Strategy: Mirror imaging

• “Well, the way that I compensate for my major problems is partly by mirror imaging.”

• “From my visual fluctuations and thinking about how they affect me now, I deduce that in childhood I had real problems in knowing exactly where my connectional limbs and trunk were, where they would move to next, and, even more frighteningly, where they had last been positioned. The solution is to make the other person part of my visual fiend. For example, is the pedestrian in front of me, a hypothetical little old lady walking in the same direction as I am, too far away to mirror? The solution is to walk close to her. The miserable little grey haired woman is nervously looking over her shoulder. Then suddenly she scurries forward as I latch onto an arms-length distance on which to forge an invisible chain. As she moves, so do I because her body is now mine—that is until her movement is out of kilter with what I project as the future. In that event I float off, or, if realy terrified, in that uncertainty I scream then bite my hand on the existing scar below my thumb.”

• Lucy Blackman, Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone, p. 151-2.