I must tell you about the most beautiful encounter I have had this week. I have to tell you about Ann Crabtree.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Ann is autistic.
His childhood took place in his own inner world. As a child, she refused to play with others, at a time when children like her were referred to as “childhood schizophrenics”. Ann is also deaf, she didn’t start pointing at what she wanted until around 10 or 11 years old, the age when she understood that the other children were human beings, like her.
It was in her forties that Ann began to master verbal language. She first learned sign language.
“I’m lucky,” she told me, in a conversation Zoom recent. When my parents died, they expected me to go live in a home for the aged. But autism has its own timeline and I developed at my own pace…”
Her voice is that of a child, but her sentences are complete and understandable. She reads my lips and replies tit for tat, without hesitation.
Ann is an ambassador for Giant Steps, a school for autistic people aged 4 to 21, a school that has pioneered the inclusion – and understanding – of autism for more than 40 years.
Until the COVID-19 pandemic, Ann went once a week to Giant Steps, where she acted as an interface between the children and the teachers. “I can help them deal with things the same way they do. Even if people without autism do their best, they are not autistic. They don’t know what we feel, do, see… It’s different for us. »
Exactly, Ann… What is being you, being autistic?
I live exactly in the moment. For now, I’m talking to you… That’s all I think about. I am in the moment, I feel everything. I smell my clothes, I smell the chair I’m sitting on. Unlike neurotypicals, we feel everything, and we feel everything very intensely.
Ann Crabtree
At this point in the conversation, Thomas Henderson, CEO of Giant Steps, chimes in: “Because of this intensity, there are things that Ann can’t do. Like taking public transport…”
She explains to me that she feels everything at the same time, that all the stimuli are amplified. The sounds (which she feels, despite her deafness), the smells, the vibrations, the colors, the light. Being touched is a huge challenge: “Tapping me on the shoulder feels like a burn,” says Ann. The smell of roses, for autistic people, is terrible. But I like the smell of rocks…”
Time is an abstraction, she explains to me. She is unable to project herself in time. If she experiences something she doesn’t like, she is incapable of saying to herself, “Well, in a few minutes, it will be over…”
“I feel like I’m stuck in this moment forever. This is why autistic children hate change. But this feeling, it can be fantastic, too… When you live a beautiful thing! »
And she has an absolutely phenomenal memory, a photographic memory that stores facts, smells, sensations, vibrations, moments, it’s as if her memory were a video library.
“Everything sticks in my memory,” she said. In this Zoomwith you, I think about others Zoom. I’m filming what’s happening right now. Afterwards, I will see this moment again, like a film. I will remember the smells, what I felt to the touch… It’s good, but it’s also bad.
“Why, Anne?
“Because you can’t forget scary memories.” »
Thomas Henderson did his master’s thesis on Ann Crabtree. He recounts Ann’s spontaneous response when he asked her her age, at their first interview: “Seventy years, six months and four days…”
Which makes me think I forgot to tell you Ann Crabtree’s age: she’s 77. But it’s as if her life was beginning, Ann is dashing like a thirty-year-old.
I ask her when she started speaking so fluently, she who only learned the language late, by reading lips, first (and late). Answer: when she started collaborating with the Giant Steps school in 2010.
On the screen, the woman talking to me is inexhaustible, laughing, playful… And intelligent.
Since COVID-19, Ann has been mostly confined. It doesn’t matter, she has her inner life, in her apartment on the South Shore. His toys, his iPad, his teddy bears. But she can’t wait, very can’t wait, very, very can’t wait to go back to the Giant Steps school, which will open in September 2023 in the Angus district, in Rosemont.
And Ann has made a big decision, dashing as she is: she’s going to move to the Angus district. She bought a condo there. There is a park in front. And, five minutes from its terrace, the future Giant Steps Centre, under construction thanks to a fundraising campaign that is still underway, the result of an effort that has lasted several years.
“I’m going to be able to go there every day,” Ann told me, delighted. I will be able to spend all my days with the children, with the staff. The park in front of my house is very beautiful. There are fountains. The condo will be mine. This will be my home. »
After 40 minutes of Zoom, I was under the spell of Ann Crabtree, an atypical person, who had explained autism to me as the spectrum of autism had never been explained to me. I thought of her parents, who would be proud of her. I thought of all the parents of autistic children, who love them and who are proud of them.
“What is it like to be autistic, Ann?”
— Autism is often a greater challenge for people caring for autistic people than for the autistic people themselves…”
She adds that before, specialists only saw her autism as a problem. Thanks to the Giant Steps school, she learned to share her life with other humans, in joy…
“And rocks, Ann, what do they smell like?”
— It’s a comforting, warm smell. It’s different from the smell of snow.
– What does snow smell like?
– Ice cream. »