Sticking to It

What's the point? This is the question I ask myself whenever my job gets tedious, boring, repetitious, no end in sight.

Don't get me wrong; I love my job. There are few things I would rather do than work with someone with special needs. I go to work looking for eyes that gleam at understanding something that most people take for granted. It motivates me to deal with my mountain of bills, respond with a smile when I am shoved on the subway (try it sometime), and roll out of bed eager to go to work.

But when you are working with autistic children the days of job satisfaction can be pretty infrequent – sometimes months or even years apart. I start to feel like I'm wasting my life working with someone who can never understand. Those are the days when I ask myself: what's the point?

Al was autistic and was soon turning 16. Statistically this is not a progressive time for anyone with autism. The hormones that made my teens an emotional storm for me were doing double duty on Al, making it near impossible for him to sit and concentrate. I know I was frustrated and I was pretty sure Al felt the same way.

I tried everything to help him. Ordering him to sit certainly didn't work and pleading with him just made him more anxious. Soothing music was distracting, aromatherapy made the class feel sick, and reading on a trampoline could only be called successful if the goal was to make me nauseous. His other therapists and doctors had exhausted all resources. We were all asking ourselves, "What's the point?"

But even though I had run out of new ideas, I plugged away. After what seemed like forever of practicing the same exercises and reading the same passages, I began to notice some changes. Al's focus began to improve to the point where he was reading three words at a time instead of three letters. What was the miracle cure?

His medications were the same; his diet hadn't changed; and his physio, OT, and speech therapists had not made any changes in his treatments.

After many long nights trying to wrap my head around this I realized that the linchpin to Al's improvement was simply that we had all persisted. We hadn't given up. It was the oldest treatment method in the book, and it was the one aspect that made the most difference: caring. You can't measure it quantitatively; you can't verify it with easily reproducible results; you can't stick a label on it and sell it on a shelf.

I realized that in a world of lights and buttons, where everything is broken down into scientific pieces, it's easy to lose sight of something as fundamental as perseverance and caring.

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