My Story- Trying to Discover Myself

I have to admit that it's pretty long and still doesn't cover more things than it does cover- but bear with me :) I'll almost definitely re-write it for another time but this will do for now.




I could probably write for a long time all about my story but that would bore a lot of you and I don’t have time to write an entire autobiography! So I’ll try and keep it fairly short and sweet. It’ll still probably be quite long, though, knowing me.


I remember so many strange details about my life. I was born in the UK to Mum, who had moved here from the Mediterranean area, and Dad who had lived in England for his entire life. I was an only child, even though my Mum had wished to have more children. She gave up, sadly, after having five miscarriages. I’ll start from when I was around four years old. We had moved to a fairly large rented house, and I was just about to start primary school. Mum was working writing articles from home for some magazines while Dad refused to get any sort of long-term job. He was fired from several jobs and had a tendency to stay up all night long and then sleep in late. Mum was furious about his irresponsibility but she couldn’t do anything about it.


I was always different. I suppose we all knew that to some extent, though we never made such a big fuss about it. As a small child I had plenty of dolls, and I have photographs of me arranging them all in size order. I suppose my play was different to that of some other children’s. I can’t remember much about starting school, but there are a few memories that stand out. I remember being misunderstood a lot. The teacher’s thought I was being deliberately difficult even though I wasn’t. I was constantly told off by a particular teacher for one thing or another- pretending to be a cat, being clumsy.


To me I was just normal even though I was slightly different. I learnt things quickly and could read from an early age. I loved reading and being read to. I found it difficult to get on with other children in my class, who would convince me that I was their friend and then ultimately do something horrible and then blame me for it time and time again. I remember being left out and forlorn and always being too trusting of them and falling for the same thing. It seemed I was never good enough. In class I was told to go and stand in the corner. In ballet class I was told to go and sit on the bench, until I came home crying and never went again.


My parents were by that time starting to have a lot of arguments. I didn’t know how to cope with it all. I remember crawling under the table in the living room and curling up into a ball where I cried while my parents argued. I can’t honestly remember anything that seems abnormal to me, but I can’t remember everything.


My parents split up when I was six and a lot of change followed. It was with change and over time that I can start remembering things which I can recognise as AS traits. I lived with my grandparents for three years. I took things very literally then, and was upset about a lot of jokes because I didn’t understand them! I was in trouble with my grandfather a few times because I “told him off” about manners! I suppose there was a lot of misunderstanding and confusion sometimes and I didn’t quite know how to control myself at other times. I remember hitting a poor girl and being dragged home by my grandma. I also remember screaming the house down as she dragged me through the hallway, struggling to get away and knocking against the cupboard and giving myself a black eye in the process. This was when I was about eight.


A lot of this is probably very boring and irrelevant but I’d probably have to ask my family about times when I was that young. I can remember a lot more things from when I moved back to live with my parents when I was nine, so I’ll write for a bit about that.


It was obviously a huge change coming back to the UK. I hated travelling on the airplane. The air pressure was absolutely horrible and for some reason hurt my ears which was incredibly strange to my parents. I was half screaming on the journey and crying because they hurt and I was nine years old. I just wanted to go home after the journey. A guard had to ask me a question to check my passport was right- which was hard because I’d not been speaking English for three years and wasn’t quite sure how to answer. I panicked a little bit. I didn’t know how to say the date. I remembered saying it before as one thousand nine hundred and ninety seven, but my Mum had said that wasn’t how you were meant to say it in England.


I hung my head and refused to speak. Mum had to beg me to open my mouth and eventually they let us past.


I have a lot of memories of being really sensitive to things, for instance certain sounds, air pressure and clothing materials especially. We lived in a flat for about a year. Certain clothes and clothes labels drove me crazy and so did certain sounds. I was a picky eater, too, which was a problem. I started school and it was hard because this is when I became aware of being so different. People thought that I was a boffin and I spoke really formally having come back to England. I was scared and didn’t know quite what to say to everybody’s questions. Eventually people just left me alone to pace the school playground. A teacher asked a girl to go and talk to me when she saw me alone, and she tried to help. We became friends even though we had misunderstandings, and I guess that I followed her everywhere, because I was lost without her.


I was diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder when I was twelve. The person who diagnosed me said that it was Asperger’s Syndrome apart from the fact that he didn’t know how my language development was because of bilingual background and one of the criteria is no delay- even though I knew I’d had no delay he couldn’t be sure because of all the complication with everything.


It was my secondary school who recognised AS when I started secondary school. It was another huge change and I was overwhelmed. Social relationships suddenly became so much harder, too. A friend tells me that on the first day I just sat alone and stared into space and didn’t really talk to anyone. I started arguing a lot with my parents at home, and at school I was disorganised and things fell apart. I embarrassed myself, everybody seemed to hate me and I felt generally not good enough. I ripped up tests, shut myself off and refused to participate in things when I just couldn’t, and hit and yelled at a girl because I’d thought she was ignoring me when in truth she hadn’t heard me. The school saw a lot of characteristics of AS and sent a letter home.


We went for the diagnosis and I didn’t say a thing, instead sitting there. I actually didn’t reply to one question I was asked. I was against going, and I had no idea what AS was. I wish I hadn’t now, but at the time I thought it was a way of my parents blaming me for our arguments.


So I told my parents I didn’t want to know about it, and then went back to school to try and pick things up. I didn’t find out about the diagnoses of ASD and dyspraxia until I was thirteen, about a year ago.


I’m finding out a lot more about it now and finally seeing that the diagnosis is definitely right. I doubt the diagnosis of dyspraxia, though, and might be reassessed. There’s no doubt now that I’m an “aspie”, as some call it, though.


I’ve struggled with a lot of things and still find some things hard though obviously things have changed. I attempted suicide three times in April. I can only describe it as kind of having lost myself, in a way, and it’s scary how that can happen. I have self-harmed for a while by cutting, too, but am trying to stop that as I know it’s not the best coping mechanism. I’m trying now to figure myself out. There are obviously a lot of parts of AS that I haven’t covered here but that mean that I am diagnosed with it. I struggle with things but I’m trying to work out ways to get through the teenage years, which are no fun, and many people agree! Hopefully things will improve. I am getting help because of self-harm/suicide attempts but at the moment finding that it’s not really working. It’s “talking therapy” and I find it hard to really talk to somebody. The truth is that I’m often not sure what’s normal and what’s not, and what’s worth talking about. I sometimes wish I could spend a day in somebody else’s head just to know what it’s like!