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aCTIvITy 2.19
continued
autobiography
“My Story”
from Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
1 People who aren’t autistic always ask me about the moment I realized I could understand the way animals think. They think I must have had an epiphany.
2 But it wasn’t like that. It took me a long time to figure out that I see things about animals other people don’t. And it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I finally realized I had one big advantage over the feedlot owners who were hiring me to manage their animals: being autistic. Autism made school and social life hard, but it made animals easy.
3 I started to fall in love with animals in high school when my mother sent me to a special boarding school for gifted children with emotional problems. Back then they called everything “emotional problems.” Mother had to find a place for me because I got kicked out of high school for fighting. I got in fights because kids teased me. They’d call me names, like “Retard,” or “Tape recorder.”
4 They called me Tape Recorder because I’d stored up a lot of phrases in my memory and I used them over and over again in every conversation. Plus there were only a few conversations I like to have, so that amplified the effect. I especially like to talk about the rotor ride at the carnival. I would go up to somebody and say, “I went to Nantasket Park and I went on the rotor and I really liked the way it pushed me up against the wall.” Then I say stuff like, “How did you like it?” and they’d say how they liked it, and then I’d tell the story all over again, start to finish. It was like a loop inside my head, it just ran over and over again. So the other kids called me Tape Recorder.
5 Teasing hurts. The kids would tease me, so I’d get mad and smack ‘em. That simple. They always started it, they liked to see me react.
6 My new school solved that problem. The school had a stable and horses for the kids to ride, and the teachers took away horseback riding privileges if I smacked somebody. After I lost privileges enough times I learned just to cry when somebody did something bad to me. I’d cry, and that would take away the aggression. I still cry when people are mean to me.
7 Nothing ever happened to the kids who were teasing.
8 The funny thing about the school was, the horses had emotional problems, too.
They had emotional problems because in order to save money the headmaster was buying cheap horses. They’d been marked down because they had gigantic behavior problems. They were pretty, their legs were fine, but emotionally they were a mess. The school had nine horses altogether, and two of them couldn’t be ridden at all. Half of the horses in that barn had serious psychological problems. But I didn’t understand that as a fourteen-year-old.
9 So there we all were up at boarding school, a bunch of emotionally disturbed teenagers living with a bunch of emotionally disturbed animals. There was one horse, Lady, who was a good horse when you rode her in the ring, but on the trail
my Notes
Unit 2 • The Power to Change 153
amplified: made larger, greater, or stronger
psychological: pertaining to the mind
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