I was at my happiest in my own company, which I took to be an abnormality. I used to fret about fitting in at school, not because I wanted to, but because I knew I was supposed to. And anybody who is a human knows that this is not a recipe for good times. This struggle persuaded me to assume that I was unlikable, and eventually I stopped thinking about the world through the lens of my own needs.
And the older I got, the less amused people were by me.ĭuring my adolescence I began to find it more and more difficult to make myself understood, and that is when I developed an instinctive habit of taking the blame whenever I didn’t understand what was going on around me – which, to be clear, was all the time.
I assumed I’d get better at stuff as I got older, but it only got worse. In my first year of primary school, I forgot to wear underpants so many times that my family started to check me at the door every morning before I left. I struggled to grasp even the most basic of life’s skills. It was only when I stepped out of the bubble of my family that things went to shit. Because I wasn’t special everyone cheated one way or another. Nobody thought I was special when I memorised every single question and answer in Trivial Pursuit. No one noticed when I would disappear for hours, and no one thought much of my habit of taking frequent naps in the linen press. I was the youngest, so no one expected me to be a leader. They looked out for me, but, because we were a big family, no one really noticed if I didn’t talk. My family unit was a ready-made social network that I didn’t have to navigate cold because I was just a part of it. My childhood was a serendipitously effective buffer for the worst that my ASD threw at me. You were like a tin of baked beans and my tin opener wouldn’t work on you.” It’s a tidy metaphor, especially if you know that Mum does not like baked beans. I always knew there was a lot going on inside you, but I just couldn’t get in.
When I told Mum I was autistic, she said: “Yeah, that makes sense. This is what is called selective mutism, which commonly exists alongside ASD, but is not exclusive to it. Especially if I am overwhelmed by a lot of sensory information at the same time as I am trying to identify, process and regulate emotional distress. To be clear, I don’t identify as being nonverbal, but I often lose my verbal ability. I believe that it is this whirl inside my brain that contributes to my occasional inability to speak. And because of my inability to quickly and efficiently translate what I see into an externally communicable format, I am wired to have lots of fun and adventure in my head while at the same time failing totally, utterly and miserably at life on the outside, and feeling profoundly alone. Sadly, the enthusiasm that my brain brings to the collecting of visual records is not then applied to the filing and retrieval process. By the time I was middling my 30s, I was no longer living my life. I doubt they’d even believe that the tornado orgy of wingdings and gifs was anything other than gibberish. If it were possible for someone to catch a glimpse of my thoughts being processed, they’d be hard-pressed to make sense out it. Needless to say, it is very busy in my head. Every single day I have spent on this Earth, I have added countless images to my brain library. I’m not capable of thinking with imagery that I haven’t seen with my own eyes, which means that when someone tells me a story, I will see it as something like a film that I must edit together out of all the other films sourced from my own internalised collection. I have never managed to develop a reliable system to file and separate my thoughts into individual think pieces, and so I am utterly incapable of having one thought without at least another hundred coming along for the ride.įurther complicating this issue is the fact that my brain doesn’t work in the realm of the abstract. It is fluid and flexible, kind of like a private Wikipedia that I am constantly revising and editing, but instead of words, everything is written in my own ever-evolving language of hieroglyphic films filled with hyperlinks to associated and often irrelevant thoughts. I see my thoughts, but I don’t have a photographic memory, nor is my head a static gallery of sensibly collected thoughts that my brain curates into easy sense.
0 kommentar(er)
