Think about this: imagine waking up every morning to the sound of human speech or of the melody of music that sounded like grinding metal underwater. Imagine feeling sandy gritty sheets on bare skin, intense pain in your eyes as light seems to burn your optical nerves and stabbing nausea deep in your gut. Imagine feeling this mixture of sound, pain, and agitation every morning, every afternoon, every waking hour.
The hyper-sensitive to many of the everyday sounds, textures, and sights that we are all exposed to daily, but for him, the result of these exposures leaves him mostly anxious, agitated, and aggravated. Wouldn’t you seek to shut off the pain and the agitation? It only makes sense that my son Garrett is seeking the same—to stop the sound, touch sensation, sight, and nausea that interrupts his daily life. I’ve worked with him since he was one day old…he is my son and he has Autism.
Now imagine cool rippling water surrounding the red hot irritation of the texture, sounds, and pain and soothing it. For Garrett his art, pictures, and sculptures gives him this sense of relief from the irritation and pain. Art is his freedom and peace.
Finally, think about creating the art work, sculptures, pictures, and so forth for 4 years and then suddenly in a moment of being overwhelmed by too much sensory input and demands to watch your life's work shatter on the black pavement of a high school parking lot as you use all your strength to through the books and tablet in your hand to the ground to release the intense pain. Suddenly you realize that the tablet with your life's work is shattered, is black, is no more....
Since 2015 Garrett had morned the loss of all of his work. It has been a terrible thing to witness you son grieve and morn in a way that you can't help. I took the device to 4 different places to fix it, and NOTHING worked. In a last ditched attempt, I gave the device to the Carlson family and they worked their magic! They were successful!! All that was left to do was to go to the AT&T store to get an SD card so that it can work!
I was NOT prepared for what was going to happen at the store. I captured it on video, and a few hours later I had Garrett sit with me and describe what he was feeling as he watched the video. The result, Autism describing Autism.