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About Me

Hello! My name is Quinn. I’m eight and three-quarters years old. My favorite things are baseball, dolphins, and ancient Egypt. Oh yeah, and I’m autistic. Sometimes I don’t understand people, and sometimes they don’t understand me. Little things get on my nerves, like too many people talking at once. It can be hard to fit in. But when the other kids see how good I am at drawing, they are interested. This is how I make my place in the world. I just concentrate on what I do best.

Did you know that nobody had ever even heard of autism until the 1940s? It was around before then, but there just wasn’t a name for it yet. Then two different doctors, Dr. Kanner and Dr. Asperger, each started thinking about what some of their patients had in common. Some didn’t speak. Some were very good with numbers and patterns. Some were bothered by loud noises. But they all seemed to live in a world of their own, hardly noticing people around them. Both of these doctors, thousands of miles apart, looked at their patients and came up with the same word:Autism (from the Greek word for “self”).

Still, it took a long time for us to begin to understand autism. It wasn’t until forty years later that Dr. Asperger’s work became widely known. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have learned much more about autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in the Arts and Sciences—some who blend in with the crowd, and some who proudly let it show.

Sometimes I wonder about all the autistic people who lived before, though. Most probably never met anyone else like them. They must have thought that they were the only ones who ever cared more about trains, or music, or the planets, than about making friends. They probably assumed that every person on earth but them knew the secret to fitting in. Did they wonder why they weren’t like everybody else? And how did they turn their unique abilities into something great? It’s hard to say for sure, but there are even some famous people who I think may have been different like me...