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…
