Asparagus color, the day I discovered that I was asperger's plunges us into The reader follows his initiatory journey from his childhood to the diagnosis, which will allow him to take off.
Lifting the veil on the invisible
Lusun is misunderstood. For her loved ones, her teachers, and for herself, she remains a mystery. Something is stopping him from doing like everyone else. She can't stand noise or touch, can't sustain the gaze, learns foreign languages just by watching her favorite movies. She does not master social and linguistic codes – or does not let herself be locked into them – and ends up hiding behind her rubik's cube, a bulwark against the world, whose rules she better understands. Plagued by doubts, she is indignant as much as she suffers from being different in a world that compartmentalizes. She fails to think and act like them, even when they encourage her to do so with more or less benevolence.
However, it is also thanks to others that she traces her path. First thanks to the support of her family, and her 'buttercup', which she meets at school. Then, following the advice of the latter, she agrees to go to the psychologist who makes the diagnosis: she is Asperger's.
Far from being inevitable, this diagnosis frees her from a weight. Everything lights up for her, her future too, and the drawings are tinged with blue, the favorite color of autistics.
Being an Asperger's Woman
"It's already not easy to become a woman when you're normal! So imagine in my case…', says Lusun. She doesn't feel like a girl or a boy.
She is also surprised, after researching Asperger's following her diagnosis, that only boys are mentioned. Women are less visible and more difficult to diagnose. This is because they make themselves invisible by internalizing their difference. They are more likely to choose fields that facilitate their integration: art, psychology… Where men turn more to fields that do not allow exchanges if their interlocutors do not know these subjects, such as physics or mathematics. Women also tend to imitate more the people who raised them and to behave like them in society, while men appear to be more clearly on the margins. They thus blend into the mass; Discreet, their symptoms are often associated with simple shyness. 'Aspergirls' refer to those Asperger's women who ignore each other, or who are diagnosed late.
Fiction at the service of a didactic work
If the story of Lusun published by the publisher Glénat is a fiction, it is inspired by very real facts. It is based on the story of the screenwriter, Drakja, as well as bibliographical references. Behind its light and childlike appearance, carried by the voice of this young woman and these drawings with endearing characters, Couleur d'Asparagus makes the syndrome visible and allows us to understand it more.
Within everyone's reach, it makes it possible to better understand the characteristics of Asperger's, and to deconstruct a certain number of clichés. For example, he demystifies the notion of 'genius' that can be attributed to Aspergers including by themselves: "I am not a genius! I don't even know how to cut vegetables… Lusun marvels at his diagnosis. This story is also a reminder that Aspergers can have a 'normal' life, have an emotional life and be autonomous. It is finally the life path that we remember the most of this young woman, who struggles despite her difference, and asserts herself over the pages.
