Everyday Heaven. Donna Williams
Communication.
Everyday Heaven is perhaps the most laugh-out-loud of the four autobiographical works, which is strange for it’s a story of beginnings and endings, of transition and emergence, of life and of death. It is a story of spirituality and development and what happens when your life has become a stagnant pond and you transform it into a flowing brook.
On some levels it is one of the first published autobiographies about autistic marriage and soon enough about divorce but also a book about an autistic perspective on death and loss.
Laced with humor throughout, Everyday Heaven navigates the reader from a veneer or contentment into the turmoil of death, separation and divorce. But as endings close one door, others open and the book soon springs into a coming-of-age story about the sudden clumsy, funny but beautiful emergence and exploration of sexuality and orientation. It is also story about health and facing the stark realities of being someone with primary immune deficiencies facing my own death in my mid thirties. And it is a book of hope and how treatment turned that around and simultaneously set me free from Exposure Anxiety’s labyrinth of involuntary avoidance, diversion and retaliation responses.
Along the way, I became not only an author and a teacher but an international public speaker, an autism consultant who has worked with hundreds of people with autism. I became a partner, a friend, a fool, a pioneer, a candle to others and a controversy. As I moved from autism to artism, I became an accomplished painter, a sculptor, a singer-songwriter and screenwriter. Most recently I became a band manager of Donna and The Aspinauts and wrote, produced, directed and performed in rock musicals.
I can’t say I managed all of these things through the defeat of my autism because in so many ways it was my autism itself which gave birth to all of these things. The once meaning deaf girl became the singer and musician. The once meaning blind girl learned to see through her hands, became proficient in gestural signing and a sculptor. The person once crippled by Exposure Anxiety learned that typing could set her free and became a writer. The person who had danced with mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders since the age of two learned to seize life where she could, never waste it. The person who had battled to feel her body, own it, love it and fight for it, became a performer who would touch the lives of others though using it. The warrior who had battled life, selfhood and autism until she learned that loving achieves more than fighting, took that lesson forth as a lecturer, teacher and consultant. I hope you enjoy Everyday Heaven as a stand-alone adventure in my autobiographical series.
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