Autism and the Challenge of Rapid Motor Planning and Initiation in New Situations

My high school has an old farm because it has a magnet program for intensive studies in veterinary science and agriculture. It is really nice because the students care for the animals. Over vacation we have to feed them. There are rabbits, hens, sheep, goats, a horse and a llama. The goats are intelligent and eager to escape to eat leaves. They have the same lock the sheep have on their pen. The sheep can’t open it but the goats open it with ease. To stay in, they require an additional chain and clasp lock and if it isn’t on just right, they escape.

Today was my turn to feed, water, clean and exercise the animals (that is, I exercise and clean the horse and feed and water the rest). We went to give the goats fresh water and in a flash they opened the gate and rushed out to eat leaves. They group up and run away and resist you too so it can be a struggle to get them back in, and the first ones you catch only want to escape to get back to the leaves and their friends.

I was watching this because I was with my mom who asked me to help her with the gate. I am able to do everything I need to do, more or less, but it felt frustrating today because I saw that I still react so slowly in a moment that required speed. I knew I needed to move fast because she had a goat at the gate and didn’t want to lock up the gate completely since there were more she had to put back in the pen. They struggle to get back to their leaves with great intensity and it is a pain to hold a struggling goat with one hand and fumble with a lock with the other.

Autism is an initiation disorder too. I see where I should go and I stay frozen. Doing new tasks is tough because our bodies need to learn the steps. The steps in this moment would be clear to a neuro-typical body, but not to mine. Though my mind knew what to do, it just wasn’t ready to react in time. This is frustrating personally, but perhaps even worse is that our difficulty initiating certain responses confuses many specialists who then assume we don’t understand logic and basic problem solving.

It isn’t the thinking that’s the problem. It is the ability to react and follow our thoughts that we struggle with. I see my skills have improved, because eventually I got to the gate and held it against goats pushing with all their might to escape again. In the end, we got them all back in. Maybe next time we should let them out on purpose so I can get more practice reacting to emergency situations more quickly.

Motor Planning and Autism

Clues into non-verbal autism can be found by observing how we move. It is obvious that moving in certain ways is difficult for us. It is easy to be idle when your body frustrates, but we must fight that. My exercising has helped me a lot, though I am far from my goals. In exercising I struggle with many things, but one of the most challenging is doing different upper and lower body movements at the same time. My body will do one or the other. It takes all my concentration to just do the legwork if the movement is even a little complicated. If you add in arms to my steps, I need to stop my feet. This is an obstacle in sports, as you can imagine. In sports you need to run and catch (or whatever). I can’t do that at all. I run or I catch. Period. If I work out and I march in place and then I have to do arm lifts with hand weights at the same time, my brain sort of thinks, “huh?”

The ability to do different actions, arms and legs, is something most people take for granted. It is very frustrating to fight your body the way we do. Some people with autism are frail. Some are soft. But we all need to work on our movements and muscle development. In autism it is the disconnect between our intentions and movements that is so challenging.