His heroes want to be considered people.
Recently, a series about people with nonverbal autism was released on several platforms: they can write novels but can hardly communicate with the world.
"I Didn't Get to Hogwarts" consists of six half-hour stories of people with nonverbal autism (that is, non-speaking). Monologues extracted from them using iPads and a facilitator (a person helping autistic individuals) are voiced by actors — Nikita Kologrivyy, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Alexandra Bortich, Ruzil Minekaev, Nikita Efremov, Alexey Onezhen (“The Tale of Tsar Saltan”), Svetlana Ivanova, and Semyon Shomin. Some lines appear on the screen as text, the same as that typed on the iPad keyboard.
Autistic individuals can be roughly categorized as high-functioning and low-functioning. The former, from the perspective of an ordinary person, have many peculiarities, find it very difficult to live, but they can speak and write, attend school, and find work. The latter (in addition to their peculiarities) do not write and, sadly, do not even speak. They can easily be mistaken for mentally disabled individuals, but very often their intellect is not impaired at all: they have a whole world locked inside them, a soul as alive and highly developed as ours. If given the opportunity to communicate with the world (for example, by teaching them to type phrases on an iPad — even for this, constant help is usually needed, not physical, but rather emotional), they can write a novel or a poem. Or simply explain what they feel.
— I would like to be considered a person, — writes 15-year-old Zakhar.
— You are already considered a person; you are not a dog, — says the facilitator.
— They think I have no brains. It hurts me.
Zakhar has just been examined by a commission, whose members affectionately called the boy smart, and then issued a verdict: "Severely limited abilities due to intellectual incapacity." The life limit is to learn to sweep and wash the floor. According to Zakhar's mother, they were guided by a simple reasoning: "Doesn't speak, so must be an idiot." "They communicated with me as if I were some kind of dog," writes Zakhar.
He loves stories about Harry Potter. His father died in a car accident, crashed on a scooter. "When I was little, my dad was gone. I thought he went to Hogwarts. On a motorcycle, like Hagrid. Muggles can't be told about Hogwarts. And I thought he just pretended to be dead. I wanted to go to him, and I waited for him to take me. But then I realized he was gone. But no one knows where people go after death. Maybe Harry Potter just died but didn't notice?"
They tell him: "It's not your time to go there" — that is, to his father. He replies: "I am already half there. My soul is there, and my body is here. Between life and death. I am almost in a coma, I don't speak, and I can't do anything by myself."
"I like Potter because he also didn't remember who he really was at first. Sometimes I think I can talk; I would like to remember how. It feels like I just forgot. If I remember myself, then I will remember how to talk... Hogwarts is not a place, but a state; it is a life that has meaning. And my state is that of a boy who survived. But not completely."
