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Home » Autism: A Family’s Journey by Julian Maha at TEDxSarasota (Full Transcript)

Autism: A Family’s Journey by Julian Maha at TEDxSarasota (Full Transcript)

Julian Maha

Julian Maha – TRANSCRIPT

All of us have dreams. All of us have ambitions. All of us long for perfection – the perfect job, the perfect family, the perfect life that we think will bring us great joy, happiness, and contentment. So we often choose a path that we feel will get us to this destination of perfection the fastest.

Sure, sometimes, life might come along and throw us some curve balls, but we often find ourselves picking up the pieces and finding our way back to the same path headed towards the same destination. But what if life doesn’t work that way? What if, by staying on this path, you miss out on all the amazing opportunities that other paths might have afforded you? Or worse yet, what if staying on this path only causes you great misery and disappointment?

My friends, I’m here to share with you today, that sometimes, just sometimes, in order to find your true life’s path, you need to be lost. How do I know this? Well, that is our story.

You see, in 2011, we got lost, not lost in a way that asking for directions or consulting a map would fix, but lost in a way of kind of being dropped into a strange country, not knowing anyone there, not knowing the language, not knowing the signs. This was our introduction to the world of autism. Before this, my wife and I were living what you would call the perfect life. We were both successful physicians. We had a nice house.

We could travel whenever we wanted to, and we had just welcomed our first born into the world. His name was Abram. Abram was born a beautiful baby boy. He slept well, we was always happy, and he was very precocious, even beginning to talk at about ten to eleven months.