My Life on This Planet: A Letter Board Speller's Revolutionary Insights Into the Paradox of Autism - Hardcover

Lina Hjalmarsson Lyons's clarity about her own autism experience confronts the reader with the confusing anomalies inherent in this complex condition. "I think it's so hard for people to incorporate the paradox of autism," she writes. "I think that life with someone on the severe end of the spectrum is a life full of suffering and a life full of bliss."

Spelling out her thoughts on letter boards, with her mother, Helena Hjalmarsson, as her communication partner, this young, bright author describes everything she remembers about the terrifying experience of regressing into autism when she was 3 1/2 years old, losing her ability to speak, and becoming severely dysregulated and disorganized. Her writing brings the brutal as well as blissful mystical realities of autism into broad day-light and will enlighten anyone who wants to understand their child, client, or student on the spectrum. It will become an advocate and friend to those who are struggling inside autism's isolated prisons. The author knows, intimately, what it feels like to lose one's speech, to suffer body betrayal and excruciating OCD and anxiety, nervous system breakdowns, and inappropriate and humiliating education. Through her own vivid observations and deep awareness, she illustrates how autism has nothing to do with compromised intelligence. "We just have a lot of difficulties with our bodies," Lyons states. "It's not our ability to think that is challenged, it's the connection between our brains and our bodies." Lyons is also able to describe her "seeing" beyond formal reality, including but not limited to her ability to read the thoughts of others, predict events, connect with other frequencies, see auras, being blessed with a very quiet ego and universal consciousness-all so curiously prevalent among individuals on the spectrum.

Lina Hjalmarsson Lyons is an unconventional, bold, and powerfully authentic writer and poet whose astute insights will alter and deepen our understanding of autism forever.