Getting to know me...

This song has a lot of meaning for me, for what I think are perfectly obvious reasons.It describes me quite well.No wonder this has been my favourite band for many years. 

On Friendship...

Humans aren’t meant to be alone. That much is clearly true. When we are in love for instance, the different hormones and chemicals of the body work to encourage and reward us. Most people have felt that feeling of euphoria in some form. It is undeniable and so are the health benefits. It is a medical fact that those in a loving relationship will live longer.  As well as the inner benefits of body chemistry, there are the mental ones. The emotional and physical support offered by a partner in life is just as valuable. Being within a model that Society accepts as ‘normal’ is also a stabilising force.  

The simple companionship of having a partner or a close friend, to share our victories and our problems goes a long way to good mental health. While on the other end of the scale, being alone is highly stressful and painful just of itself. 

If a person finds themselves outside of this paradigm, then there are many negative effects, both physical and mental. Living with loneliness and a feeling of failure for extended periods of time has effects that one would expect such as depression and social isolation. The withdrawal of the hormonal nectar is painful and eventually ebbs into a dull lethargy that becomes the everyday trudge to and from one place to another. Parts of the brain that govern positive emotions go into a semi-shutdown mode. It is as if we are not living, but merely existing from one day to the next.      

This state of affairs can also have strange and unexpected effects. When a person exists for a long period in this state, then the effects of any form of human contact are magnified. A successful interaction with another human being can initiate that same feeling of euphoria within the soul as being in love. It is a rush of good emotions that allows one to accomplish many things in a small amount of time, until the feeling passes and the effect of the hormone has worn off.

This is how I have come to feel about true friendship and how being around friends makes me feel. It is an experience oh so rare and to my mind, valued beyond riches.

Setting the scene...

It was the mid 1980’s and even the highly questionable term 'High Funcitoning Autism' didn’t yet exist. Highly inaccurate though it is, I mention it because back then even the concept of Autism without obvious cognitive and physical disabilities was not thought possible. So there were almost no health professionals to offer any assistance or insight into people like me, whose struggles were fought behind the walls of my mind. Inner struggles, wreathed in shadows, hidden away for decades, without even my understanding of how and why they existed. As for parents, in those days they were conditioned to avoid even the thought of it. Having a disabled child was social anathema. The social stigma attached to Autism meant that many went out of their way to deny it in their children. 

Those whose learning difficulties were so numerous as to be obvious were told they would not cope looking after them at home and many were advised by health professionals that the best thing would be for their children to be institutionalised, which sadly some did. This was very much sweeping under the carpet what they saw as a insoluble problem. So families were divided and children left to the mercies of a state that did not understand how to help them, often doing more harm than good.  

The existence of, shall we say, those autisitcs who were better able to blend in and whose inner struggles were missed by the medical profession went unacknowledged. Parents who questioned and brought up problems to health care professionals were often labelled as part or the even the cause of ‘the problem’. Terms such as ’refrigerator mother’ were coined by Doctors to imply that parents themselves had caused their children to be Autistic by not showing them love. This general lack of research and lack of understanding would endure for years to come. 

And so a generation of boys and even more undiagnosed girls were left without support and many were forced to mask their disability, in an attempt to fit in with the neuro-typical world around them. As they grew older, the severe stress would manifest in a host of mental health issues. Even more importantly they somehow always feel on the outside and the fringes of society, looking in.  

For some, their pain and frustration at not being supported or understood would lead to their behaviour being deemed unacceptable, challenging and dangerous. It would take decades for this group of people to become recognised by the rest of society and to be offered some kind of inclusion in it. Nowadays there is an acknowledgement that somebody who does not present as obviously having a learning disability can be Autistic too.

The labels of 'High and Low Functioning' imply severe and mild, which is to my mind a flawed system. A person that fits any combination of criteria to achieve a diagnosis may be just as severely impacted in their life, no matter what list of conditions may come alongside their autism. Every person's Autism is unique to them. As the saying goes in Autistic culture: when you've seen one Autistic person, you've seen one Autistic person. In other words, what may help one autistic person, may not help the next person. 

I am part of that history and it is part of my story. For I am one of that hidden generation of Autistics. Putting on a mask to survive the necessities of life. Living behind the walls I had to put up, to protect my identity and all the vulnerabilities that came with it. Protection from others and for a long time, even withholding the knowledge from myself. Holding back a flood of distress, behind the walls of a dam.

Like comic book characters from a different dimension, we Autistics have learned to put up our defences by day, donning our masks, to cover over our irregularities. We hide in plain sight, seeking to be a part of the world around us. A part and yet also apart, so to speak.

I recall the nights when memories would constantly replay in my mind, making sleep difficult. I would obsess and analyse over the past. Snippets of stressful social situations, of mistakes made and the traumatic emotions felt at the time that cut like a knife. Slowly over time, I learned to turn my face away from these impossible problems of the past. Removing myself from stressful situations helped with this, but at the cost of a life with few social interactions outside my small family circle.

Now that I am aware of who I actually am, I use the social media term #ActuallyAutistic. It encapsulates the whole meaning of a generation’s hidden struggle, to seek and to find identity and a community of our own.