I recently read the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-time by Mark Haddon. It is one of the best books I’ve read this year as I absolutely loved the main character, Christopher Boone. In fact, sometimes I think I might be autistic myself…
1. He hates crowds and so do I. He gets a proper panic attack in Brent Cross Shopping Mall but managed to survive the London Underground in the end. I hate crowds and constantly feel claustrophobic. I do many things off-peak to try and “beat the crowd”.
2. His attention to detail is excruciating. I won’t go so far as to say I can remember the numbers, positions and colours of sheep on a field, but I do notice lots of things that other people don’t. Like typos and different font sizes in a novel.
3. His OCD behaviour includes arranging things in a certain way and not letting food touch each other on a plate. I don’t like wetting my rice, and I arrange my books and DVDs according to height and colour.
4. He knows what he likes and dislikes. The quote below had me in stitches because it is exactly how I feel about people who want everything in life. As a youth, I wanted to be good in everything and have everything. But I soon learnt to stick to my strengths and passions.
But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don’t take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others. It is like being in a restaurant like when Father takes me out to a Berni Inn sometimes and you look at the menu and you have to choose what you are going to have. But you don’t know if you are going to like something because you haven’t tasted it yet, so you have favourite foods and you choose these, and you have foods you don’t like and you don’t choose these, and then it is simple.” – Christopher Boone, p.85
Wan Phing Lim 