing that. Over the years everyone else dropped out and I just kept going. I loved it.
Those old '90s models when women were just themselves and they were real and they were embraced that way - I think we should get back to that.
I didn't like what was on TV in terms of sitcoms?it had nothing to do with the color of them?I just didn't like any of them. I saw little kids, let's say 6 or 7 years old, white kids, black kids. And the way they were addressing the father or the mother, the writers had turned things around, so the little children were smarter than the parent or the caregiver. They were just not funny to me. I felt that it was manipulative and the audience was looking at something that had no responsibility to the family.
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