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There Was a Secret in My Strange Walk
People tend to ignore non-behavioral signs of ASD — including me
It wasn’t the usual symptoms that made me start wondering about ASD, the ones that people typically associate with autism. Not a lack of eye contact. Not an inappropriate affect or coldness. Not a single fixed obsession.
I remember hearing a joke in the early 2000’s: Asperger’s is a syndrome contracted by reading its Wikipedia page. Some of the behavioral symptoms are just too subjective, too easy to self-apply. If that was all this was, I would still be shaking my head.
But people can forget that autism, as a neurological condition, has a range of symptoms beyond unusual behavior. Motor coordination, for one — people with autism don’t walk quite right. This can manifest in a few different ways: Perhaps a child starts walking late, or is especially clumsy, or has an unusual gait or posture.
That last one had a little extra purchase for me. You see, in my reading I kept coming across a term I’d never seen in any other context: Toe walking. The name says it all, I think, but for those in need of an explanation, it is a gait that favors the front of the foot — walking on tiptoes forever, basically. It is common in toddlers, but most children grow out of it unless they have some condition that keeps them from walking heel-to-toe.
Autism happens to be one of those conditions. Toe walking is extremely common in children on the spectrum, to the point where it can be an early warning sign.
That’s a pretty specific symptom right there. Experts are quick to point out that toe walking is within the normal range of human physical expression, that there are idiopathic cases not connected to any known disorder. Nevertheless, most evaluations for autism are going to ask the caretakers some variation on the question: Did your child favor walking on the front of his foot?
And my answer to this, when evaluating myself, is “…I still do this.”
It’s something that I don’t even really notice anymore, although I did back then. As a child, I was actually pretty amused by my curious walk — I moved like a great cat, like a stalking tiger, and it seemed more like a talent or a gift than a problem. It…
