The PDA Paradox 9781785926754, 1785926756

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THE PDA PAR ADOX

of related interest PDA by PDAers From Anxiety to Avoidance and Masking to Meltdowns Sally Cat ISBN 978 1 78592 536 8 eISBN 978 1 78450 934 7

Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome – My Daughter is Not Naughty Jane Alison Sherwin ISBN 978 1 84905 614 4 eISBN 978 1 78450 085 6

Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children A Guide for Parents, Teachers and Other Professionals Phil Christie, Margaret Duncan, Ruth Fidler and Zara Healy ISBN 978 1 84905 074 6 eISBN 978 0 85700 253 2

Freaks, Geeks and Asperger’s Syndrome A User Guide to Adolescence Luke Jackson ISBN 978 1 84310 098 0 ISBN 978 1 84985 790 1 (large print) eISBN 978 1 84642 356

Living in Two Worlds On Being a Social Chameleon with Asperger’s Dylan Emmons ISBN 978 1 78592 706 5 eISBN 978 1 78450 263 8

Fitting In Colin Thompson ISBN 978 1 78592 046 2 eISBN 978 1 78450 301 7

The PDA Paradox The Highs and Low of My Life on a Little-Known Part of the Autism Spectrum

Harry Thompson

Foreword by Felicity Evans

First published in 2019 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers 73 Collier Street London N1 9BE, UK and 400 Market Street, Suite 400 Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA www.jkp.com Copyright © Harry Thompson 2019 Foreword copyright © Felicity Evans 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying, storing in any medium by electronic means or transmitting) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the law or under terms of a licence issued in the UK by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. www.cla.co.uk or in overseas territories by the relevant reproduction rights organisation, for details see www.ifrro.org. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 78592 675 4 eISBN 978 1 78592 677 8 Printed and bound in Great Britain

For The Beast

Contents

Foreword by Felicity Evans

9

Preface

11

Chapter 1 Gratitude? I Think Not!

17

Chapter 2 So What the Devil is this PDA Malarkey Anyway? 21 Chapter 3 Mother and The Beast

27

Chapter 4 ‘School’

43

Chapter 4 A Brief, Yet Necessary, Digression

79

Chapter 4 ‘School’

89

(and a half…)

(resumed)

Chapter 5 ‘Pretending to Be Something I’m Not in Pursuit of Green, Rectangular Pieces of Paper’

115

Chapter 6 Coexisting with Other Living Things on a Blue and Green Speck of Dust Hurtling Through Space Chapter 7 Inhale and Exhale A Final Note from the Author’s Mother

167 179 183

Foreword

I first met Harry when he was 13 years old. It was like visiting a different country: one with an unfamiliar culture, different ways of communicating; a place that made me hypervigilant because I never knew what was going to happen next. At first, I aimed to get Harry to come more into my familiar world – for his own good as well as mine. I thought it would make life easier for him, but it didn’t. Harry liked skiing. So, I just couldn’t understand why he wasn’t eager to set off on time. Instead he would wind up all the other kids, get them agitated or laughing, so they couldn’t get themselves ready. This included mimicking me and swearing profusely, which the younger ones copied. Every day I thought about how to connect with Harry. Things improved somewhat – eventually I could glance at him and he would usually settle. But he remained very troubled and full of angst. 9

10 The PDA Paradox

At moments I glimpsed Harry’s intelligence, but it wasn’t showing academically. His intelligence would spark in wonderful ways – like when he suggested ‘Freedom to Learn’ on the back of the NatureKids t-shirts, for a charity occasion. Harry went off to a school but kept in touch. At 16 he declared that he wanted to get his body and brain to work more effectively. He meticulously set about this, but his aim was misunderstood. Others broke his fragile sense of self and his tentative hold on reality. So, at 18 years old, Harry came back to NatureKids, to find himself. It was a rocky journey for eight months. Gradually he started to eloquently express how he experienced the world, his heightened awareness and profound insights. He enabled me to see the world through his eyes and became my teacher, helping me understand other children and adults on a deeper level. Now when I talk to Harry, it’s interesting and deeply absorbing, a time to replenish my energy and further my insights. It’s an easy and natural connection, like having a relaxing holiday in my favourite place. Harry has written this book to further understanding of PDA and help parents and children towards an easy and natural connection. Felicity Evans a teacher and family support counsellor who has worked with children at a grassroots level for many years. She is the founder of NatureKids – a unique centre for small groups of children and young people.

Preface

Ever since I decided to embark upon this literary venture, it has both amused and astonished me to discover how I have continually fallen prisoner to the very subject matter I endeavour to convey. Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome (PDA) is a behaviour profile within the autism spectrum first proposed in the 1980s by Elizabeth Newson, a UK child psychologist, after analysing a group of children who exhibited traits that were similar but at the same time different from typical autism. By definition, it is the compulsive resistance of the demands of everyday life, and up until about half a paragraph ago, this quirky condition that I supposedly embody felt as though it was going to be a fixed and insurmountable monolith that would block my path, tower over me and ultimately deter me from even starting, let alone finishing, this book. It’s interesting because I seldom need to bring up my diagnosis anymore. I virtually never think about it unless I either make a 11

12 The PDA Paradox

YouTube video, if someone asks or if the topic of autism is dropped into conversation (which, come to think of it, has been happening more and more since starting my YouTube channel). This is due to the fact my life is now more or less together, and, as I’ll go on to explain in chapters to come, whether PDA or autism are gifts or disabilities is, to some extent, contingent on the environment in which those with the conditions are situated. Because over the years I have gradually drifted towards the right life for me, or, as I’d rather put it, gravitated towards my natural habitat, I have found that the drawbacks of all my diagnoses – many of which I’ve utilised – have beset me less and less; but here I am, thrust right back into the heart of the world of PDA ready to do my bit for all of those parents and children currently undergoing the same throes as I did once long ago. I find it ironic that I am writing about a condition, or – to make brisk and reluctant use of that word’s cringe-worthy and lacerating linguistic subordinate – ‘label’, that does admittedly capture many aspects of my personality with impeccable precision, yet is still something I have writhed away from since the very day I was diagnosed with it. But it is a part of my nature, and I’m sure the nature of many others with whom I share this diagnosis, to stave off labels as they can be divisive and demeaning. One person with PDA may relate to the label as it can provide a sense of identity, whereas others will perceive it as society attempting to pigeonhole them and impose a restriction on their individual liberty. I, for one, fall into alignment with the latter; however, as someone with three diagnoses, I do remember how relieving it was for me, my parents and my teachers when our tireless efforts to find out what the heck was ‘wrong’ with me suddenly yielded a clear explanation. I am happy to concede that labels are sometimes useful and necessary. Yet another difficulty that lies ahead of me is how I am expected

Preface 13

to be somewhat compliant and cooperative, and because of this my instinct is to now (and please don’t take this the wrong way) befuddle and toy with you, dear reader. It’s not that I don’t like talking about this topic – I do, quite a lot as you will find out. And neither is it that I am averse to a solemn discussion; on the contrary! It’s not even out of rudeness. It is, like I said before, the fact that this project, however noble it may seem, has now itself become a bit of a demand! And as with any situation where I am asked to do something, I am inclined to politely say, for example, ‘F*** off and write yourself, book!’ Yes, indeed, expectations can be demands too; even those that are unspoken as they linger in the air like germs. If I were to look for just one word to sum up PDA, the words ‘irrational’ and ‘paradoxical’ simultaneously spring to mind and jostle to the front to be picked. Well that’s not entirely true as there is another ‘word’ of sorts. I’d personally employ the nonsensical, glossolalic gibberish that goes through my mind whenever I am asked by others to explain PDA in a nutshell, which is quite a task I must say, but this is not something that can be transcribed easily as it really is just an incoherent splurge of sounds. I suppose if I had to give it a go it would sound something like: ‘BLOGUMSPLERGH’. I assure you there’s nothing to decipher here, and there’s no profound revelation. It really is just a testament to how frustratingly impossible it is to sum up in a few sentences how a brain like mine really works. Luckily for you, my darling reader, I have decided to write a nice juicy book about it. Sometimes I feel it would be more convenient if, instead of taking time to sit down and write a book, I were to install a camera in my flat. Especially a few moments before I started writing, as it would’ve really captured PDA in action as I feverishly paced around the room, picked things up, got lost in thought, and did pretty

14 The PDA Paradox

much anything to avoid writing. This may come across as though I don’t want to write? But that couldn’t be further from the truth, as I wanted nothing more than to start typing away, and this is what can be hard for ‘neurotypical’ people to grasp. I have written, binned, rewritten, and binned this book again more times than I can possibly remember for various reasons, but here I go again for hopefully the final time! I sometimes wonder if ‘Pathological Procrastinating’ may be a more befitting name, or perhaps ‘Pathologically Free-Spirited’, or even ‘Pathological Curiosity’. After all, it is of utmost importance to know ‘why’. ‘Don’t play with fire!’ may seem like a reasonable injunction. If someone were to give me such an order as a child, I’d ask ‘Why?’ And if they gave me a valid and informative answer then that might’ve worked as a deterrent. But if they were to say, ‘Because I said so,’ then it would reinforce my curiosity and there’d be a chance I’d be rushed to A&E a few minutes afterwards. If I were to encapsulate what it feels like to be autistic, then the short answer would be, surprisingly, ‘normal’. This is just the way I am. I am not broken; I do not require any improvements. A longer answer would be: when I am around human beings, I feel like an alien, or a different species. They do things that I cannot get my head around, and vice versa. When I feel forced to live in the real world and do as the humans do, I resent who I am. When I am around my kind and doing things that make sense to me then I understand how being this way is a gift, and I wouldn’t give it up for the world. I appear to be in the flow now so I will spare you the ponti­ ficating, as there is plenty more to come! But just to round this intro off, PDA can be deeply mysterious, and sometimes the explanations to some of its more obscure and puzzling aspects can be hidden from even its host. It can lead us to do terrible things, it

Preface 15

can make us impulsive; but at the same time it can – more often than people realise – be a good thing. Acts of charm, selflessness and courage can also be attributed to its fickle and unpredictable nature, and numerous other endearing and philanthropic qualities can also be derived from its very essence. Also, autism has nothing to do with a person’s upbringing. Some autistic people I know are among the politest and most pleasant people I’ve met. Our autism has a neurological basis and should be treated as such, and some of our more quirky or forthright behaviours shouldn’t be perceived as ‘bad manners’ for which our parents are to blame. Now, I am not a medical professional, and I can only really talk for myself, but since I have firsthand experience of autism, I feel I am qualified to some degree to talk about it; especially from a first-person perspective. It is not my aim to glorify or justify my own misbehaviour, and I ought to point out that if I do come across as self-pitying – or, worse, a spoilt brat – at any point then I assure you it’s not intentional. I simply intend to demystify PDA and autism and dispel a few myths. So, without further ado, I will try my best, with panache, grace and clarity to provide you with a subjective report of what it’s like to be a highly sensitive, high‑functioning autistic millennial in a confusing modern world.

Chapter 1

Gratitude? I Think Not!

Now, it is generally expected from the author, after they ingratiate themselves with the readers, to say ‘thank you’ to those who may have contributed to shaping them along their journey through life, or perhaps to those who lent a hand with the publishing or editing etc. Who in their right mind would object to this? Surely there’s nothing wrong with expressing one’s gratitude to the kind and generous people who have helped someone to become the person they are today? And surely there’s no good reason to withhold gratitude or, worse still, not to even feel gratitude in the first place? Well, herein lies the problem. Gratitude has to actually be felt in order to be expressed. Whether gratitude arises or not is contingent upon whether it naturally arises or is extruded by someone else from the source of feelings. Contrived gratitude is not gratitude! Now, I don’t generally find expressing my true feelings a laborious task, but what I am vehemently objecting to right now is the tacit expectation to give thanks. 17

18 The PDA Paradox

Many of us fail to make the distinction between saying ‘thanks’ and actual gratitude itself, and, further still, are prepared to accept even the most perfunctory and unfeeling ‘thanks’, even though there might not actually be a scintilla of accompanying gratitude. We would all rather some ‘thanks’ than no ‘thanks’ at all, and I include myself in this because I can become quite enraged when I am not thanked after I take time out of my day to help someone in need. So, depending on what the reasons are, I suppose I am not immune to a little hypocrisy. It is, after all, very bloody annoying! I can remember one time when travelling on the London Underground I stopped to assist either a foreign student or a tourist who didn’t know how to use the ticket machine. I slowly talked him through it step by step until the machine eventually dispensed his ticket. I was stood there gormlessly awaiting a ‘thank you’ that never came. He just picked up the ticket, didn’t even think to look at me and walked off. In the height of my anger, I yelled at him. Still no reply. He carried on walking and disappeared down the escalator. I would never see him again. Now, there are so many reasons as to why that young man didn’t thank me. Maybe gratitude just didn’t arise, maybe he was never taught manners, maybe it was just part of his culture, maybe he couldn’t speak English, maybe gratitude did arise but he felt too reserved to express it, or maybe, just maybe, he was having a demand avoidant moment where he was resisting the expectation to feel gratitude? I will never know. But gratitude isn’t solely about mechanically voicing the words ‘thank you’. If anything, it’s about feeling genuine and organic appreciation for something that brightens up one’s life even if for the briefest of moments, and there are many reasons as to why gratitude sometimes just won’t arise. Some parents, for example, expect their children to say ‘thank you’ to them as an automated response with absolutely zero regard

Gratitude? I Think Not! 19

for gratitude. Without gratitude, ‘thanks’ is nothing more than an impotent word. If a child were to return home one evening after a long and excruciating day at school and their mother presented them with their favourite snack upon arrival, then I’m sure they would be delighted. The act would almost definitely elicit gratitude. But being delighted is not the same as being grateful; one must acknowledge the source of that about which one is delighted and express due appreciation. Let’s imagine that this doesn’t elicit gratitude, and the child doesn’t say thank you, proceeds to eat the snack, and eventually the mother prompts, or demands, they do it instead. I would argue that this would be a useless way of teaching the child about gratitude. The only outcome of this situation is that the child would utter some words and the mother would get what she wants. If the child had PDA on the other hand, she may not have even got that. I have found that gratitude is something I can only cultivate myself contingent upon my relationship with (and awareness of) external circumstances, and it is not something others can extract from me. Perhaps ‘thanks’ is just a provisional linguistic symbol of gratitude and ‘sorry’ is just a provisional ling­ uistic symbol of an apology, and the actual symbols, or words, are irrelevant so long as the actual feelings are cultivated and, hope­ fully, thereafter expressed. I have always instinctively done the opposite of what people expect of me; unless, of course, people expect me to do the opposite of what’s expected of me, which can be an even bigger problem. Some parents may resort to using reverse psychology in an attempt to get their child to meet a demand, but the child may be shrewd enough to see through this. Thus, the tacit expectation will override the direct demand. For example, I have been a passionate guitar player for many years and I can recall many a time when

20 The PDA Paradox

certain family members may have innocently asked me to play them a song. I wouldn’t for obvious reasons, but sometimes they’d think before asking and would say something like, ‘Hey, Harry! Why don’t you not play us a song?’ Ha-ha! Nice try.

Chapter 2

So What the Devil is this PDA Malarkey Anyway?

It may already be occurring to you that PDA is a lot more comp­ licated than just ‘demand avoidance’ as its ambiguous definition suggests. Demands take on various forms such as direct instruction (‘Say thank you’, ‘Do this for me’, ‘Clean your room’) or subtler forms like tacit expectations as previously discussed. Tacit demands and expectations may plague the lives of adults more than children, as adults have no round the clock supervising authority constantly urging them to do things as children do. Therefore, teeth brushing in adulthood automatically becomes a tacit demand as there’s no one there to instruct the adult with PDA to actually do it, but the fact we all know we’re probably better off brushing our teeth for reasons of health and hygiene in and of itself can become demanding. I’ve even known of adults with PDA who have put off eating, and one could argue that this begins to overlap with classic eating disorders such as anorexia. So apart from demand avoidance what else characterises PDA? 21

22 The PDA Paradox

There are five other key features according to the current existing literature on the topic and these are: •

Appearing sociable, but lacking in depth and understanding.

•

Excessive mood swings and impulsivity.

•

Comfort in role play and pretend, sometimes to an extreme extent.

•

Language delay, often with a good degree of catch up.

•

Obsessive behaviour, often focused on people.

People with PDA are also more likely to give appropriate eye contact than people with other autism spectrum conditions (which is true for me now but when I was little and had very little trust for most people, looking into someone’s eyes felt like looking at the sun). Also, unlike other parts of the spectrum, females are just as likely to be diagnosed with PDA as males are. I wouldn’t necessarily challenge any of these points. After all, I’m sure people who know me personally would happily apply some of them to me, but as with everything there is always room for nuance; and I’d like to think that there aren’t many people out there who would deign to suggest that everyone with PDA must exhibit every trait on this list in order to qualify. As comprehensive as it may be, this list can’t capture the whole person. It can only describe PDA in general and how a person who meets the diagnostic criteria for PDA is flawed or failing to reach a standard. But are PDA symptoms problems? Or are they only problems when viewed from a specific perspective and in a specific context? And in another context, provided they are healthy in mind and body, could these symptoms cease to be seen as problems at all? Better still, could they be seen, simply, as the person’s attributes or gifts? By school standards, children with PDA (and probably

So What the Devil is this PDA Malarkey Anyway? 23

other behavioural disorders for that matter) may well appear as though they are defective ‘normal’ children when in reality they are just wired up differently (though a school environment may amplify the downsides of PDA while obscuring its merits). Some PDA children may even bestir themselves and try to reach the standard (since being themselves is not an option), but this would be exhausting and may give rise to further complications. PDA is often described as ‘an anxiety-driven need to remain in control’. Now this pithy description (despite being more or less on the mark) is a lot more complicated than it seems. For instance, let’s imagine someone who has the all too common fear of heights. Now of course it is important for us to overcome our fears where possible, but this particular fear makes evolutionary sense as it could be crucial for our survival. Such a person may simply decline an offer to partake in activities such as skydiving or abseiling without thinking too far into it. They would be well aware of their fear and of their preference for keeping their feet firmly on the ground, as they know it is here where they’re safe. Therefore, further enquiry on their part would be bootless as they know that being up high could result in death. So by immediately declining the offer, they are forestalling fear rather than experiencing it. Let’s imagine, though, that they are forced to skydive. Moments before having to jump out of the plane, they would be sat there ashen-faced and quaking and convinced they are about to die. Any attempts to stave off fear at this point would be futile as fear is right there permeating their entire being; propelling them away from the activity they’re being forced to do. I will proceed to nauseatingly describe this typical urge to avoid as a ‘fear-based need to stay alive’. Let’s apply the same principle to someone with PDA. While it is true that many people with PDA will experience an anxiety-driven

24 The PDA Paradox

need to remain in control upon being confronted with a demand, not all demand avoidance is necessarily adrenalin inducing. For example, someone with PDA might be asked by someone directly to do something for them. The preying demand, in this case, would be close proximity, and the PDAer needs to act fast and may resort to aggression or evasiveness to avoid it depending on how pushy, relentless or cunning the person is making the demand. This could definitely be classified as an anxiety-driven need to remain in control. Here’s an example of a different sort of demand avoidance: at most of the places I’ve ever worked, I have often decided to give myself days off here and there. Not out of fear necessarily, and not even out of boredom (which was, admittedly, usually the case anyway), it would be because the very act of going to work would sometimes prove too demanding. In order to forestall exhaustion or anxiety, and in order to remain in control or, rather (and probably most importantly), to retain my freedom, I would need to avoid the danger zone, which in this case happens to be the workplace, in order to stay alive. It is for this reason that I prefer to describe PDA as ‘an instinctual desire to be free’ rather than ‘an anxiety-driven need to remain in control’. Alas, anxiety is still a prevailing theme of PDA, and many of its branches can in fact be traced back to the received definition as we will see during the course of this book. I believe this may be because PDAers, and many other people on the autism spectrum, feel caged in a world which does not make sense to them. Anxiety, after all, is the heart’s way of saying, ‘come back to me’. Personally, I’ve never struggled with things like the avoidance of teeth brushing. I have always prided myself on the immaculate condition of my pearly whites, though I say so myself, and never in my life have I struggled with language delay. According to my family members, I was speaking in full sentences by the age of

So What the Devil is this PDA Malarkey Anyway? 25

11 months. So why then would these things affect others with PDA and not me? The autistic brain is a thing; however, no two autistic people are the same. What one person avoids, another may revel in. I suppose the answer to this question resides in the sanctum of the memories of my formative years, and, further still, right back to when the story of me begins. Of course, the person who knows this point in time better than anyone is my mum.

Chapter 3

Mother and The Beast

When revisiting one’s distant past by means of memory, one must always ensure that the veracity of what one recalls is confirmed by other conscious beings who were also there at the time. I am fortunate enough to have in my life such beings to call upon whenever I am trying to unearth a deeply rooted memory from the soil of time. The furthest I can go back, however, doesn’t require too much assistance, as it is stunningly vivid in my mind as it always has been. This event occurred precisely one year after the day I was born, which was of course my first birthday. It took place at the first home my parents lived in together in a town called Barnet; a conservative suburb that lies on the border of North London and Hertfordshire in the UK. I am in the kitchen sitting in my high chair surrounded by loved ones who are singing to me. Given my tender age, I am permissibly  ignorant of the fact the cooing chorus of mostly 27

28 The PDA Paradox

young  women were feting me with perhaps the most famous song on the planet, ‘Happy Birthday’. Charming gesture, yes. I am, however, all too transfixed with the peculiar object that sits before me on my tray. Even though I now know that this object was indeed a birthday cake, for some obscure reason I am only able to recollect it as a box of seashells. I wouldn’t have even been able to identify a seashell at a year old, so it baffles me as to why on earth this memory is arranged in my head in this way. Mother by name, Mother by nature. Although most of the time I call her ‘Mum’ when addressing her, she is ‘Mother’ when I call her to mind. A beautifully modulated woman; kind, gentle, thoughtful, very pretty, and with supreme maternal prowess. When asking her about her pregnancy with me, Mother has no ills to report bar the occasional morning sickness. She had strong cravings for peanut butter sandwiches, regularly listened to the mellifluous tones of the unparalleled Italian opera singer Pavarotti, and would often go swimming as her choice of prenatal exercise. So, for those of you who were expecting me to say something like, ‘My mum smoked crack when she was pregnant with me and that’s how I ended up so bonkers!’ well I’m sorry to disappoint you but she was very good to herself and to me while I was gestating. My journey here on planet Earth began as I sailed through my mother’s birth canal on 22 February 1993, and from my laryngeal knell I trumpeted my first wailing cry in an announcement to the world that I had finally arrived. For the first few months, nothing of any real consequence happened. My parents and extended family members were obviously ravished by my arrival and all rejoiced accordingly. I smiled at the right age, laughed at the right age and sat independently at the right age. Everything seemed – and I detest myself for using this word – ‘normal’. But, at some point when I was about six months old, something strange started

Mother and The Beast 29

to happen. Infantile insomnia may be a bit of an exaggeration, but honestly, I just wouldn’t sleep. It was a nightmare for my parents who were finding it increasingly more difficult to soothe me. It was as though I was in a constant state of angst, which seems an odd way to talk about a baby, but that’s more or less what it was like. The older I grew, the seemingly more restless I was becoming. In the end I would fall asleep from sheer exhaustion. However, Mother did find one solution: if she were to not hold me but lie next to me, then it would somehow do the trick and send me off into a deep slumber. Despite the obvious sleep deprivation from the frequent vigils, nothing was to thwart me from mastering the art of walking and talking before my first birthday. I’m sure my parents felt ambivalent about my acquisition of words and ambulatory skills as on one hand it was probably nice to see me progressing, but on the other hand this would give me an advantage when it came to my sleep defiance as by now I was no longer confined to a cot, and my vocabulary was no longer restricted to burbles and moans. Most nights I would scramble out of my cot and whiffle across the landing and climb into my parents’ bed. They, of course, would be sound asleep and would often wake up in the morning to find me sandwiched between them. My father was adamant that my sleep strikes were just a phase. A premature terrible twos perhaps, or at least a hearty prelude. Mother, on the other hand, wasn’t convinced, and around the time when I was 18 months old and she discovered she was pregnant with my baby brother, she decided to seek help. The health visitor was my first chilling introduction to authority. This woman was cold, rigid and ruthless in a kind of Dickensian way. ‘Eighteen months old and he still won’t sleep?’ She snarled,

30 The PDA Paradox

‘This is unacceptable, Mr and Mrs Thompson. You must put bars on his bedroom door at once!’ So with that, my parents took this venomous hag’s advice. After fitting the cold, cream bar gate on my door, effectively incarcerating me inside my own room, my parents settled down to sleep. That night my shrieks and screams sliced through the air and continued unabated until the early hours of the morning. When my parents arose, they found me upside down in my toy box with all my toys strewn across the hallway floor outside my bedroom. Unsurprisingly the draconian advice from the health visitor turned out to be a complete joke, but, as it turned out, there was but one special place where I would never fail to have a good night’s sleep, and that was my maternal grandmother’s house. I have always adored my grandmother immensely. I was terribly close to her as a little boy as I always felt safe and relaxed in her company. I didn’t have any comforts such as a dummy or a blanket and I didn’t care to suck my thumb. My grandmother was my comfort and the type of character I needed in my life: radiant, optimistic, loving and whole as a soul can be. As a child fraught with fear, my grandmother’s warm disposition, plus the gentle ambiance of her home, was all that was needed to appease the chaos in my mind. It must have been relieving for my mother after she gave birth to my brother, Ben, to find that he didn’t only sleep well, but more or less to an Olympian level. Had he been anything like me, I don’t quite know how Mother would have coped. I think the glaring contrast between my brother and I, plus my behaviour becoming more unusual by the minute, really illustrated to my mother how I wasn’t your average boy. I started nursery school in the autumn after my brother was born and Mother would escort me there every day. While we were walking one morning, she noticed how I had developed an

Mother and The Beast 31

insatiable appetite to learn new words. I would stop her every few paces and point to street names, shop signs, window advertise­ ments, anything that bore letters, and would demand her to divulge to me their respective meanings. Mother drove me to primary school on my first day and the two of us sat together in the car for a little while before lessons began. ‘Okay then, Mummy,’ I chirped. ‘Are you going home now? Because I want to go in by myself.’ Mother was astounded by her tiny four-year-old’s streak of maturity. She giggled, gave me a kiss and walked me to my classroom. Throughout my time at that first school, I feel that Mother was constantly on standby. She later revealed to me that when she saw me in my uniform for the first time, just before I was about to start school, something didn’t feel right. This feeling would often revisit her throughout the rest of my childhood every time I was to go on to do something she didn’t deem suitable for me. She just knew, somehow, that the education system wasn’t a setting I would ever thrive in, and watched as the enthusiasm I initially brimmed with gradually faded over time. The ever-increasing activity in my mind was somewhat sated by voracious reading, but if there weren’t any books to hand I’d resort to following my mother around the house incessantly asking her questions about quite an array of topics. I have always been prone to overthinking and since I can remember have harboured an astronomical level of curiosity which comes partly from a desire to learn and partly from paranoia. I probably drove my mother insane. I wanted to know everything, and the fact I didn’t caused me immense distress. When things started to get really bad for me at the age of about nine or ten (which I’ll talk about in detail in the following chapter) I can remember always feeling slightly terrified that my

32 The PDA Paradox

mother would be dead by the time I finished school. Somehow my domineering and unrelenting thoughts would convince me of this fate every afternoon. I remember one of my classrooms overlooking the school playground which was the place where parents would gather to wait for their weary children after a gruelling day of compulsory information imbibing. Conveniently my desk was right by the window, which meant there was nothing to restrain me from staring out fixatedly. Nothing apart from the hands of my teacher pulling my head around to face the front. She’d have to pull so hard and it isn’t at all difficult for me to recall in exquisite detail just how stiff my neck was as I gazed out, anxiously waiting for my mother who in my mind had a 50% chance of being dead. It was like I literally couldn’t move my neck or focus on anything else but the playground. The sleeping problems I suffered from as a baby hadn’t got any better. I hated having to be on my own in the dark so my brother and sister would take it in turns sleeping in my bedroom each night. This routine lasted until around my 13th birthday. This year was a particularly low point as the thought of having to be a grown-up sickened me, as did the inescapable clutch of time that ushers us forth whether we like it or not. I dwelt on how I would be entering my teenage years a child and would be leaving them an adult and quivered at the whole injustice of it all, that I had no say in the matter. Mother would always be rather handy to have in these situations, as the art of consolation comes so naturally to her. The anxiety-driven need to be in control, which is intrinsic to PDA, knows no bounds. It doesn’t stop at petulant refusals to comply with parents and teachers. In my most unhinged moments as a child I thought if I tried hard enough that I could manipulate and get my own way with the entire universe. Even when I was prevailed over, I still would not admit defeat.

Mother and The Beast 33

My problems didn’t exactly stop at school either as at home I was manic and boisterous in ways that caused my parents a lot of ire and grief, but most importantly it caused them to ques­tion the orthodox disciplinary methods they adopted, which seemed to be successfully implemented in other households but proved risibly futile in ours. Whenever my siblings, my cousins and I were taken out to the theatre or to a restaurant of an evening, I could become uncontrollably hyperactive, act obnoxiously and obstre­perously and may have gotten everyone else into trouble as a result. If I got everyone hyped-up during sleepovers, we were often separated; or worse still, all my cousins would be sent home. So, my problems weren’t only carried over into home life, but they took on completely different and arguably irreconcilable forms at school and at home. During my transition from boy to man, the relationship I had with my mother was strengthened by our shared desire to delve into topics of science and abstract matters of philosophy and life. A deep woman, my mother, she has always been one of my favourite people to converse with. Had I not been able to always speak so candidly with her then I would be a much more dysfunctional person today. Anything that may be bothering me – no matter how obscene it is – can be spoken about with my mother at length without the fear of being dismissed, silenced or suppressed. Which is paramount for a person with PDA. I’ve often been told to ‘drop it’ by people during times of angst, completely useless advice that illustrates a person’s lack of emotional intelligence. Not only will the demand contained within ‘drop it’ compound my pre‑existing stress levels, but the pain of not being allowed to talk about something that is clearly perturbing me is the neurological equivalent of holding my pee in when I am busting to go; one must simply release the pressure.

34 The PDA Paradox

Whenever I couldn’t bring myself to do my homework as a child, my teachers would have encouraged her to encourage me to do it, but she was never in any position to force me to do something that would be to my detriment. A similar thing happ­ ened when I started experimenting with drugs: she could have ordered me not to, but she instead proceeded to educate me on the potential danger of drugs. Can you see the difference? By giving me the freedom, I was able to figure out the dangers of drugs on my own. Had she enforced some kind of family law against narcotics then I would’ve most likely drugged myself into a perm­ anent stupor. Sound advice holds more value and efficacy than plain prohibition. The only animosity between my mother and I that I can recall is when we fell out over something silly for a few months when I was 18. I had gone to live with my mentor, Felicity (who I’ll come to), at the time, which she was probably a bit jealous about, not­ withstanding how absolutely necessary this was for my survival. I, on the other hand, could have been more sympathetic to her as she was clearly in pain. I am sure she has wanted to tear her hair out many a time because of me and I don’t blame her in the slightest. I wasn’t at all an easy boy to raise, but Mother never once faltered. She assumed her motherly mantle with unwavering love and fortitude despite the frequent obstacles she had to dodge. If anyone were to ask my mother what she feels her purpose is in life, then she would not hesitate to tell them that it was to bear children. This calling is not something of a banality; it wasn’t arbitrarily decided after, say, feeling a bit broody upon seeing an adorable giggling baby. Nor is it an echo of the biological imperative to reproduce. What I am trying to say is that from the moment my mother first laid eyes on me, apart from being overcome with awe at her mewling creation so perfectly nestled in

Mother and The Beast 35

her arms, she had a true glimpse of herself and what her role in the world would entail. This was crystalised further when my siblings came along, and further still when, one by one, the three of us began to buckle under the weight and attrition of our hagridden minds. Mother entered parenthood with no agenda whatsoever. She didn’t secretly wish for her children to be a certain way prior to our existence and didn’t secretly wish for us to be any different once we’d arrived. Even in our darkest moments, she still didn’t secretly wish for us to be anything other than who we are. Mother was prepared to relinquish anything for her cubs. She shaped the home to fit us and not the other way around. What I learned most from my mother’s parenting style was that the role of a (PDA) parent shouldn’t be to encourage their child to meet a standard, to take a particular path or to be a certain way. I think the role of a (PDA) parent should be to learn to trust in their child and facilitate their life by granting them the space and freedom required for them to gravitate towards what is right for them and what works for them. Should they need guidance, then offer a gentle hand or perhaps some heartfelt, yet genuine and practical, advice if they ask for it, and always be ready to cushion their fall. Of course it is crucial to teach children how to distinguish right from wrong, but where parents can lay the foundations and impart these basic life skills, they will find that, if they are willing to listen, their children have a lot to teach them as well. It is impossible for me, at this juncture, to avoid pointing out that this is one of those moments I was talking about earlier where gratitude effortlessly rises to the surface, unbidden and undemanded. Thank you, Mother.

***

36 The PDA Paradox

One must always adopt a sufficient level of caution, neutrality and magnanimity when writing about a person who has done them a disservice or two over the years; even more so when that person happens to be a family member. If I were to deny that I’m hinting at something, nay, someone, then what an untenable position that would be to take as I would in fact be lying. In case you haven’t guessed already, the person I am alluding to is my father. When I first attempted to write this book two years ago, it didn’t take me long to notice how it had more or less become a scathing critique of my father and a panegyric on my mother. I have decided, this time around, that I will not do the same as I did in the original draft. I was a different person back then and wrote almost purely for cathartic and self-indulgent purposes. After two years of educational, character-forming, and – to use a mawkish cliché – life-changing experiences, I now see fit to formulate the final copy wherein I can speak about my life, and all of its components, objectively. The time has come, once again, to take a journey back through time. In my earliest memories of my dad he is invariably featured behind a video camera. Quite a lot of mine and my siblings’ first few years of life and development were caught on camera and I will be forever pleased that they were, as we now have quite an extensive collection of home videos to enjoy. I must admit I am a little tentative to delineate my father, and this is partly because, as it happens, I can recognise traits of PDA in him. My dad embodies all of the characteristics one would expect of a typical businessman: ruthlessness, competitiveness, drive, selfishness and confidence. In the same breath, he is funny, eccentric, charismatic, charming, a tremendous host and has a very big heart that is not always visible, but is ever glowing.

Mother and The Beast 37

When I was growing up, Dad worked as an oil broker in Central London. We had money, and a fair bit of it. I began to realise this by the age of about ten after assessing my plush surroundings that many of my peers appeared to lack. I’d often ask my parents if we were rich people, to which they’d invariably reply, ‘No, Harry, we’re well off,’ almost as if they were trying to hide something. This response always managed to irk me. Sometimes my dad spends a little too much time stressing over money and neglects the gravity of life’s simplicities. But still, he carried out his fatherly role pretty well in a practical sense. He excelled when teaching me to ride a bike, to swim and to play football. I regard him, generally, as an impatient man, but the one time I did see him display remarkable patience was when he was teaching. Perhaps because this is an area where he can exert total control. I noticed how he wasn’t only good at teaching his own children how to do things, but he was equally good at teaching other children as well. Whenever we’d go on family holidays I can remember him teaching the locals and offspring of other British holiday goers how to swim, and he even started up his own football team back in England for me and all my classmates to play for. One must commend him for his ideas and sense of ambition. I suppose I really looked up to him when I was little. To me, he was almost like a superhero or celebrity figure in that he was not only amazing and I was proud of him, but he was also a little distant. Distant in a sense that he has always been a bit emotionally detatched, and distant in the sense that I didn’t really see him much. During the week he’d work long hours which meant he’d often leave for the office before I’d get up, and return home after I’d gone to bed, and I’d mostly see him in his black motorbike helmet and protective clothing, like a superhero in full costume. I can remember lying awake in my bed every single night, anxiously

38 The PDA Paradox

awaiting his arrival. As soon as the purr of his motorbike engine was within earshot, my excitement levels would skyrocket into other dimensions. The first thing he’d always do when he got home would be to greet my mother, then come upstairs to kiss me, my brother Ben and my sister Ella goodnight. I can still hear the door creak open, his bold silhouette would fill the door frame and he’d then proceed to crouch down beside my bed. He’d then lift up his helmet, never all the way, but enough to reveal his pursed lips and coarse, stubbly face. He’d kiss me, probably ask me ‘Alright?’ with raised inflection and a heavily enunciated ‘T’, and would then go back downstairs to have dinner with my mother. Dad’s long absences during the week were punctuated by active, fast-paced weekends with bike rides, long walks, trips to the garden centre, watching football matches on Saturdays and then barbeques, lounging around in the garden and watching movies on a slightly more placid Sunday. Things went on like this for years. When my brother, Ben, was old enough, the two of us invented this silly language and would draw equally silly stories and scenarios from it. We sought enjoyment in giving everyone who was part of this nonsensical narrative a nickname. I won’t divulge too much, but we decided one day, after co-opting him into our game, to start calling my dad ‘The Beast’. Every evening around the time Dad would usually get home from work, one of us would usually say, ‘The Beast is nigh.’ The two of us would become very skittish and would go a bit crazy when he’d come in. Oddly enough he’d actually be totally oblivious to our larking about most of the time. My relationship with The Beast became more strained as I got older. The image I once had of him as a superhero soon, and sadly, fizzled out. I was zealously, and some would say, recklessly, self-seeking as an adolescent, and this did not pair well with my

Mother and The Beast 39

father’s controlling and alpha male tendencies. Our relationship around this juncture was turbulent at best, and a series of ever intensifying rows took place over the course of a few years. I always had this lingering thought at the back of my mind that I was never the type of boy he would have wished for. That he would have, perhaps, preferred a son who was a little less eccentric and arty, and a little more conservative and into sports like he was; or one who aspired to one day become a businessman like he is. A son he could relate to, I suppose. When I was in my late teens, he would often suggest for me to pursue the most ludicrous career paths and I’d be left thinking, ‘Really?! That’s who he thinks I am? Or is that who he wants me to be?’ I always felt as though my father’s sense of awareness was somewhat limited and impaired. His ability to look into things outside his fields of interest seemed poor at best. I would always ensure that I was extra obnoxious and flamboyant whenever in The Beast’s presence, almost as a way of getting his attention, making a statement and, of course, rubbing it in. I felt he didn’t understand my autism; maybe he didn’t want to and so he dismissed it, or perhaps he just couldn’t understand it. One very bad incident that will forever be etched in my memory may help you to better understand our father-son friction: I used to have a very obsessive and irrational phobia of putting my clothes in the tumble dryer. Most of my friends and family are aware of this. The Beast, for some unknown reason, was not. This fear of tumble dryers developed after I disastrously shrunk all of my clothes the first time I washed them myself. I was overly paranoid from then on and could only ever trust my mother and grandmother to do my laundry for me. I have very similar irrational fears such as when people ask to borrow one of my razors, sit on my bed, or ask to wear my shoes – even if someone needs to quickly grab something

40 The PDA Paradox

from outside. The reason being is that sometimes external objects (and sometimes people) can feel as though they are extensions of me. A change in my immediate surroundings, however small, can be synonymous with an apocalypse. One day, I came downstairs with a pile of clothes that needed to be washed. I had something planned that day that I was already late for, so I decided to leave the clothes in the downstairs laundry basket and wash them later. When I returned home, my heart nearly ejected from my chest when I found my clothes in the tumble dryer. I confronted The Beast about this who reacted defensively and told me I should show more respect as he’d taken the time to do my laundry for me. Okay, so in a way he did have a point. The reason why this anecdote is so useful is because it can explain so much about autistic or PDA behaviour. There is a most peculiar duality worth noting: it’s like there’s a foreign entity living in my body and separate from my true and rational personality, one that is grotesque, untamed, malevolent and heartless. Let’s refer to it as an inner Loki (after the Norse god of mischief, known for being a troublesome, destructive and occasionally evil trickster) for simplicity’s sake. I am processing this situation in two ways here: 1) yes of course I am grateful that Dad kindly washed my clothes, but 2) autism, when pushed, can be totally irrational and doesn’t much care for morals, ethics and the general wellbeing of others. Of course I am aware of how silly it is to get so worked up at such trivial matters, I don’t need anyone else to point this out. Half the problem is the inner Armageddon that is taking place in these situations; the rationality fighting a losing battle with the animal self and completely exhausting me in the process. When I found my clothes in the dryer, the inner Loki instantly stirred but was still too drowsy to ruin my day, so I would’ve been able to subdue it.

Mother and The Beast 41

Upon confronting Dad, however, and receiving his dismissal, the Loki was up and out of bed, and rather flustered. Again, not fully ‘awake’, but it now would take a lot of work for me to assuage its burgeoning fury. I went upstairs to my bedroom and paced around for a while; hyperventilating and trying to think ‘happy thoughts’, believing I would never recover from this incident. Dad had no idea this was going on. The next day I descended down the stairs and went into the kitchen to grab some breakfast, and to my horror, I discovered that he had put another batch of my washing in the dryer which I’d clearly forgotten about the night before. He walked in moments later and my voice trembled as I asked him why he did it again. I was given yet another dismissive and uncaring response but this time I went f***ing mental. This was one of the most intense meltdowns I can recall having. Had I howled any louder the walls would’ve surely collapsed around me. I looked utterly psychotic as I hurled abuse, along with a few inanimate objects, at him. It ended with me falling to an undignified heap on the ground after wheeling around in circles a few times like a runaway tyre losing momentum. To tell you the truth, I frightened him, a lot. He all of a sudden started apologising repeatedly. Perhaps this was due to regret and sympathy, but judging by the sound of his voice, I think it was just that he wanted the madness to stop. Why did I lose it? Well, it wasn’t just about the clothes. That’s a trivial mistake I can get over. I lost it because I secretly longed for him to see and feel the pain in me, and to empathise with my struggles of growing up in a world that often left me feeling confused, angry and, above all, lonely. I don’t want to leave this on a bad note, nor do I wish to make my father look too much like an ogre. He is, after all, a Beast, and a

42 The PDA Paradox

very noble one at that. As stormy as our relationship has been over the years, we have had our fair share of laughs. He tried his best. We all try our best. Even when we appear stupid or lazy, we are all still trying our best. If a child is seen as lazy then perhaps they’re just bored, or consider they might be weighed down and incapacitated by mental and physical blocks. If a child is seen as stupid then consider that perhaps whatever they’re engaged in that’s making them look stupid is not an area where their particular form of intelligence can flourish. If I were to sum up my relationship with The Beast in a single analogy then I would say it would be like being out at sea with him during a tempest sharing nothing but a flimsy raft and a single oar, and the two of us have to work together in order to get back to the shore. Many a squabble will break out, but I am pleased to announce that, through trial and error, we have found a way of sustaining a harmonious relationship, and placid waters and an azure sky mottled with a few fluffy wisps and a lambent sun now surrounds us, and the shore, of course, is in sight. I love The Beast, and have never doubted his love for me. My only wish for him is to realise that there are things in this world that are more valuable than money and that he needn’t look far to find these things, and having an abundance of material possessions may feel nice at first, but the happiness it brings is fleeting and can never be a sustainable source of visceral nutrition. I suppose that, in a way, he is still the superhero figure I saw him as when I was a little boy, and he probably always will be. Arise, fair gratitude: thanks, Dad.

Chapter 4

‘School’

Perhaps you are wondering why I slipped the word ‘school’ between inverted commas? Those of you with PDA may know why I did that, but for those of you who don’t then allow me to relieve you of your confusion as best I can. School, for me, was an inane and almost pointless process. Something that I could have, quite simply, done without. I suppose I am what people would call an ‘autodidact’, a self-taught person. Granted, many autodidacts I’m sure would find school somewhat useful as a kind of ‘supplement’, but for me I quickly found that I fared much better without it altogether. You see, we are all born curious. We all have, to some degree, an innate desire to know about the world around us and how it works. This is evident in toddlers during their sensory exploration stage when they wander around, pick things up and put them in their mouths, pull the tails of cats and dogs, pull their mother’s hair to get a reaction, and so on. This curiosity is somewhat diminished in 43

44 The PDA Paradox

a lot of people as they mature, which is unfortunate because that curiosity only needs to be sublimated from hair- and tail-pulling into something a little more fruitful, but for me (and the same goes for many others I’m sure) that childlike thirst for knowledge, be it psychological or not, feels as though it never really left my being, apart from when I was forced to attend school of course where it was thoroughly impeded. But what most of my teachers didn’t know was that while I was busy repudiating and deflecting most of what they tried to instill in me during school hours, I was working furiously to educate myself at home. So, the very word ‘school’ really is a meaningless term to me, as I feel that’s exactly what all of life is: a fleeting foray into existence whereby we are all free to develop and hone and perfect our skills and whereby one need only avail themselves to the myriad lessons that reside within every experience. I often tell people that I didn’t really feel like I was at school until I left school, and to my delight, after further inquiry, I found that I hadn’t only begun my quest for knowledge and truth subsequent to turning my back on the education system, but I had been engaged in it since being disgorged from my mother’s uterus. ‘School’ was only ever this big, cumbersome and distracting chunk of my life that got in the way. Some lessons, also, just can’t be taught in ‘school’. School can’t really teach us how to be wise, for example, as wisdom is something that can only really be acquired experientially over a long period of time and is fuelled by rumination and perhaps making, and learning from, a few mistakes here and there. Ironically, attending ‘school’ gave me more wisdom to take away than anything else, as I soon learnt that being spoon-fed information I was expected to regurgitate on demand was not part of a path I was willing to take. I didn’t know what my alternatives were for a long time, but

‘School’ 45

I certainly knew from a very early age that ‘school’ was in no way a place for me. Funnily enough, I did actually enjoy it at times. Okay, perhaps quite a lot, but this was of course for all the wrong reasons. Muck­ ing around, winding up the other students, commandeering a class and being a general nuisance was always exhilarating despite the unpleasant repercussions I incurred. And of course I did, at times, make some great pals. I’m not about to make a case that ‘all schools are terrible’, because that would be demonstrably untrue. Oodles of people benefit from the current education system in place and I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of the opportunity of going to school if that is what’s required for them to boost their chances of succeeding in life. School just happened to be the wrong thing for me, and I was lucky enough that I came across the right people at the right time who helped steer me towards a purposeful and meaningful life. Some people, however, are not so lucky. They get lost in a system that doesn’t speak to them and endure many torrid years believing that they’re stupid and worthless. They may end up severely depressed and turn to drugs and a life of crime which may lead to imprisonment, or (and possibly worse) suicide. These are the people I wish to reach out to and help over the course of this chapter by demonstrating that just because you don’t belong in school, doesn’t mean you don’t belong in the world. Please join me as I share with you my own ‘school’ experience.

*** Now, I can do this in two ways. I can begin by capturing the spirit of my first few days at nursery school, but in doing so I’d have to omit an awful lot. So I should probably start by limning my first true

46 The PDA Paradox

educational experiences which incidentally took place before I was ever made to attend all of the institutions I was forever slipping out of like a bar of soap through the clumsy hands of a toddler. Prior to discovering the charms of the written word, television was the only means by which I could attain an education, albeit of a rudimentary sort. I was into a wide range of TV shows and films and retained whatever information I absorbed from classics like ‘Rosie and Jim’, ‘Fireman Sam’, ‘Noddy’ and ‘Postman Pat’, all of which I’m sure other British children born in the early nineties would’ve watched with similar zeal. I learned, not only the words to the songs, but the entire scripts to many of the Disney movies. My mother can recall me sitting in my high chair opposite the TV singing along, perfectly in tune, and then mirroring the dialogues between characters. I am often asked by parents how they can get their (PDA) children to either 1) attend school or 2) learn something. These types of requests, as innocent as they seem, happen to make me feel as though someone has used a Stanley knife to slowly cut open my abdomen to vigorously scrub my spleen with a scouring pad. Apologies for the graphic and horrific image, but I have to stress to you in some way how it is I naturally respond when I am met with something I don’t like, or rather, to use a word which will hereafter be making regular appearances in this book, ‘triggered’. The reason this triggers me so much is because I am immediately brought back to those times in my childhood where I was under such an enormous amount of pressure to conform. Now I am approaching a quarter of a century, I can revise my entire life and comprehend what worked and what failed to work from my hellish school years to my embarrassing attempts as an adolescent to hold down ‘normal’ jobs like a ‘normal’ person. At the time I wouldn’t have been privy to this insight, for if I had been then so

‘School’ 47

much bulls*** could have been avoided. But this of course is how we become wiser, so I am, as it happens, very grateful for every single experience I’ve had no matter how unpleasant some of them may have been at the time. I had to go through it all in order to learn, and I was, of course, under the care and supervision of my mother, who was also none the wiser, but she was willing to try her absolute hardest to find what worked for her unusual child, and this is how she ended up learning so much as well. I can only talk for myself. It would not be intellectually honest of me if I were to assert that every single child with PDA experi­ ences life in the same way. Fundamentally the triggers may induce the same physiological effects, but what actually causes the trigg­ ers themselves will differ from person to person. One thing I do know, however, is that children with PDA can only function if they are granted total freedom over their own lives. Now, I don’t mean they should be granted total independence, as that would be abnormally irresponsible for me to suggest as one may construe this as something like: ‘If upon deciding to go food shopping your four-year-old insists on driving the car to the supermarket, then by all means let her as this is exactly what is required to prevent a meltdown’ or ‘if your ten-year-old wakes up one day and decides that the exciting prospects of living alone are far more appetising than the comforting bosom of home life with Ma and Pa, then allow him to leave! He’s clearly a man if he says he is so let him get on with it!’ Oh perish the thought! By freedom I mean we, PDAers, require maximum freedom as children within our family spheres. We will learn inexorably insofar as we have the freedom to learn about whatever we want, be it the laws of thermodynamics, how to juggle with frogs, or how to make soap. The almighty urge to delve into something that captures our hearts and imagination is so strong that we find ourselves completely consumed by it.

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When this happens, it is essential that we are permitted to indulge as we please, because this is exactly how we learn. As we swan through life we will come across certain concepts that will inspire and enthral us in such a way that the urge to pursue such concepts further will prove irresistible. We are spurred towards whichever subject we wish to educate ourselves on, and will not rest until we know absolutely everything there is to know about that subject. Once we are sufficiently nourished, then we move on to the next thing. It’s like an inbuilt curriculum we follow, that is more often than not out of sync with the curriculum at school. But they do occasionally intersect, which can be especially confusing for teachers who suddenly find that their most disruptive stu­ dent becomes the most attentive following a gentle segue from mathematics, which the student has no time for or interest in, to astronomy which happens to currently dominate the life of the student and enraptures their every cell. It really isn’t too compli­ cated as to how we learn, it only becomes complicated when we are overwhelmed with the constant duress from the outside world. So, I feel I can confidently say that a trademark of all PDAers is that, in order to learn, it is paramount that our freedom is not trampled on. At school this happens an awful lot, where teachers are constantly trying to make us learn things, not because we ask for it but because they say so. It’s not that we aren’t academically inclined, it’s that we are only inclined to learn something when we feel that the time is right. (You wouldn’t cleave a chrysalis and remove the caterpillar before it metamorphoses into a butterfly, would you?) Having said that, when I first went to school, I didn’t ’alf love it! Nursery school basically consisted of reading, light creative exercises and play. All of which I felt very much in alignment with and ready to learn about, especially reading, and because

‘School’ 49

of this I soared to the top of class where I remained throughout nursery school and into primary school. It was the ability to read I was so tenaciously trying to master. I didn’t care much for the content. I just wanted to read everything and anything, but once I had attained a certain degree of competence in this area, I felt it was time to specialise, but unfortunately by the age of about five or six when I decided that the animal kingdom would be the first ever subject I would devote all my time and energy to, I found that school wanted to impart to me matters I couldn’t frankly give a s*** about. Going back a bit: because I was generally quite interested in what nursery school and primary school had to offer me, many of my quirks went unnoticed. There were, however, a few (PDA) incidents I can recall, and one in particular I recall with grave horror. I must have been about three when this occurred, but I can still replay it in my mind as though it were yesterday. My nursery teacher, a strict disciplinarian, pulled me aside (not sure why it was me) and ordered me to draw a picture of one of my pet goldfish. Immediately I felt tremendous unease after being singled out. It was like this teacher was a farmer and all the children were turkeys in a pen and I was unfortunate enough to be the one chosen for her Christmas dinner. After we both sat down and she handed me a piece of paper and some coloured pencils, I froze. She tried to get me to draw the picture but I couldn’t move; I just stared at her blankly. So she tried again a few times, her tone becoming more irate by the second. I simply couldn’t. I was well and truly paralyzed by this point, apart from my heart which was pounding exponentially. I broke down and cried for my mum, and with that she lost it and slammed her hand down on the table very near to my face and bellowed: ‘STOP CRYING!’ I can remember the loud thud as her arm impacted the table which left me disoriented.

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Another significant moment also stands out: on Christmas Day, 1996, I was given my first guitar. It was a miniature toy of a thing, but one could still wheedle a song or two from its strings. My dad caught this all on video. I was sitting in front of an audience which consisted of my parents, siblings and grandparents, and I gleefully sang to them many Christmas tunes accompanied by cacophonous guitar playing and, of course, a smile. At a couple of points at the end of the songs, after being duly congratulated, it is possible to hear someone say, ‘Okay, last one now,’ but I carried on playing nonetheless and then the camera cuts out during a marvellous rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’. Then it cuts to the next scene, the next day, in a similar setting of me playing my guitar to an audience. The first thing heard is Dad asking me to play ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’. The vital grin on my face is instantly erased and I began to whimper and thrash my legs in frustration. ‘Come on, Harry, give us a song!’ someone asks. I then proceed to angrily strike the strings once, or twice at most. ‘Oh, is that it?’ someone says. I nod my head churlishly. The family, most likely growing tired of me by this point, turn to my baby brother and start singing him a nursery rhyme which is almost immediately intercepted by me. ‘No! I don’t want to sing that one!’ I wail. Then I order everyone in the room to keep quiet while I make my mother sing a solo. When an incident like this takes place, one ought to know that the crying and accumulating frustration doesn’t always come from not wanting to follow a task, but from the sheer pain of not being able to do it. Something strange and disturbing my mother noticed a few months after starting nursery school was the way I used to frantically pace around the coffee table when I returned home. In retrospect, I can totally relate this to how I feel now when I am

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around other people for too long. Becoming drained, restless and agitated, needing to take myself away for a run or a walk in the woods to shake off any excess stress or anxiety I pick up during the day, mostly from other people. Perhaps other autistic people will understand what I mean when I use the phrase ‘to overdose on company’. I can recall having frequent lapses of concentration which would be brought on by either boredom or distraction from the busy world around me. Every single day at school around lunchtime the teacher would dismiss us and we’d all do the same thing: sprint over to our lunch boxes and knee slide when within a couple of metres. Then came the day when the teacher decided to alter the routine a little bit. From then on, after being dismissed, every child would visit the lavatory before having their lunch. Not sure why this new rule was suddenly enforced, maybe it was due to the fact the bowels of some of the children still had minds of their own. Anyway, instead of acknowledging this new, and, in my opinion, ‘daft’, rule, I went ahead and followed the exact same procedure as I’d always done: sprint over to my lunch box, knee slide the last few metres, and tuck into my food. Of course, this time I was riding solo. Every other child gawked at me while the teacher groaned in annoyance. It was at that very moment that I first realised I was different.

*** The first institution I attended after nursery was an all-boys private school that I utterly loathed. The miasma was one of intense pressure and fierce competition, and conspicuously low in frivolity, colour and oestrogen. I felt as though it was never okay for the pupils to ‘be themselves’ as it were, as it was of utmost

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importance to personify the bearing of a typical British public schoolboy. Something that appeals to many, but to me this ideal was synonymous with having my heart and soul drilled out of me. Something my teachers in primary school were forever picking up in me was how I always seemed to be in a daze whenever they were talking. An inconvenience for them as whatever drivel they were teaching me, or attempting to teach me, would obviously be going over, around, and any place other than in my head, but daydreaming has always been a very cherished pastime of mine, and has sometimes proven to be very useful. Some of my best ideas seem to come from those moments when I zone out and drool. For example, I can’t tell you how much I’ve been daydreaming since writing this book. I’ll type away for a good hour or so and then I’ll stop for a while and just stare into space. You know when you lose focus, your thoughts dissipate and everything goes all fuzzy and pixelated? I tend to let that go on for a while until I am fortuitously struck with inspiration and then carry on with writing. It’s so essential, like a revitalisation process or perhaps even a form of meditation? The teachers didn’t seem to see it as anything other than annoying or rude, and at this point my concentration was so poor in just about every discipline other than the one I was engrossed in. The attention I once so steadfastly applied to school had now turned towards my new obsession, the natural world. I was enraptured by other creatures. At home we had this big, thick animal book that I read and read and read again. I took it every­ where with me, and not just in the house, but to other people’s houses too. It was within arm’s reach most of the time, and I wouldn’t think twice about handing it to my uncles and aunts and grandparents on family gatherings, telling them to pick a page at random and test me on my knowledge. Okay, so I was a bit of a

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show-off, but it was this drive to educate myself that convinced everyone that I was fine, when in fact things were starting to go wrong at school. One very kind and perceptive teacher, who happened to be the only authority figure I ever properly liked during my time in primary school, called my mother in for a chat one day after school had finished. ‘Now, I am very fascinated with your son, Mrs Thompson, because unlike the other boys who boisterously run off to the green and play football every day at break time, Harry will always spend the first ten minutes on his own as if he’s thinking things over. Most interesting. It does make me wonder.’ I am very grateful that I fell into the hands of a person in the system with this level of gentleness and awareness, as the other staff members at that school all seemed to be rather callous and parochial. Most of my contemporaries at primary school exhibited the same fundamental traits, as did their parents; materialistic, flash, perhaps a little facile, though still fine, personable emblems of the British middle-class who rested on a bedrock of sophistication and grace. To say I had no friends would be a lie, but to say I had found my tribe would be a gross exaggeration. It was among this milieu where I realised that I possessed an unusual ability to make people laugh, and I say unusual because at this age the laughter was more a byproduct of my outlandish behaviour as opposed to a response to my display of comedic flair. I learned that the goofier I behaved in public the more of a chance I had of getting a cheap laugh, and cheap laughs were always my favourite. However, I’d go to extreme lengths in order to get the reaction I valued most of all, which wasn’t peals of laughter as one might presume, but sheer gob-smacked awe or shock. When reality as we know it has been

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distorted, when things start happening that aren’t supposed to be happening, when the unthinkable and unexpected occurs, when people stare at me in bemusement after I do something shocking and go ‘Wow…’ Yes! I f***ing live for that s***! Some of my childhood feats were: drinking out of pet bowls, dressing up in my mother’s clothing, p***ing myself on purpose, telling vulgar stories to my siblings and cousins late at night during sleepovers, and – a personal favourite of mine – asking my friends’ mothers to marry me. Despite my obvious brilliance, my popularity with my peers fluctuated. Mostly I was regarded as a strange and unpredictable little boy: really loud one minute then mousey quiet the next; really polite to people one minute and then horrendously rude and unsubtle the next; and even though I was quite shy and felt somewhat reserved around my peers, I’d lose all inhibitions when presented with an opportunity to act up and be silly in class, or in any other situation overseen by an authority figure. Where I was exceedingly introverted at school I was the complete opposite at home and around family friends like someone had cracked open a can of cola after violently shaking it. I was known by some as ‘the dare king’ as I was the only one stupid enough to volunteer to do the dangerous and disgusting things no one else would do. Although I was happy to provide the entertainment for the other children, I knew deep down that this probably came from some deeply rooted insecurity; a desperate need to be seen. I acted like this because I felt there wasn’t really much else I could offer apart from publicly making a complete nincompoop out of myself. The only other option would be to remain on the periphery and to not say a single word, because to be caught in the middle, as the one doing the laughing rather than the one doing the funnies, would be unheard of in my world.

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It didn’t only seem like a dull and unappealing role in a social context but the very thought of me assuming such a role made me feel ill. My inner Loki would always intervene if ever the limelight happened to move away from me. I’d be plagued and harassed by these urges to act antisocially and/or absurdly. ‘Go on. Just do it. What’s the worst that could happen? If you don’t do it I’m going to make your life miserable!’ the Loki would say. I can recall randomly and impulsively kissing another boy when we were on a family vacation. The other children who I was playing with just looked at me, gave me that ‘wow…’ reaction I often yearned for, and then burst out laughing. This incident made others a bit wary of me for the rest of the holiday. Was it really worth it? I guess so. It always fascinates me how I was so very able to do every single dare without question but I would resist and shy away from demands. There’s something about the way in which a dare is phrased and put across. Especially if it’s not direct. For example, if someone were to say, ‘I dare someone to pull the fire alarm!’ I would have pulled it before the question was asked. I would, however, be a lot more reluctant if someone were to ask like this: ‘Harry, can you pull the…’ ‘Can you do one?!’ For parents who are looking for a way to get their autistic children to help around the house, then indirectness may be an alternative to demands. I don’t know about other people with PDA, but if someone were to think aloud in my presence and come out with something like, ‘Yuck, look at all those dishes that need to be cleaned,’ then the chances of me jumping to attention and offering to clean them would be pretty high. If someone were to directly ask me to clean the dishes, however, then I wouldn’t be quite so willing. Inspiration is also something worth going into here, as without it I find anything to be an agonising toil no matter how elementary

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the task. I’ve never really needed to be nagged into brushing my teeth or making my bed as I’ve always felt inspired by those who do these things beautifully. If someone had lush teeth then I’d want them too, and if their bed looked spick and span then I’d want mine to look the same! By about the age of eight, my fascination for the natural world began to drift from the animal kingdom to other areas of science. There were two main questions on my mind at the time: 1) is the concept of Santa Claus scientifically plausible? and 2) how do humans, and other living organisms, come into being? These topics were pondered in a more childish way of course. I was beginning to awaken to the lack of evidence for certain childhood fantasies and it was time for Mother to give me some cold, hard adult truths. I questioned the existence of Santa to her while I was in the bath one evening. She knelt down near to me and told me how he wasn’t real, in the gentlest of ways. I sobbed and hoped that she was lying to me; I even asked her to reverse time. I implored her not to tell my brother or sister. The truth hurts I suppose, so I just picked up the pieces and got on with my life. Around the same time, the real story behind the birds and the bees was about to be divulged to me. Prior to knowing about the mechanics of creation, my parents had kludged together this beautiful little story about how Mummy and Daddy share a special kiss whereby a seed is dispensed from Daddy’s tongue and travels down Mummy’s throat, gets planted in her womb and then sprouts into a baby. This had me duped for a long time, but there was no fooling me by the age of eight. Wow… The what goes in the where? And for what? And then fertilises the…? Holy s***! Did anyone else share my complete and utter horror when finding out about sex? I just couldn’t believe it! It seemed so grotesque to me that I was almost a little offended.

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‘Can I do it with you, Mummy?’ Probably not the question to ask straight after hearing news like this. The mortified face of my father appeared from behind a newspaper while my mother struggled to muster up a reply. ‘Well, we love each other don’t we, Mummy? You could show me how to do it on my first time, couldn’t you?’ ‘Harry! I don’t love you in that way! I love Daddy in that way, and we express our love differently than we do to you.’ She giggled and then a moment of silence followed. ‘So can I do it with the dog then?’ The sharp rustles of Dad slamming the newspaper down hurt my ears, and Mother nearly choked on her own tongue. ‘What?!’ Dad coughed. ‘Well, I love the dog differently to the way I love you and Mummy, so that’s how I would like to express my love for the dog.’ My behaviour continued to worry my mother. One time the whole family got together at my grandparents’ house for a Christ­ mas party. I asked Mother if I could take my clothes off and run around naked which she, unsurprisingly, said no to. I threw a huge tantrum that drew much negative attention from everyone present in the room, and this continued on the car ride home where I begged for my parents to, ‘Take me back so I can run around naked! Take me back so I can run around naked!’ At this point, my mother really wanted to know what the heck was up with her son. Despite my father’s insistence that my weirdness was just a phase, things only got weirder. I went through a period of inviting a lot of children home. This wasn’t because I wished to enjoy an evening of innocent ‘play’ with them, necessarily, but because I strangely enough wished to assess them; checking their height, listening carefully to the rhythm and cadence of their voice and taking note of their scent.

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So, I’d have some ‘lucky’ person over, give them a formal appraisal and then openly discard their company. That friend would often spend the rest of the evening playing with my brother and sister while I barricaded myself in my room to read, look out the window and dribble or practice doing impressions of people. I would go to other people’s houses occasionally as well. Whenever arriving at a house that I’d never been to before, the first thing I’d usually do was give myself a grand tour. I wouldn’t think twice about wandering up the stairs and opening bedroom and bathroom doors before going back downstairs to have a look to see what was in the cupboards or the fridge. I know this sounds rude, but it really isn’t. I would never rummage through people’s drawers and pilfer their belongings. In order to feel completely relaxed in a new place, I have to know it like the back of my hand. One time when I was invited round to play at a friend’s, his mum phoned my mother to ask what kind of food I ate. ‘Oh Harry isn’t a fussy eater at all!’ Mother said. ‘He eats anything you put in front of him.’ However, when dinner time came around that evening at my friend’s house, it was a totally different story. When I was presented with my meal I was shocked and appalled to discover that it was cold. Cold?! Really… How dare she?! Well, I described it as cold at the time but it was most likely room temperature, but still unacceptable. I decided at that very moment I wouldn’t eat a single bite. I sat there with a most malignant scowl on my face. When it was eventually time for me to be picked up, my friend’s mum was more than eager to talk to my mother about me. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Thompson, but I thought you said that Harry ate anything? He didn’t even touch his supper.’ Aaaah, that’s the reaction I’m looking for; total acknowledgement that I’m different.

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While my conduct in social situations was raising some eyebrows, my performance at school, along with my reputation among teachers, ever worsened. My form teacher whom I was given near the end of my time at this oppressive snob-ridden cesspool of a school was almost the end of me. I do not remember ever feeling such contempt for a person in my childhood as I did for her. I was convinced she was a witch. She was tall, pallid, had long straggly jet-black hair and had this permanent disdainful look scribbled across her face. The way in which she’d shriek at her pupils still makes my hairs stand on end to this day. If I fell behind in this teacher’s lesson, she would keep me in at playtime; depriving me of the one time of day I looked forward to. Once, during playtime, she forcefully tugged my arms away from my chest when asking me a problem-solving question and shouted at me every time I either got it wrong or told her I didn’t understand it. This was around the time I started refusing to go into school and would put up a fight most mornings. I told my parents how much I disliked my teacher, and my mother went up to the school to speak with her and was met with a rather fawning act which was completely inconsistent with the horror stories I’d often relay. It looked as though I was exaggerating, but I assured both my parents that she was, in fact, a witch. I can remember randomly vomiting a few times while in her class. This wasn’t due to sickness, I was legitimately terrified. It would just come over me all of a sudden and I’d be powerless to stop it. I remember throwing up once during break time in front of the other children who were all disgusted, and another time all over the school corridor on my way to the lavatory. There comes a time in the life of the British public schoolboy when he must prove his worth by demonstrating that he has the handwriting ability required for him to wield the coveted

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fountain pen. Since my handwriting looks like the production of a blind, arthritic pensioner, I was one of the last pupils in my class who still used a pencil. Even when the right to bear ink was eventually bestowed upon me, I was soon demoted back to the lowly rungs of graphite and wood after getting into a few ghastly messes. At the end of a school day, I’d have ink all over my hands, some up my arms and some even around my mouth. I was probably better off not using a pen. At this juncture, the only area at school where I showed any potential and promise was drama. I felt rapturous during this class. I loved being able to escape myself and become another person for a moment. I partook in the school play and was cast as an evacuee boy in the Second World War who had bad anxiety (apt, eh?). I improvised a scene in which I brushed my teddy bear’s teeth when I was getting ready for bed which elicited felicitous laughter from the audience. The 9/11 attacks in New York had a very strong and strange effect on me. I became obsessed with tall buildings and developed a fear of being inside them. I wondered whether my school would ever be attacked by terrorists. I’d drive my parents nuts asking them questions about terrorism, especially my father who I’d often ask if I could use the computer to do my own research on the hijackers. I’d also spend much of my time drawing pictures of what I thought was happening inside the buildings following the impact, or on the planes prior to the impact. My mother thought it might be a good idea to look into some kind of counselling for me at school. I liked the therapist I was given a lot, she was very nice. Though I always feel as though she was in a quandary with what to do with me as she was trained to deal with textbook cases, which I, of course, was not. My favourite staff member at primary school though had to be Matron. I often

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sought refuge in the sanctity of her office. I wasn’t the avid and highly competent sportsman that my brother was, so I didn’t really care much for football in the same way he and most of the boys in my class did, so instead of heading to the green for a game of footie at break time, I’d run straight to Matron’s office and spend the afternoon with her, often feigning illness in hope that she’d send me home. Out of the hundreds of times I asked her if I could leave early I think she only ever let me go home once. The school, of course, thought Matron was being too soft on me, and maybe she was, but the time I spent with Matron was the only time I didn’t feel terrified. She called my mother a few times to apologise when she thought she might’ve been hindering me from my studies. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Thompson, but he turns up at my office with his big beautiful blue eyes and I can’t help but let him in!’ During my last year at this ‘school’, things got really bad. My head was always down, I always looked scruffy, I didn’t like speaking to people, and my face, which usually evinced a healthy tan, looked pale and beaten. Even my reputation as a class clown could no longer be upheld. I had put on a bit of weight by virtue of comfort eating, and when I wasn’t eating, or if food wasn’t readily available, my fingers would constantly be in my mouth. I’d chew them until they bled. This nervous habit of self-mutilation took me years to get over. We were assigned a maths project in my last year which I failed to complete on time and, to my further chagrin, everyone else in my class handed theirs in long before the due date. Every day my maths teacher would ask me in a condescending tone, ‘Have you got something for me, Thompson?’ I avoided this man like the plague. If he was coming towards me in the school corridor I’d about turn and run for my life. Similarly, if I was walking to class

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and I knew there was a chance we’d cross paths then I’d choose to take a different route which would often be much longer. I didn’t care how tedious the detour would be, I could not bear the thought of being buttonholed by this maths teacher. Once he sat right behind me in a school assembly. I was looking around the room, as I often did, and I clocked his eyes burning into my soul. He leant over the bench and whispered in my ear in the most hairraising and unsettling gravelly voice I will never be able to purge from my memory: ‘Have you got something for me?’ He knew full well what my answer was going to be. ‘No, sir. I still haven’t done it.’ There was an icy interlude. As a ten-year-old, my brain would jump to rather far-fetched and illogical conclusions. I genuinely thought that the next thing he was going to do was kill me. ‘I’m going to punish you if it’s not on my desk by tomorrow.’ As he leant back his face disappeared into the darkness of the auditorium. One would assume that with my teacher’s smoldering rage, and the humiliation of being the last boy in my class to hand in a teensy bit of homework, it would in some way impel me to go home and get the bloody thing done. But this only made it worse. I would have rather been the laughing stock of my class, received scary threats from my teacher and avoided him for the rest of my life than to obey his stupid commands. Sometimes, and I kid you not, even death is more preferable than doing as I’m told. My grandmother approached my mother one day and said, ‘Darling, you have got to take Harry out of that school.’ Nothing felt right to me. I’d have these blistering headaches in the evening after school and would feel very carsick on the journey home. I physically couldn’t get myself to do any of my homework at all. It all seemed too pointless and tortuous.

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‘School is for work! Home is for play!’ I’d declare. ‘You cannot mix the two!’ The mornings before school were equally distressing. I remember waking up every day and feeling like I was headed straight for the gallows to be executed. Mother would play Pavarotti in the car on the way to the school to try and calm me down. I still sometimes get a bad feeling in the morning which I believe stems from those fear-ridden moments before school. My mother would drop me and my siblings off every day wearing her gym attire. On the occasional day she’d be in regular clothing I’d break into a cold sweat. ‘But what if you forget to pick me up from school?!’ I’d quaver. ‘Darling, of course I’d never do such a thing,’ she’d console. ‘But sometimes you go upstairs to run the bath and then forget what you’re doing as soon as you reach the top of the staircase. You could make the same mistake with me and forget to pick me up!’ Mother had to laugh this, but she made a habit of wearing her gym kit every day, without fail, to relieve me from my worries. When Mother would drop me off at school, I’d disembark from the car and walk a couple hundred metres towards my classroom which overlooked the green and the school gates. Moments before I’d enter the grounds, she’d restart the engine and I’d turn around and call out, ‘Outside the classroom!’ and then she’d give me a thumbs up before the car disappeared behind the trees along the road. ‘Outside the classroom’ meaning that’s where I wanted her to be when she picked me up. Mother and I did this every single day; not once did we forgo this procedure. However, one afternoon I was unfortunate enough to discover that my mother was indeed absent from the spot I’d usually expect her to be in. This was due to an auditory error on her behalf when she mistook my regular request of ‘outside the classroom’ for ‘outside the car park’. When I

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failed to find her outside the classroom I almost lost the ability to breathe and stand up unaided. This seemingly innocuous mistake was nearly the end of me. I still can’t recall having a worse panic attack to this day. In IT class I would ask to use the lavatory at the same time every week. Not because I needed to go, necessarily, but because this was the last class of the day, which meant I could sneak out the building to check to see if my mother had arrived at the school. She would always be waiting outside my brother’s classroom. Ben’s two and a half years younger than me so would finish school around 15 minutes or so before I did. That IT class was torture. I would not be able to stop looking at the clock the entire lesson until it struck three, which was the time I’d ask the teacher if I could go and do my business. My heart would be racing away, and I felt as though I had to go out and check to see if my mother was there just in case something might’ve happened to her. The teacher wasn’t aware of this ritual of mine until a good two-thirds of the school year had elapsed. ‘Do you really have to go every lesson?’ he huffed. My skin went hot. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just gawked at him like a frightened rabbit. ‘Go on then,’ he nonchalantly added. With that, I darted downstairs and out the building. I whipped around the corner and, as I hoped, my mother was there waiting outside my brother’s classroom. She looked over at me, smiled, then waved. Phew! She’s alive! The final straw for my mother was when, at a parent’s evening, my new form teacher said, ‘Now, Harry is a rather sensitive and passive boy, Mrs Thompson, but don’t you worry! We’re going to make him competitive!’ With that, Mother decided to withdraw me from the school by summer, and started to look for other options.

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Mother got into a conversation with her cousin’s wife one day who talked about the school her children were being educated at known as ‘The Rudolf Steiner School’ and by many others as a ‘Waldorf school’. She explained to my mother how their approach to education was very gentle, free and avant-garde. Mother was fascinated and thought that this could be ideal for a boy like me. She organised a visit to the school where my dad joined her. It didn’t take long for them both to decide that this might just be the thing I needed. My siblings and I attended the open day where we met a few of the students and teachers. It was very, very different to what I was used to. To our delight, three places were available for me, my brother and my sister. My parents secured them right away and we handed in our leave notice to our current schools. When my parents broke the news to me that I would soon be going to another school I was over the moon, and when the time finally came for me to leave my current school, all who knew me noticed a positive change in my demeanour. I seemed more chipper, relaxed and smiley; an astronomical load had been lifted from my shoulders. The holidays soon came to an end and my first day at the Rudolf Steiner School was within reach. Could this be it? Could this be the school that’s right for me?

*** The Rudolf Steiner School was far more bizarre than anything I could’ve ever imagined. The first day didn’t even feel like I was preparing for a school day. It gave me that feeling one gets when they go away on holiday. You know when you wake up super early to go to the airport but put normal clothes on? Yes, I was

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amazed to discover just how relieving it was to not have to wear a school uniform anymore, as donning that dreadful, itchy private school livery every day always seemed a needless chore and hassle. I must have possessed a very mild form of PTSD because my first few weeks at Steiner were spent in fear and trepidation. The other children warmed to me, thankfully, but I was always anticipating maybe a lecture or disapproving remark from the staff members and felt, as a new student, I had to work extra hard in order to earn everyone else’s respect when in reality I didn’t. This was just one of the ways wherein my mind had been tainted and my self-esteem zapped by my old school. I’d been tricked into believing that my worth could only be validated by others (who were much older than me), and that believing in myself was a waste of time insofar as I was following my heart and passions without simultaneously adhering to some bulls*** standard. Steiner were the complete opposite in this regard; their ethos was all about ‘developing the whole child’, and didn’t focus much on academic excellence or fitting the mould. The unforgiving pressure I was under in my old school seemed to be non-existent in Steiner. There was no more homework for a start, we weren’t kept behind after hours for pointless and tedious tasks, we weren’t forced to be sporty or academic against our will and I found myself in lessons I didn’t even know could be taught in school. Gardening, knitting and hut making to name but a few, and of course the one which will always win first prize for strangeness had to be ‘Eurythmy’. I have my reasons to believe that the Rudolf Steiner School could be, at times, wilfully unconventional, and this is one of them. Please forgive me, dear reader, while I proceed to use Google’s definition of Eurythmy, as I cannot for the life of me begin to explain it: ‘A system of rhythmical movements to music used to teach musical understanding, or for therapeutic purposes.’

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To me it was like a fusion of ballet and yoga. A staple of Waldorf tradition, though not many students took it seriously. In my first school, the deputy head pulled me aside once to comment on my ‘dishevelled’ appearance. ‘Do you brush your hair, Thompson? You always look rather messy.’ I did always seem to have bed hair, but in the Steiner school I now looked around me to find that so many of the boys had long, and sometimes unkempt, hair. I decided to grow mine out myself. Girls were another novelty. Apart from my sister, cousins and a few female family friends, I’d only ever associated myself with boys as I was only ever exposed to boys in my previous school. I wasn’t at all accustomed to the ubiquity of young females and found it rather amusing just how different they were which I remarked on to my mother: ‘Mum, girls are so weird. They clap their hands when they’re happy and plait each other’s hair when they’re bored.’ She giggled at my astute observation. Though I was initially stumped by these peculiar creatures, it didn’t take long for them to inure me to their ethereal appeal. The Rudolf Steiner School, for me, was like a period of respite after a long and gruelling phase of having my personality steadily corrupted. The friendly ambiance along with my nerves saw that I really wasn’t going to be much trouble for the school during my first term. This is all part of what I’d one day describe as ‘the honeymoon period’. The initial few weeks after arriving at a new place when I’d be compliant and off the radar as I explored, got a feel for the place and found my feet. If I were to thank Steiner for anything, it would be for all of the confidence it gave me. I had been depleted of verve before arriving and soon found my voice and strength and, in some way, rediscovered the person I was at my core, and as positive as this all sounds, there was, unfort­ unately, a catch.

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I was all too aware of the lack of discipline and boundaries at my new school. ‘Where are the boundaries?’ I wondered. ‘How far can I really go?’ I watched the behaviour of my fellow students intently and sought to emulate them. Once I’d achieved this and realised I wasn’t content with copying, as it felt a bit feeble and un­ original, I knew the only way I was ever going to be seen as the class legend would be to take whatever the other students did and do it better. It all started with a bit of chattering here and there in lessons which developed into drawing rude pictures and passing them around. Mostly of penises. One time even a graph of the penises of some of the boys in my class in size order (not that I actually knew what these boys’ willies looked like and whose was bigger, I just made a prediction based on physical appearances), but other times I’d write little cartoons and stories about the other children or teachers. These obscene and prurient productions were designed to display my creativity and wit. I got into a strange habit of making up and spreading disgusting rumours about people to the unalloyed aggravation, and sometimes amusement, of my fellow students. For example: ‘Hey, everybody! Adam inserted his hand up Gary’s a***hole and pulled his c*** through to the other side!’ and during break time I’d violently shove people while shouting, ‘Take your clothes off!’ I can recall one day after a PE lesson entering the changing room with the other boys in my class. Everyone was in a particularly excitable mood which was often the case in school after being dismissed by a teacher. That sense of ‘we’re free!’ when it’s time to play outside at break time or time to go home at the end of a school day, and of course when it’s time to get changed before and after gym class because the teacher would almost never be present for (what I’d like to think) obvious reasons. So, into the changing room we galloped. I remember my adrenalin kicking in

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when the teacher dismissed us and we darted off. Everyone around me was buzzing and chatting away. At least three of us at a time would try and squeeze through those narrow doorways and then into the changing room itself where the lighting was slightly (and irritatingly) dimmed. I could never tell whether I was more nervous or excited. Different feelings would supersede one other. ‘Oh my god oh my god oh my god!’ I’d be flapping my hands like a madman barely able to contain myself. A pudgy lad in front of me named Leigh removed his t-shirt and I felt this almighty force surge up my spine and into my head which then came out of my mouth as… ‘Leigh’s fat!’ Everything around me went silent, which was followed by peals of laughter from everyone in the changing room. I was then, of course, attacked by Leigh. While the impulse was brewing moments before, I remember the fact I wasn’t supposed to say things like that made me want to say it more. I would like to make it clear to readers that at that time I did things to make people laugh and acted in ways I thought were socially acceptable, because I didn’t have the social tools to figure out playground etiquette or distinguish mildly inappropriate behaviour from behaviour that was just plain wrong. I recognise that my behaviour was inappropriate and that I upset many people. Of course, even in a neurotypical setting, autism can have its advantages. On birthdays, each student would be given a poem to learn which they’d have to recite in class every week until their next birthday when they’d be given a new poem. It would take most children weeks, if not months, to get to a stage where they didn’t need frequent prompting by the teacher, and some would even read from the original card they were given (on which the poem was written) which they’d hold covertly behind their desk, glancing at it occasionally as they faltered through the verses.

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When the day finally came for me to be presented with my poem on my 11th birthday, I memorised the whole thing overnight, and when it was time for me to recite it to the class a week later, I did so fluently and without hesitation. The teacher had his spare copy of my poem at the ready to prompt me (as he did for the other students) but he soon realised that he would not need to. The whole class were staring at me in disbelief by the time I finished. ‘Impressive…’ my teacher said, smiling. When I was about 12 or so I went through a bit of a grunge phase. My image was modelled on Kurt Cobain from Nirvana, which was my favourite band at the time. I wore rolled-up flannel shirts, ripped jeans, red Converse and at this point had long blonde hair. I had also taken up the bass guitar a year earlier after my grandfather – a cool and altruistic man – kindly lent me a couple of guitars from his vast collection in his attic. Music became my whole life; I played every evening after school for hours on end. It was cathartic and a great way to decompress. I never had a knack for composition; my strength lies in my musical ear. I’ve always intuitively known how to sing the harmony over a melody, and after learning the bass and then the acoustic guitar a year later, I figured out the bass lines and chords to numerous songs. I relish any opportunity I get to sing or play music with people but I can be extremely pedantic. One evening while my family and I were driving home after an excursion, I was trying to conduct a three‑part harmony with my mother and sister. Mother kept getting her bit wrong which resulted in me raging. When someone sings even slightly out of tune, or, worse still, changes the key, I react as the Pope would if the Sistine Chapel got destroyed before his very eyes. It’s nothing less than barbarism to me. Because music had now become my passion, it meant that it

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wasn’t just going to be an after-school avocation, but an activity I’d parade at school. We were in German class one day, and halfway through the lesson when we were all reciting a German poem I arbitrarily jumped out my seat, played the air guitar and yelled at the top of my lungs: ‘Let’s start a rock band! Dernernernernernerner!’ Goodness knows where that one came from. I was immediately sent out of class and danced to the door while my classmates convulsed with laughter. Strangely enough, no one accepted my offer to start a band. There were other times where I’d be sitting in class, the teacher would ask a question and I’d go to answer, but what came out my mouth would have absolutely no relevance to the question whatsoever. I’d either randomly say, ‘Hello!’ or, ‘…and I’m Harry!’ Or sometimes I would shout out the name of one of my fellow classmates. Other times I’d reach for the genitals of my fellow classmates while doing an impression of a turkey, and often some kind of ague would descend on me and I’d burst into a fit of raucous noises. ‘Are you trying to get sent out?!’ a teacher asked once. ‘Ummmmm. No?’ I’d lie. It’s almost as though I have to do some things rather than want to. I’m even tempted to say that it sometimes feels as though I will die if I don’t follow it through, like I have no other choice. My brain will not stop hassling me until I accede to its biddings, and will end up flooding my prefrontal cortex; effectively violating my ability to make my own decisions. Then, of course, my inner Loki takes the driver’s seat, and, most likely, shocking antics will ensue. The autistic seeks not pleasure, but safety. Academically, Waldorf schools are a year behind mainstream schools which meant I was more or less repeating the same stuff I’d already completed, though in a much milder setting. Because of

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this, I did find the schoolwork relatively easy and I was top of the class for the first couple of years. However, as my behaviour worsened, so did my academic performance. My form teacher watched me transition from a sterling student into a deplorable menace and couldn’t help but feel a little sad about it. ‘Harry,’ he sighed. ‘You should really know better than this. You are such a clever boy. It’s a shame to see someone with as much potential as you willingly throw their life away.’ This really unnerved me. I knew I was a pain in the ass to everyone, and I knew of the adverse consequences I kept careening into, but I somehow couldn’t stop myself. I found myself in a bit of a catch-22. What got me down was that, for once, I was actually feeling quite happy in myself, but as my happiness and confidence grew, so did the number of problems that befell me. To overthrow authority, spontaneously bring about change and to defy and undermine the ‘norm’ and status quo wasn’t just what I did, it was who I was. And unfortunately a personality like that cannot be part of any system unless they are prepared to make some serious sacrifices and alterations to their character; which would result in unfathomable melancholy. At any rate, I decided not to curb my insubordinate ways. I was too intent on riding out my mission to find out just how far away the frontiers of tolerance stood. My teachers started to phone my house an awful lot to complain to my parents about my strange behaviour, and letters containing similar complaints endlessly flew through our letterbox. So many letters in fact that it was almost like the scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when the owls delivered a plethora of letters down the chimney until the living room looked as though it had been flooded with large confetti. I became rather obsessive about my reputation as the ‘naughty boy’, and took it very seriously. If for whatever reason I didn’t get in trouble one day, or if one week I got one less

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letter home than the week before, then out of panic I’d end up completely overdoing it the following week because I would feel as though I had failed myself. One apparition I conjured from thin air was my imaginary Rastafarian friend named Joe. Joe sported a large tam, embroidered with the colours of the Jamaican flag, with which he sheltered his thatch of coarse, matted dreadlocks. I’m pretty sure he wore a basketball top, bulky trousers and flip-flops, but his exact dress sense eludes my memory somewhat. I never told anyone about Joe apart from a few family members, of whom my brother and sister, I recall, responded with laughter. I invented a very complex imaginary world to which I used to retreat whenever I found myself becoming tired or bored of the real world, or if ever I felt upset about something and needed to escape. I would usually enter it when I was in the toilet for some reason. Every day after a meal I would lock myself in the downstairs toilet in our house, or in a cubicle in the school lavatory, for up to 20 minutes at a time and sit back and allow myself to roam freely from within my inner landscape. I am not going to tell you too much about my imaginary world, but I will tell you that my imaginary Rastafarian friend, Joe, was a part of it. I think part of the reason I found it so difficult to sustain genuine friendships as a child was because I felt as though I couldn’t really relate to other children. There wasn’t anybody with a mind even remotely like mine. I remember trying to speak to my classmates once or twice about my thoughts: ‘Hey, do you guys ever shake someone’s hand when greeting them and imagine head-butting them, spitting at them, or pouring a pot of boiling water over their head?’ ‘Um, no, Harry… We don’t.’ ‘These humans are strange creatures,’ I’d think to myself.

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Intrusive thoughts were always randomly popping into my head and plaguing my life when I was young, and they still do today if I’m honest. Typically, the less anxious I am, the less they occur. I’ll have these visions of myself doing something ignominious in, say, formal situations which precede an upwelling of adrenalin. I’ll wince and whine and flap my hand (‘stimming’) until whatever unpleasant image that’s being projected in my mind passes away. People may have tried to bully me at points, but my responses to banter and teasing were always odd and a source of confusion for my classmates. I would shrug off quotidian insults yet I was hypersensitive to criticism. So, if someone were to say, ‘Hey, Harry, you’re ugly!’ I wouldn’t have flinched because there’d be a demand to retaliate. Had someone said, ‘Hey, Harry, you grate your cheese awkwardly,’ on the other hand, I would have flipped. I could be an extremely literal-minded child. For example, when I was at my first school and my teacher announced that we were going on a school trip, I automatically assumed that she meant the whole school would fall over. Unsurprisingly, I was an easy child to fool, sometimes believing anything anyone told me. A few of my classmates at Steiner clocked onto how gullible I could be, and once during break time a couple of boys approached me to tell me I was in a lot of trouble and that a certain teacher wanted to speak to me about it. So, with that, I scurried off to look for this teacher who, in my naïve mind, was about to chastise me. It took me half the break time to locate her, but I did. I asked the teacher innocently why I was in trouble. She was perplexed. As it turned out, she hadn’t summoned me, but she assured me I’d done nothing wrong and that I needn’t worry. On my way back to the playground I mulled over possible explanations for what just happened, without once considering the fact I may have been

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deceived by my so-called ‘friends’. Alas, it soon became clear when I returned to find them laughing at me. I remember, once or twice, actually deciding to conform. I’d sit in class and try my hardest to pay attention and follow what the teacher was saying. So…damn…hard. I would exhaust myself just by trying. The room would be abuzz with seductive and annoying noises; flies, heaters, chairs and desks creaking. My heart thudding away in my chest would feel like it was a man buried alive in a coffin frantically trying to scratch his way to freedom. I’d hear some classmates murmuring away at the back and I’d feel a tremendous urge to get involved. I would try and fight it, but the more I fought the urge to be mischievous the stronger the urge became. It was no use ‘trying’ to be another person, or even a person for that matter; some unrelenting force inside me wouldn’t allow it. I compulsively took things one step further than anyone else who dared to destroy a lesson. If one boy muttered the word ‘rape’ under his breath, I’d yell it at the top of my lungs. If someone lobbed a woodchip at another child during woodwork then I’d throw one straight at the teacher and readily take the blame. Similarly, if a food fight were to break out during lunchtime, I’d suborn everyone to carry it on into lesson time. Even though I was now 13 years old, I didn’t think it at all inappropriate to pull stupid faces and make silly noises in the middle of lessons. I was simply resisting the demand to ‘act my age’. My parents sought professional help for me after my father, at last, surrendered to the fact I was far from a normal boy. An esteemed psychiatrist in London, after assessing me, gave me my first ever diagnosis of ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’ or ‘ADHD’. I don’t recall feeling much emotion, but I suppose it did bring about some relief as it yielded an explanation

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(albeit a crude one) for my naughty behaviour. The psychiatrist’s suggestion, however, that I should take Ritalin, didn’t sit well with my mother and myself. Dad was up for giving it a go, but was, thankfully, outvoted. Apart from when I got into illegal drugs as a younger man (which we’ll come to), I never once felt the need to be on any kind of prescriptive medicine which would to some degree alter who I was, and possibly who I am today. By the time I got my first diagnosis, I knew I was fine the way I was and, if anything, it was the system that needed remedying, not me. I liken medication to a solar eclipse. The moon being the drug, the sun being the person and how the drug just dims the person’s light as it passes through, much like the moon does to the sun during an eclipse. I had no desire to dilute myself in this way. If school couldn’t accommodate me the way I was then so be it, it would just mean that school wasn’t the right place for me. The last thing I was prepared to do was bow down and tailor myself to fit the system. I’m not denying that medication is necessary in some circ­ umstances. If a child is diagnosed with a serious illness, for example, then I’m sure the last thing on the mind of his or her parents would be to skip the hard-proven treatments that have stood the test of science, for fear of making alterations to their child’s personality. No. They will do everything in their power to somehow make their child well again. There is a place for medication in extreme cases. If someone with an atypical neurology wishes to go down the regular route of school and aspires to one day get a normal job, then by all means medication may be what they need in order to scrape the mark. If that were me, however, then it would feel most inauthentic. I would feel as though I was in some way rejecting the person I was and am at my core, in tragic and hopeless pursuit of being someone I’m not. Autism is not a terminal illness, but a

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lifelong condition. Something those who are blessed or – some would say (depending on how one looks at it) – afflicted with have no choice but to accept and embrace. The only time I ever felt the need to change myself was when I wasn’t happy with myself, so I began self-medicating with illegal street drugs and staggering amounts of booze. The legal status is irrelevant. I may have even been desperate enough at that point to try out prescriptive medicine. At the end of the day if there existed a quick and easy way for me to abscond from reality, then I was taking it. Thankfully now, life for me is more bearable, and I have no desire whatever to enhance or muddle it up it in any way. It wasn’t years of attempted self-alteration that got me here, it was learning to appreciate and respect myself enough to become healthier and find my natural habitat. Anyway, back to the story. My reckless antics soon prevented me from being invited to all the outings my classmates would go on at weekends. This hurt, but I was really done with the Steiner school by this point. My form teacher was pretty much at the end of his tether, too. I had this habit of making popping sounds with my lips which drove him berserk. He asked me to stop about three times in one class. Then a few moments after the third time, unable to refrain, I made the fourth teeniest tiniest pop. ‘Get out!’ he roared. This was most disconcerting as this teacher was a very mild-mannered and cordial man, so for him to erupt in such a way meant that he had really been vexed. I scurried off and he joined me outside about five minutes later. ‘When are you going to approach adulthood, Harry? When are you going to just grow up?!’ He wasn’t asking sardonically; he had this exhausted, desperate tone in his voice. A truly broken man with absolutely no idea what to do with me. ‘You could get so much out of school, Harry. It all depends on which way you choose

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to go.’ I knew he meant well, but it stuffed me further into a hole I already felt unable to get out of. I eventually decided to stop going to school altogether. After delivering an explosive and emotionally charged sermon to my mother on why school stank, she let me stay home. She couldn’t bear to see me so distressed and knew it would only make me worse if I were to routinely subject myself to seven hours of (what I thought was) pointless torment. It was also far less of a risk keeping me at home and out of harm’s way, plus, she’d read my report; it was atrocious. My parents were constantly driving up to the school for meetings with my teachers who had started threatening to kick me out; all of this my mother could have done without. I actually admire some things about the Rudolf Steiner Schools and the Waldorf way of life. It just wasn’t for me. New adventures were now beckoning from the horizon and it was time for me to move on. I wasn’t to be bumming around the house for too long as I learnt of another school that was potentially even weirder than Steiner. I mean ‘weird’ in a good way of course. In fact, I only ever mean weird in a good way; the weirder the better! Because if a place is weird then there’s more of a chance I’ll feel at home. The same applies to people: the weirder someone is the more chance I’ll get along with them, and this particular school was so weird that one might not even call it a ‘school’.

Chapter 4 (and a half…)

A Brief, Yet Necessary, Digression

I didn’t write anything yesterday, and struggled to the day before. Some days are like that. Fruitless, bleak, and annoyingly so. The demand has been much too high. When I started this book (this time around) I told myself that I would produce no less than a chapter per day, and as a result I have now ended up shying away from the very goal I originally set out to achieve. I should know better really. I often say to myself: ‘Just do it when it feels right’; a sound, simple and, granted, trite bit of advice that hasn’t failed me thus far. So what went wrong here then? I never usually shy away from a challenge, especially a physical one. Because as soon as my body begins to falter and fatigue from whatever gruelling exercise I am undertaking then I am compelled to push myself even further as if I am resisting even my body’s urges for me to stop. One thing I cannot stand, however, is when other people are motivating me, say, at a gym or on a run. ‘Come on, you can do it!’ 79

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This will have the complete opposite effect of what’s intended. It does nothing but make me want to give up. So, as much as I relish setting myself goals and overcoming challenges, sometimes even that will prove to be too much when I have people around me who wish for me to achieve my goals as much as I do. I have my own YouTube channel where I make videos on neurodiversity. Many people watch my videos and kindly provide feedback both critical and complimentary (both are appreciated), and many of these people are aware that I am currently in the process of writing a book. Okay, perhaps you are anticipating I am about to blame the fact I wasn’t able to write yesterday on the impatience of my followers? Well, not exactly. I can see where they’re coming from. They have been waiting a long time after all, many are raring to get their hands on a copy so they can read it, and I feel it is my solemn duty to finish this bloody thing as quickly as possible so I can make everyone happy, including myself. Most days I write with brio and I am open to encouragement and questions about, say, the due date for my book’s birth, but sometimes I feel a little more jaded and close myself off from such questions. ‘Is it done yet?’ could potentially set me back a week or so. But on a good day, this would be a perfectly harmless question that I’d be more than happy to answer. So PDA isn’t solely about demand avoidance, as it really depends on the PDAer’s anxiety levels at any given moment. Two such incidents occurred within the same week. I was living with a girlfriend at this juncture and it was time to take out the rubbish as the bag was full, so we left it by the front door for one of us to grab on our way out. We left the house together. I was in front and as I approached the door my girlfriend called out: ‘Harry, can you grab that bag, please?’ I tersely responded with an emphatic, ‘No!’ and walked straight

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past the bag of rubbish and out the front door empty-handed. Dearie me I must’ve looked a right douchebag. A few days later, the exact same thing happened. A full bag of rubbish was sat by the front door for either my girlfriend or myself to grab when we left to go out. Once again, we had something to do together that day, so off we went and off I led. ‘Harry, can you grab that bag please?’ she asked again, though this time more tentatively. ‘Certainly!’ I cheerfully replied. So I swept the bag right up off the floor on my way out and put it in the wheelie bin on the driveway. Hang on… So is PDA like some kind of virus with intermittent symptoms? Or do we have it some days and not others? The heck’s going on?! As I said before, the demand avoidance aspect is a result of overwhelming anxiety. When I flat out refused to help my girlfriend the first time, I was having a bad day, which I can remember rather vividly. The second time it happened I was having a relatively stress-free day, enough so that I was in total control of myself when confronted with a demand. In order to successfully eliminate or, at least, reduce outbursts or meltdowns one must make sufficient efforts to minimise anxiety levels before anything else. When anxiety is heightened then the likelihood of being triggered, and potentially having a meltdown, is increased. The autistic meltdown is analogous to an epileptic fit in that once it starts it cannot be stopped, and any onlookers must stand back and wait for it to pass. Any attempts from parents or other people to guilt-trip or condemn the autistic person at this point are futile. A meltdown is a physiological response to overstimulation. The system desperately trying to purge itself of anything toxic, overwhelming or unwanted. A hit of the refresh

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button or a flush of the toilet. A meltdown is not a sign of weakness or immaturity and it is in no way a temper tantrum. People who think it is are either ignorant or bigoted and should be ashamed of themselves. I have said this to parents in the past, ‘If you’re complaining about the number of meltdowns and outbursts your child is having then you need to stop trying to find the fault in your child as all they are doing is responding to the triggers dotted around their environment. Look outside of your child to see what’s triggering them!’ Too many parents take their children’s meltdowns personally and don’t seem to understand cause and effect. Much of the time it’s their conduct that is responsible for the meltdowns in the first place. Sometimes it’s possible to feel a meltdown brewing, like when one feels nauseous and intends to find a suitable place to barf. When an autistic person is on the brink of sensory overload, depending on the intensity, they may look for a nice quiet place to vent, hyperventilate or gather themselves away from people. It’s not always possible to find that ‘right place’ as sometimes they are overburdened by internal chaos and will ‘spew’ involuntarily, like when one who is sick fails to reach the toilet on time and throws up all over the floor or some other highly inconvenient place. Or we could use the analogy of when one releases a balloon full of air and it whizzes around the room. The balloon being the person and the air the excessive emotion and energy. At the end of the meltdown it is not unnatural to feel ‘deflated’ in every sense of the word. Unless you’ve got a diagnosis of autism or something similar, it may be difficult for you to fathom or comprehend this kind of mental state and what precipitates it. Rationalising the irrational is not always possible. Meltdowns can range from panic attacks, to rolling around on the floor, to physical assault,

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to smashing the house up or to acts of passive aggression such as vengefully peeing all over the toilet seat in someone’s house. How a meltdown manifests really depends on the personality type of the person having one. So, to sum it up, the meltdown is (or feels like) a rampant surge of hyperintense emotion, in the body of a person, trying to find the nearest exit. Once it starts then there’s not a lot anyone can do apart from wait for the storm to blow over. Better out than in! And there is no way of suppressing it, unless of course the triggers are very much in their infancy. The various ‘types’ of triggers are a very important factor as well. There are two types that I’m aware of in myself: the short-term triggers and the long-term triggers. The short-term trigger is no stranger to the autistic person or their parents. The explosive, rapid onset meltdowns that are ignited after one is fiercely dislodged from the driver’s seat or their comfort zone. There’s more of a chance these ‘allergic reaction’ type triggers will occur in ‘multisensory’ environments. That is to say, places with a lot of people, a lot of noises, a lot of smells and a lot of lights. Environments like this are minefields for autistic people or those who are highly sensitive and have processing issues, as a trigger lurks around every corner. For a start, being in a multisensory environment will automatically whack our anxiety levels up to a frightening and irrepressible degree, and what I find most disturbing is how ‘neurotypical’ people have absolutely no idea what is stirring inside people like me in said situations. Where other people’s sensory tracts are like filters, ours are more like funnels. Stimuli hit us like someone’s holding a hose to our face after they’ve changed the setting to ‘jet’, while a regular person might experience the same thing like a gentle summer drizzle – noticeable but not overpowering. The long-term trigger is a little different. It sets in almost

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unnoticeably and builds up very insidiously. It could take a long time before it can cause even the slightest inconvenience to other people but is all the while bedevilling its victim. Let’s imagine there’s such a thing as a ‘triggermeter’ inside a person with PDA, a (metaphorical) device that can withstand up to about 15 hits, or triggers, before the person has a meltdown. Some demands are more minor than others. Some parents may ask something of their children so politely, and so subtly, that it may even go over the head of the child. I am aware at this point how PDA effects people to varying degrees but I will proceed to talk generally for simplicity’s sake. Let’s say that a mother is washing the dishes and accidentally drops a spoon on the floor next to her child who is playing near to her. She might unthinkingly say, ‘Whoops, silly me! Could you pick that up please?’ Now, that child, provided they’ve had a relatively stress-free day, might do as their mother says and hand the spoon to her forthwith, as the demand may be minor enough to be met. But what it may do is give them a little anxiety hit which may be noticeable enough that the child will feel a slight twinge, but it will most likely subside after a quick nourishing gulp of air. This seemingly innocuous interaction may happen at various points throughout the day, each time delivering another hit and each hit becoming a little more intense than the last. If a triggermeter has a threshold of 15 hits then by the 15th a classic meltdown may occur and, to the confused parent or whoever is doing the triggering, it may appear as though it’s been brought on by absolutely nothing when in reality it’s been building up for quite some time. So how do my meltdowns manifest if I have them? Well, as I said earlier, it really depends on the personality type of an individual. Had I been a burlier and more butch lad then perhaps the way in

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which I expressed my reaction to sensory overload would have been more physical. I may have gotten into more fist fights and smashed more things up, for example, but I have always felt more confident when using words which have been my weapons of choice for as long as I can remember. To verbally dismantle the self-worth of a person who triggered me in a poetic diatribe or a fluent putdown came much more naturally to me than physically attacking them. Many of the people whom I have emotionally torn asunder probably regard me as some kind of remorseless monster, but as it happens I am deeply contrite for all the times I have hurt the feelings of another. Sensory overload can, quite simply, rob one of their moral code. Meltdowns and outbursts can be f***ing hard to explain without making yourself look like a total psychopath, especially when they’re adorned in eloquence and competence. Meaning, it’s one thing if a non-verbal, cognitively impaired autistic person is having a meltdown as there is a chance that it’ll manifest ‘classically’ as loud, unintelligible groaning, dribbling, frantic hand flapping, while swaying backwards and forwards or side to side, and with no eye contact whatsoever. But it’s another thing when someone with high-functioning autism who is well dressed and well built has a meltdown which will manifest in cutting yet beautiful sentences, unswerving eye contact, cunning manipulation and, maybe even, sound reasoning. The appearance of a well-operating exterior and the use of intellectual prowess can easily mask inner turmoil and fear, and deceive other people who are either on the receiving end of a stream of insults or observing the situation as it unfolds, and because of this the behaviour of the highly functioning autistic person can be automatically deemed ‘unacceptable’, whereas the classic or severely autistic person will always be absolved because of their more obvious

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superficial handicaps, even though, fundamentally, a meltdown is a meltdown regardless of how severe the autism may be; and furthermore, regardless of autism. A meltdown is not even a phenomenon exclusive to autism; it is a human thing. Anyone who is completely overwhelmed becomes susceptible to meltdowns. We just happen to get there quicker. This is one reason I sometimes feel sorrier for people with high‑functioning autism after they emerge from a volcanic episode as they seldom receive any sympathy. Everyone around them will either call them weird or treat them as evil people and say things like, ‘You should know better!’ And of course I can see why this is often said, but when you’re the one having a meltdown wherein your personality is temporarily overtaken by what feels like this malicious existential force that destroys everything in its path, then you will see for yourself exactly how horrible it is. Unlike textbook psychopaths as well, once the madness stops and everything settles down, the regret and sympathy for the other person, or anyone else affected, is unbearable. The notion that ‘autistic people have no empathy’ is arrant bulls***. Granted, once a meltdown has been fomented then one’s empathy does scarper initially, and that’s not because we make a decision to shove it to one side, it momentarily vanishes as one fights to regain control. It would be very easy to judge the PDA person when they are in this state, but one must understand that they are not thinking clearly or rationally. They are almost completely blind to people and their feelings and to the surrounding world; all they care about is taking back control. This is sheer animal panic, a fight to stay alive. Once control has been regained, however, then back come the senses, and, like a herd of stampeding buffalo, in comes the empathy and regret, in spades. I was the little boy who cried when other people were in pain,

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even if they weren’t crying themselves. I remember watching other children being bullied on the school playground and when I’d get home I’d weep to my mother who would be confused at why I was the one affected when I wasn’t even the one being bullied. Phew! That was quite the tangent wasn’t it? We’ve veered off course a little bit so let’s bring it back to the narrative, shall we?

Chapter 4 (resumed)

‘School’

When I was in my last few months at Steiner, a boy in my class (who was also a troublemaker) told me one day that he would be leaving Steiner to attend a home from home schooling organisation that was run from a quaint farmhouse in rural Hertfordshire. I can remember a piercing yet lovely sensation germinating in my chest upon hearing about this peculiar place. I somehow intuitively knew that that was where I should be going as well. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be there, it felt more like I needed to be there. After garnering all the relevant information from my classmate, I decided to broach the topic to my mother who reacted rather cynically. Maybe it was because this ‘place’, of which the name was yet to be disclosed to me, appeared to be a little haphazard at a glance. My friend mentioned quad biking, trampolining, various kinds of outings, long country walks and watching TV during lunch. I mean imagine being able to go to a school like that! Sounds like 89

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every girl and boy’s dream, doesn’t it? Well, as it happens, it was, and is, but not for the reasons I just listed off. Every new ‘student’ (which is probably not the right word to invoke in this context) had to have an assessment before starting. Which may sound a little invasive, but it was really just a way for Felicity, the – oh, I don’t know, let’s call her – ‘principal’, to get to know her new students. Felicity Evans – my long-standing muse, mentor and dear friend – is the founder of the wonderful sanctuary I was now lucky enough to call (with an element of reserve) ‘school’. A maverick, a leading light, a polymath and guru in her own right. I first met Felicity a day before my 14th birthday. I was to undergo a process whereby my fine motor skills, coordination, cognitive ability and communication skills would all be carefully examined. I already knew that Felicity’s organisation was run from her home, but this pre-existing knowledge did not in any way mitigate the shock I felt when realising, upon my arrival, that I would be, quite literally, attending school in someone’s house. I scanned my surroundings, and I liked what I saw. It was, after all, very beautiful, but still I struggled to envisage her 20 or so students, who were between the ages of four and 18, thronging the place. Following my mother’s hesitant knocks, the door opened and the quizzical face of a 61-year-old woman appeared in the door frame. Felicity invited me in and my mother went off into town for a bit and would return once the assessment was over. I could feel almost immediately that Felicity was a very special and powerful woman. She possesses these striking sapphire eyes that can peer right into one’s psyche. She read me like a book, and in a way that no one else had ever tried getting to know me before. Prior to meeting Felicity, I was all too aware of how people (especially those who hadn’t observed me in a school or social

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situation) balked and scoffed at the idea that I ‘struggled’ with life. I was from a respectable, wealthy family and often struck people as a confident, articulate and bubbly young man who excelled on a one to one basis. My difficulties were concealed by this stratum of charm and it would strain credulity to propose my behaviour could, sometimes, be quite so outrageous and unacceptable. Due to the disjunction between my two personas, I often felt compelled to ‘milk it’ whenever being assessed by some sort of professional because no one could ever quite bring themselves to believe how such a nice boy could be capable of such misconduct. But Felicity was wonderfully different in this way; she saw and knew who I was from the start. ‘I can see you have problems, Harry,’ she empathised. ‘I can see you find life difficult, but underneath your dysfunction lies a lot of potential. I see it.’ As absurd as this may sound, it was actually a lot more refreshing for me to hear the former part of that sentence. In all of my previous schools, staff members were always harping on about how there was absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t be getting on with my schoolwork and that my perpetual misbehaviour was deliberate and most likely resulted from apathy and a bad attitude. Felicity, on the other hand, before judging and condemning someone’s misbehaviour will always endeavour to look for the causes, and does so with an inimitable style. After a very enjoyable couple of hours in Felicity’s company, my mother returned to pick me up. I told her how happy it would make me if she and Dad were to send me to Felicity’s school, but Mother maintained her scepticism. I think she was a tad worried that I wouldn’t have many friends my own age at Felicity’s, whereas Dad may have harboured concern that there was a chance I would not receive a first-rate education. Plus, there existed another little red flag that made me furrow my brow, to be honest.

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The name of Felicity’s home from home schooling organisation was ‘NatureKids’, and a name like this invokes some rather curious connotations indeed. For me it always conjured up an image of nerdy, bespectacled, pimple-faced teens clad in anoraks, wielding magnifying glasses and notepads, stomping through the woods observing the lives of ladybirds and snails. Come to think of it I suppose there were, at times, elements of this, but the core principles of NatureKids far surpassed its quirky moniker. Ultimately, my parents decided to send me. The NatureKids motto was ‘freedom to learn’ (which was, for the record, a term coined by me). Each child had the luxury of being able to learn in their own time and at their own pace, and could draw snacks from the cornucopia of wholesome and nutritious foods as they pleased, spend ample time playing outdoors, they would be encouraged and assisted with academic undertakings or personal, creative pursuits, and would always be treated as the beautiful individual they were born to be. We had so much land to explore and have fun in. We’d regularly make bonfires and go on long nature walks where the activities would range from building bridges across streams to searching for edible plants. We even had a teepee in the back field where a few of us would occasionally stay overnight. During these evenings we’d enjoy philosophical conversations around the fire, make prank phone calls in the middle of the night on top of the hay bales in the fields, and would spend hours pretending we were all aliens from a faraway planet who had come to save planet Earth. Because we were all ‘outcasts’ there was something so pertinent about this game we all cherished so much. Felicity specialised in children who had diagnoses of ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism, and because of this, many of the children could be quite challenging, to say the least. The

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farmhouse, at times, could become quite hectic and I watched as stress accumulated in Felicity time and again as she fought to keep everything under control. But for the most part, everyone got along famously. We were a mélange of strong and eccentric personalities that constituted one big family. I could never describe Felicity’s place as a ‘school’, to me it will always be a refuge for people who do not fit the system. The outside world may have branded us ‘disabled’, but when we were at Felicity’s we were just human beings, with different brains, in our natural habitat. Sure, we could all be a bit of a handful and wound Felicity up quite a lot, but this still wasn’t an indication that anything was ‘wrong’ with us. We were just a bunch of spirited individuals who couldn’t be understood or tamed by society. I think it’s safe for me to say that the times I spent at Felicity’s were among the happiest of my life. My honeymoon period at Felicity’s consisted of a very long and protracted duration of one whole day… I’m not really too sure why this one was so short. Maybe it was because I had a lot of energy after Steiner and couldn’t be an introvert for too long in case I’d implode or something similarly disastrous. The last time I found myself in an unexplored land, I did what I usually did in those situations and became the clown through a tireless and incremental process, but I cavorted out of my shell on my second day at Felicity’s like an impatient jack-in-the-box. Felicity describes my presence at this juncture as ‘like a whirlwind’. If I was a little crazy in Steiner, then I was surely a full-blown wild child by the time I was at Felicity’s. I would swear profusely in the faces of the other children, get my bottom out at inappropriate times (i.e. during a lesson), one time I urinated on Felicity’s pet rabbits and on several occasions dry humped her cats to get a laugh from the other students. I was neither trusted nor permitted to ride the

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quad bike as I would deliberately crash it into walls and wipe out a few plant pots while I was at it. Felicity is, I must say, a character, and can be impossibly enter­ taining. She was full of these rather amusing and old-fashioned phrases that she’d employ in certain scenarios. Whenever we were all in a hurry to get somewhere she’d shout, ‘Quick sticks!’ And whenever she wanted to know how we were doing she’d ask, ‘Is everything A1OK everybody?!’ I don’t know if she knew quite how euphorically dippy this made me. When I was at Steiner, I started swimming for a local club a few nights a week and took part in a few galas. I lost a lot of weight as a result and became fighting fit. However, this all came to an end when I started attending Felicity’s as the ‘schooldays’ were exhausting and I’d expend so much energy being hyper. The other students could be afraid of me, and I would, admittedly, annoy them, but I was also quite popular at the same time. I’d do a pretty mean impression of Felicity which everyone found rather funny and I would run around and play with the much younger children for hours on end. I drove Felicity spare but she never gave up on me, and I commend her highly for that. She went out her way to find me music and English teachers, some of whom I’d benefit from while others I would scare off with my puerile tricks. After a few months of bliss, my behaviour improved immeasurably. I calmed right down and found some sense of focus with my guitar playing and creative writing. Despite the unstinting love I held for Felicity and her haven, the novelty of it all eventually palled as I started to crave a new adventure or perhaps a new environment to explore. I knew I didn’t want to go back to a ‘regular’ school, but I knew it was definitely time for something else. One day when sitting in the car with my mother waiting for my

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brother and sister to finish school, I opened up to her about what was going on inside my heart and mind. Mother listened intently and then asked: ‘Have you ever thought about a boarding school?’ ‘…?!’

*** I must say this was the last thing I expected to come out of my mother’s mouth. Had The Beast made this utterance then I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised as he probably thought that a good old-fashioned bout of toff tuition would have done me a world of good at this particularly pivotal point in my life, as this is exactly what he was the recipient of in his boyhood. This seems a custom in middle-class families and I for one was determined, from a young age, to be as revolutionary as possible and jettison any mode of behaviour one might associate with the typical ‘posh boy’. To attend a boarding school would be to abandon my principles but, as it turned out, this particular boarding school was fantastically unconventional. Brockwood Park School was founded by the great late Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, in Hampshire, and was fairly reminiscent of Steiner in that it had an alternative, or ‘holistic’, approach to education. It was a hippy international school where there were actually more people from overseas than there were Brits. No uniform, a strictly vegetarian diet, gardening (or ‘care for the Earth’ as they liked to call it), daily meditation, school discussions, and, since they did not employ cleaners, everyone was assigned to a particular job in the morning after breakfast, and everyone had to take turns in helping with the washing up after meal times. What really sold it to my mother, when she heard

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about it from her cousin’s wife (again), was that Brockwood Park had very small classes (averaging about ten students per class) and she thought it might aid my concentration if there were fewer people in a room. The two of us, along with my grandmother, went to an open day and were all thoroughly impressed with Brockwood Park. I decided right there and then that I wanted to secure a place for myself for the following September, but some people – especially Felicity – doubted that I’d be ready for a school environment by that time, if ever. Felicity wasn’t being pessimistic per se, she wanted what was best for me and was fearful that I might end up hampering, or even reversing, my progress. In spite of everyone’s qualms, I went ahead and attended a pros­ pective week at Brockwood. I vividly remember the drive up there; the long and windy road leading up to the sumptuous country manor which was situated in a most bucolic part of Hampshire. Then through the main doors where the scent of wood, tahini and miso suffused the air and wafted gently towards my nostrils. After taking a deeply satisfying breath in, I entered the building. It was imperative for my honeymoon period to begin at the exact same moment as my prospective week, as I knew if it didn’t then I’d have to kiss my chances of going to Brockwood Park goodbye. Conveniently for me, the two simultaneously occurred and I was affable and agreeable to every staff member and student I happened to cross paths with. I had to snigger to myself after a pleasant conversation with someone at lunch or a nice jam with someone in the music studio: ‘These people have absolutely no idea what a little s*** I can be.’ It felt a bit like I was hiding a lethal weapon under my shirt. I knew it was there, but as far as everyone else was concerned, it didn’t exist. I returned to Felicity’s after my lovely week at Brockwood Park

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School and about a month or so later, a letter which was addressed to me arrived in the post. It was from Brockwood. I opened it with bated breath and proceeded to read it. They were delighted to announce that following a successful prospective week they would like to offer me a place to start in September. I informed my parents who were most proud, and we accepted right away. I only had a few months to go before starting my new school, but so much happened in that small window. I found myself beleaguered, for the first time, by mind-altering substances and received a second diagnosis. After my prospective week at Brockwood, a few people noticed and remarked on how my behaviour had got worse and I am in no position to deny this was the case. I found myself in a catch-22. September, for one thing, could not have come around any faster if it was made of greased weasel s***, so this meant my impatience was abject, but at the same time I had to prove to everyone that I was mentally and emotionally ready for a boarding school, which was incredibly difficult given that I probably felt readier to go to Brockwood than I actually was. Since I was little, I always wondered whether I might have Tourette’s syndrome. This was on account of the sudden jerky movements and the occasional expletives I inappropriately blurted out here and there. By the time I was at Steiner and developed more intense tics and found it next to impossible to hold in full sentences laced with abuse, profanity and salaciousness, I started to give it some more serious thought; even more so when at Felicity’s after my prospective week. The frustration of having to wait for something, while trying to be as well behaved as I could possibly be, was at times incapacitating. I noticed my tics and abrupt involuntary vocalisations were more frequent when I was out of sorts. A very nice young man named Jack who worked for

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Felicity, one day found himself, unjustly, on the receiving end of one of my verbal ejaculations. There were about five teenagers, myself included, who attended Felicity’s at the time and we were at an age where we required a medium through which we could channel some of our raging testosterone. Jack, who was 23 years old, would take us on runs and bike rides and other stuff like that. We were all sitting outside one day during lunch and he and the other teenagers were enjoying a civil conversation about some fairly mundane topic that happens to elude my memory. I was awkwardly perched on the periphery, struggling to find a way into the conversation until the perfect opportunity emerged: ‘Yeah, so I’m not really sure why, to be honest,’ said Jack, rounding off something he was talking about with the other teenagers. ‘Well, maybe it’s because your mum f***s dead people!’ I odiously interjected. Random and totally uncalled for. Not my proudest moment. Felicity was furious when she heard about this. She phoned my mother who came to pick me up at once. I wasn’t allowed to be near any of the other children after this episode so Felicity and I sat and talked in a room by ourselves while I waited for my mother to arrive. ‘Why say that?!’ Felicity barked. ‘I have no idea. It just popped out.’ I can remember sitting there floundering, full of regret and disgust with myself and thinking, ‘Why did I say that?’ To me it was as if someone else had said it. Felicity and my mother would often phone each other to talk about me. I didn’t mind this at all as I knew there was a lot to discuss. Plus, Felicity sat in no judgement of my behaviour, she genuinely wanted to find a solution and a way for me to thrive in the world. Following a few incidents, such as the one I mentioned earlier, the topic of autism began to infiltrate their

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ongoing dialogue. For years my mother suspected that I might be on the autistic spectrum, and believed that the older I got the more that certain ‘symptoms’ were transpiring. Luckily Felicity had an arsenal of resources at her disposal and provided her with the phone number of one of the most esteemed speech and language therapists in the country, Margo Sharp. I didn’t really know too much about autism at the time, and ruminated on it during the car journey to the dark and decrepit land of Birmingham. Mother and The Beast were both present which I was pleased about. When we arrived at Margo’s house I was struck by how adept and formidably intelligent she was. I remember thinking, ‘Wow. This is a person who really knows what they’re doing.’ She wanted to see me on my own first. For an hour she asked me countless questions and put me through a number of tests. She then requested to speak to my parents, so saw me to her living room downstairs where a scrim of toys and magazines covered the floor. Margo had a husband who was pottering about. I was 14 at the time and felt a little too young to start up a conversation with him but a little too old to play with the toys. Time seriously dragged its heels while I was sitting around waiting. I was fidgety and couldn’t relax knowing there was an in-depth conversation about me going on upstairs, so I decided to eavesdrop. I stuck my ear to the door of the room in which Margo and my parents were conversing. Listening to Dad trying to describe my behaviour was funny: ‘Well, I come home from work and try and have a normal conversation with him about school or something and he just comes out with a load of gibberish.’ He then proceeded to do an impression of the sound I’d always make to him which made me giggle so much that I had to quickly move away from the door so as not to be heard.

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Eventually I was allowed in the room as it was necessary for me to be present for the moment Margo revealed her conclusion. ‘Okay then, Harry, I’m going to say Asperger’s.’ For some reason, instead of digesting what I’d just heard and taking a few precious moments to reflect on it, my eyes shot straight at my parents who looked relieved, a little stunned, and of course, emotional; especially Mother who had tears in her eyes. I’m not sure why I was so interested to see how my parents would react. Maybe it was because for years I had tried so desperately to get some kind of message across to them. A message of ‘Look at me! I am different! I am weird! This is me! I am not changing! Lalalalala!’ All of which were conveyed through behaviour alone, and then to suddenly have a qualified professional verbally affirm all of this to my parents was satisfying in a way that is too great to be put into words. We thanked Margo Sharp earnestly. I then asked her for more information about my new condition. Which I suppose wasn’t exactly ‘new’. Margo spoke eloquently and comprehensively about Asperger’s syndrome and gave me a little booklet on the subject which I perused for most of the way home. Although I agreed with a lot of it, the booklet still left a few ‘gaps’ in my knowledge. Don’t get me wrong, I did share my parents’ relief, but something still didn’t feel 100% right. In the booklet it mentioned how ‘Aspies’ exhibit a lack of empathy. Apart from when triggered, I couldn’t relate to this at all. I was also left without a good explanation for my intolerance to authority and need to be in control. There wasn’t a section in the booklet that mentioned any of that, and these were my main ‘problems’. Alas, my search for answers continued. With only a few months to go before I started my new school, I was introduced, by my friend, Connor, who also attended Felicity’s,

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to tobacco, marijuana and alcohol. One could say that he served as the Cupid who entwined me with some of the fieriest lovers of my life. I’d managed to get a bit tipsy once when I was eight or nine after quaffing a bit too much cider at a family friend’s, but I had always found the taste of alcohol to be somewhat disagreeable, which, therefore, made me avoid it more or less entirely. This all changed though when Felicity, and a few of her helpers, took us all to The Home Educator’s Seaside Festival (HES FES) in Essex. I loved this experience and found the attendees to be delight­ fully uninhibited and authentic. I played my first gig at HES FES; myself and a few of Felicity’s students performed ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen on stage to hundreds. It was exhilarating, and inspired me to one day pursue a career in music so I could have that insurmountable feeling more often. Connor and I were walking around the campsite one afternoon when we came across a slightly shifty looking lad who happened to have weed on him. Connor, after correctly surmising this lad was a possessor of drugs on the basis of his looks, called him over for a word. He pulled a joint out of his jacket pocket, which I – admittedly, greenly – assumed was a large rolley that happened to smell nice. The three of us wandered off into the woods, lit it up and passed it around. Needless to say, I soon found out what it really was. Later that evening, Connor, our new friend and I set out on a hunt for an irresponsible adult who would buy us a bottle of swill or two. Once we successfully found our unscrupulous young scallywag, we walked with him to an onsite shop, told him our order and waited patiently outside until he came out with three large bottles of WKD. We chugged fervently until not a drop remained and then took a little hobble around. Connor and I got drunk every night after that until the festival

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was over. He sought amusement in getting me to do dares similar to the ones I used to do when I was a younger child. Most of them were pretty tame, then at one point I stole someone else’s wine, and then Connor mentioned (he wasn’t being wholly serious as it turned out) approaching a random girl and asking her to f*** me. I leapt at the chance because (as discussed previously in this chapter) he didn’t exactly tell me to do it. It was phrased more like, ‘Harry, imagine if you went over to that girl and asked her to f*** you?’ There was a strong cautionary undertone here. He was tacitly implying that it would be pretty darn unusual and socially unacceptable if anyone was to do so, and that’s exactly what made me foolishly trot over to her. I should point out that the two of us actually had a minor argument with this girl a few moments before. It was after we cockily asked her if she would just hand us the bottle of alcohol she was holding. Another stupid question met with a disheartening refusal. So, when the time finally came for me to ask her, ‘Will you f*** me?’ the utter revulsion on her face before her foot launched for my testicles, stays with me still. I didn’t realise quite how much Felicity and her wondrous idyll of NatureKids had made an impact on me until a couple of weeks after I left in the summer of 2007. I was looking forward to going to my new school, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit sad about what I was leaving behind. I knew though, that the cherished memories I had of that beautiful place where I found my tribe, and of Felicity, the philanthropic genius who saved my life, would live on in a deep recess of my heart, forever.

*** September hastened and jostled past August and greeted me like a smack in the face. I all of a sudden felt slightly nervous about

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going to Brockwood, and after about two or so weeks into the first term I decided I didn’t want to be there at all. This untimely spell of cold feet extirpated whatever social inclination I had, so I decided to shut myself in my bedroom in the evenings to avoid having to interact with the other new students. I remember calling my mother in tears once or twice, threatening to run away if she didn’t come and take me home. She never did, and managed, adroitly, to persuade me to stick it out for a bit longer. Anyone could see from day one that my time in Brockwood was going to be short-lived. The first thing I thought after bidding my parents and siblings farewell was, ‘Right, who smokes? Who drinks?’ It wasn’t so much that I was in pursuit of drink and drugs for the recreational enjoyment they could bring more than it was how I knew that they could serve as such charming nerve dampeners and confidence boosters. I can recall traipsing, timidly, around and noticing many large groups dotted about the school, comprised, mainly, of new students whose conspicuous lack of diffidence rendered me envious and sulky. ‘Why do they make that look so easy?’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Why can’t I do that?’ As an alien, I was eager to learn more about this abstruse human race and their bizarre behaviours. Small talk, to me, feels like what I’d imagine being trapped inside a wheelie bin full of scorpions for half an hour would feel like. Abject and unnecessary pain. For the first few days I would sit on the perimeter of one of these large groups and listen in to the conversations. I was secretly and selfishly hoping for someone to say, ‘Does anyone want to go for a joint?!’ But that moment never came. They were all giving each other massages, talking about their favourite music and what life was like in their own countries. I was going to have to find another plan.

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Fortunately, I came across a lad from Northern Ireland who agreed to help me out, so the two of us cycled to a nearby petrol station. ‘What am I gettin’ for ya, Harry kid?’ he asked in his beautiful Belfastian lilt. ‘Twenty Marlboro lights please, mate.’ I mentally intoned the words ‘Please have fags’ repeatedly, like a mantra, until he returned. He reached into his pocket and handed me the tawdry cardboard treasure chest which enclosed my 20 cylindrical jewels. Weed would have been more ideal, but this would have to do for now. There were many activities going on at Brockwood to help all the new students integrate, which I would either deliberately miss or partake in very reluctantly. I’m sorry to say this but I simply did not give a toss. All I was interested in was getting out my head. I hadn’t been alive for very long, but I’d been alive for long enough to know how I felt about the world: it sucked. Most overrated, if one were to ask my former adolescent self who was under the mistaken belief that he knew everything. The evening, after I’d finally got my paws on some juicy smokes, most of the 67 students (yep, you heard) had organised a gath­ ering in the school Grove. The Grove was the most beautiful gar­ den situated at the back of the school behind a couple of fields. A variegated salad of trees and shrubs from all over the globe, liberally peppered with sublime flowers. It was like being inside a Lewis Carroll novel. When I turned up that evening I lit up a cigarette and started offering them around. Part of me knew I was asking to be reprimanded. Sometimes I can’t resist the thrill of p***ing people off en masse. There’s something so roguishly appealing about it that makes me feel, inexplicably, totally at peace with myself and at one with the universe. One student put an end to my equanimity by wresting my gasper from my hand and stubbing it out.

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Brockwood, instead of using words like ‘rules’ to describe an obligatory set of regulations, and ‘headteacher’ as a name for the big bad boss, preferred terms that were less heavy and less sinister in nature. ‘Agreements’ is one example; chosen carefully to give off the impression that all that is required from the student is their cooperation and willingness as opposed to their obedience and submission. ‘Director’ is another good Brockwoodism; not an omnipotent ruler per se, but one who guides and oversees without being too much of a dictator. Now, I really did respect Brockwood for this as it displayed humility, but it did make me curious as to, well, what would happen if I – didn’t cooperate? If the ‘directors’ possessed a more ‘equal’ air than the average headmaster at a conventional school, then how much goading from me would it take for them to assume a more authoritarian stance? I was determined to find out. The word ‘Harry’ began circulating around the school and not in a good way either, for my very name was drenched in vitriol. However, to quote Oscar Wilde: ‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ I smoked weed incessantly, but thankfully only ever got caught smoking cigarettes, which happened several times. A series of ‘student’ meetings followed my transgressions. I never took these meetings seriously and assumed the other students didn’t either. Perhaps this was because there were never any staff members or adults present, and had there been then it might have given me more of an incentive to… Oh. Never mind. Even when the staff members did eventually have to intervene and I’d be called for a meeting with, say, the director, I’d always be eerily honest about my offences. For example, the director may have asked: ‘So you’ve been smoking again, Harry?’

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To which I’d reply, ‘Yes, that was me,’ in a most cavalier tone, not showing the slightest hint of remorse or concern for the con­ sequences. ‘Okay. So what should we do about this then?’ ‘Well, you should probably expel me. It’s happened many times now after all.’ ‘…’ Brockwoodians loved to discuss everything at length, and so did I to be honest, but not when I felt pressured to do so as I did in all of those meetings I was forced to attend. I was so very quiet in meetings; apart from during the compulsory minute silences we had at the end of school assemblies where I could never seem to stop laughing, I rarely uttered a word. It was never officially stated, but Brockwood, an unspoken breeding ground for orators, did feel as though at times they were slyly forcing their students to speak in public. Maybe I’m wrong, but it is something I picked up on when noticing my demand avoidant reactions in such situations. If I didn’t feel a demand there, then I wouldn’t have been quite so disinclined to make my voice heard. I do catch myself releasing a little wince of pity for Brockwood now and again when I hop aboard the Nostalgia Express. I had such a nasty and flippant attitude at 15, which I’m sure could be said about a lot of kids that age, but I really cringe at the bravado I cowered beneath as it was such a shoddy contrivance manufactured for my own advantage. I feel compunction mainly because now I am older, and not quite so governed by self-interest, I am able to see and appreciate all of the marvellous things about Brockwood, of which I childishly trifled with as a student. Alas, a system is still a system at the end of the day. Brockwood may have had an approach that was wonderfully different, and far more

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open-minded and benevolent than other schools, but it was still a system nonetheless. It is, after all, in my nature to disassemble any kind of system and to do the opposite of what’s expected of me, even when it’s something I’m generally in favour of. Though my behaviour was a little erratic and unpredictable, I did eventually make some very special friends while at Brockwood, which helped to significantly reduce much of my abiding tension. We would sneak out of our dorm rooms together at night to go and smoke weed or cigarettes together in the Grove, gossip and play truth or dare up in the school tree-house and sometimes we would even run around the school grounds naked and play a game of tag. But what really made a difference was falling in love for the first time. Jessica and I got together in the November of my second year. I’d once enjoyed a brief ‘romance’ with a goth girl in Steiner for a few months, but Jessica was my first ‘serious’ girlfriend, if you will. I can’t pinpoint what it was exactly that made me fall for Jess. She had these extraordinary and entrancing different coloured eyes, a warm and disarming smile, a fearlessness beyond measure, and had mastered the art of being abundantly confident without ever displaying the faintest flicker of arrogance. I will always remember her either as the keen sportswoman playing football on the South lawn sending a ball hurtling through the atmosphere with her powerful left foot, or as the diligent academic labouring away in the dining hall with her head in a book and a pen in her fist; assiduously ploughing through a piece of homework she would not fail to hand in on time. I suppose, upon reading the last half a paragraph, one may assume that Jess and I were polar opposites? In some aspects we may have been. I certainly wasn’t sporty, it had probably been years since I last did any homework, and I wouldn’t

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say ‘confident’ was a good word to describe me at this juncture as I was more teetering on the edge of narcissism. We had the exact same sense of humour though, and shared a similar method in the way we analysed Brockwood and the other students. Our relationship was woven together with a streak of innocence. I can remember us climbing trees together and going for walks on a rainy day and jumping in puddles. Jess and I would sometimes be chilling out in my bedroom at school in the evening and I would never like it if she were to suddenly get up and announce she was leaving. I needed plenty of notice as I couldn’t bear the anxiety brought on by surprises or sudden change. This usually happened just before room time on weeknights, or if Jess had class to attend. Even if the two of us were speaking on the phone during holidays, I’d try my hardest to stop the conversation from ending. Jess would say: ‘Okay, Harry, I have to go now.’ I’d try and create a distraction by saying something like: ‘Jess, guess what?! I drew a picture of a butterfly!’ As I basked in Jess’s intoxicating presence, just about everything else in my life was falling to pieces. On more than one occasion, my mother was asked to drive an hour and a half up the motorway to meet with my teachers to talk about my misbehaviour. The teachers were growing increasingly more concerned about the abnormal amount of energy I seemed to have at night time. ‘Why won’t he settle down?! What could possibly be so fun and exciting about going to bed?!’ the director asked in an exasperated tone. Anyone would think he was talking about a toddler. As it happens, I do get very hyperactive at night. I don’t know whether it’s the demand of having to go to sleep or if it’s that I’m bewitched

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by the evening’s crepuscular hue, but all I know now is that it’s a prime time for me to be creative. When I was at boarding school, however, I was too busy not doing as I was told. An average night for me at Brockwood would be to host a gathering in my room after hours, or, failing that, sneak out of my bathroom window and break into the girls’ dorm to get drunk or stoned, and perhaps top the night off by going for a woozy wander around the school grounds under the stars. It was soon brought to my attention by my friends that I had a devastating dearth of subtlety, finesse and spatial awareness at times when one is expected to uphold such qualities, or at least have some wits about them. I wouldn’t contend this to be honest. If the others were creeping through the corridors at midnight, I’d barge and stomp through, slamming doors behind me as I went. Similarly, if they were whispering in a room or someplace we weren’t supposed to be in for fear of a staff member hearing us, my voice would be blaring away at full volume. This carelessness was often the reason my mother kept on getting dragged into the realm of my shenanigans. Had I been more subtle and vigilant then I could’ve precluded much of the tiresome hullabaloo. I was suspended at one point and spent a good part of a week travelling on the London Underground to Camden Town where I enshrouded myself in a wreath of weed smoke, before returning to Brockwood pitifully unreformed. I had learned about the concept of ‘Indigo Children’ through Felicity, and I once tried (and miserably failed) to use this as an excuse for my appalling behaviour at school. My director called me into his office one day following some incident or other and asked me why I possessed such a strong urge to destroy, or words to that effect. I told him that I was an Indigo Child who had come to Earth from outer space to tear down the system and bring about world

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peace, and would return to my home planet as soon as the mission was complete. I do wonder what was going through his head while I rambled on in this fashion. And so, a trifle concerned and deeply disturbed by my tedious spiel on New Age rot, the director called my parents to tell them about our recent bizarre encounter. One thing I did have going for me was my music. I even joined the school band; the eponymous and appropriately named: ‘Harry and The Troublemakers’. We provided the music for all the school concerts, and I did, with all honesty, take this band seriously. When I wasn’t jamming in the music studio with the other band members, I remember playing the acoustic guitar in the school corridor by the staff room. I was secretly hoping that one of the teachers would notice me in my entranced state and see that I wasn’t just a surly teenage boy, I did have it in me to be passionate and that I could amount to something. Some teachers were more amiable towards me but others had very little patience, if any. One teacher, in particular, had it in for me, and I dealt with this by ripping my name out of all his classes on the school timetable that was pinned up on the wall outside the reception and director’s office. I can recall a time during my first year in English class when we were all set a creative writing task that had to be completed before the end of the lesson. From the moment the teacher said ‘go’ I was instantly paralyzed and watched my fellow classmates writing away contently while I just sat there, motionless. We were told to stop what we were doing around ten minutes before the end of class and were then asked, one by one, to read out what we had written. My paper was shamefully blank. I cannot convey to you, dear reader, the sheer embarrassment that befell me when it was my turn to read out my story and all I could say for myself was, ‘I just couldn’t do it.’

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This incident haunted me for years. I remember really wanting to join in with the others. I love writing, but when someone tells me to do it, it’s as though I suddenly fall victim to some kind of neurological constipation. I get cut off from the stream of creativity and am left to languish in my echoingly and eerily empty mind. There was another English teacher of whom I was actually rather fond and vice versa. We were blessed with Louise in our second year; her teaching style was singular. She would often set us a task and join in herself, and there was almost no teacherstudent separation. She felt like our equal. Sometimes she wouldn’t prepare for a lesson and everything would be spontaneously executed. This I liked ever such a lot, and it was enough to make me put aside my antics for once and be compliant. My passion for writing was revamped in Louise’s class and I embarked on a few creative writing projects with her in the evenings when school had finished. Isn’t it interesting how I couldn’t bring myself to do the creative writing projects set by my first English teacher but with Louise I punched out poems and stories so prolifically? It appeared that my promising performance in Louise’s class was not enough to turn me into an all-round sterling student. I was suspended again after getting caught in the girls’ dorm at night. Jess was very worried about me when I returned from my second suspension. I hadn’t exactly been rehabilitated while at home either. I’d been drinking a lot and smoking far too much weed. Jess remarked on how the weed was having a negative effect on me; I was forgetful, aggressive and continually dazed out. The two of us went for a walk and shared a tearful moment together. I told her that I was done messing around and that I really wanted things to change, but I felt trapped and would need some support as I couldn’t for the life of me do it alone. Jess was more than happy to help. I decided to go for one last joint before starting an

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intensive exercise and rehabilitation programme with her, but as luck would have it, that fatal last joint would be my ticket out of Brockwood Park School. The directors had had enough of my nonsense. My mother was called up to the school for the final time where she learned of my expulsion. She didn’t make a peep, whereas I begged for the directors to reconsider. They kept firmly with their decision; the die was now cast. I staggered back to my room drunk with emotion. I could barely summon the energy to pack my bags. Jess turned up at my door and I disclosed the news to her. She didn’t look at me. Instead just stared at the ground while silent tears streamed down her face. I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in her shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, Jess,’ I wept. Although our heads were teeming with activity, we didn’t say much else to each other. Once my bags were packed I left Jessica in my room after one of the most agonising goodbyes of my life. I walked the long way back to my mother’s car, saying goodbye to everyone in my tracks. This took a long time indeed. I must have passed 90% of the students who, after a long duration of weeping and hugging which accompanied each farewell, would join the ever-growing trail of people following after me on my last saunter through that rural oasis. I knew I would never see most of these people again. I was astonished at how upset everyone was that I was leaving. I knew I was loved by the rebellious kids and a handful of others, but I assumed everyone else detested me. I was clearly, and thankfully, mistaken. I clambered into my mother’s car and she drove away more or less instantly. I couldn’t bring myself to look behind at the school and all the teary students who were seeing me off. I just couldn’t bear it. We endured a long, quiet and reflective car journey home. I felt like my whole world had been shattered.

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My father was far from happy when I broke the news to him that evening. Incensed, he sent me to my room. Even though I was 16 years old and exploding with emotion that would’ve almost surely rendered me demand avoidant at any other time, I mysteriously just did as he said. I felt more in control that way. I was too ashamed of myself to show my face to anyone, too ashamed of the disappointment I was to everyone; too ashamed of my very existence. I then knew, with absolute certitude, it wasn’t just that the few schools I’d been to weren’t right for me, but that no school was right for me, and never would be.

Chapter 5

‘Pretending to Be Something I’m Not in Pursuit of Green, Rectangular Pieces of Paper’

The art of the autodidact is very simple; learn what you want, when you want, and never feel as though you have to learn anything you don’t want to because that in itself has the potential to kill your desire to learn altogether. In my experience I have found that when I study solely towards subjects that are of interest to me, then I am able to more easily retain the information I soak up, which is a no-brainer I’m sure. It’s more fun this way, and a lot more ground can be covered as of course when we love the learning process we get through so much so quickly. One must never be ashamed of their ignorance either, for we are all ignorant about not just some things, but most things, and this of course includes even the most educated of people, and this may be humbling or emboldening for one to realise. One cannot refrain at this point from invoking a quote attributed to Aristotle: ‘The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.’

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A lack of curiosity is a much bigger sin in my opinion. Some people show no interest at all in History or Science, which I can just about get my head around, but then there are those those who are so insular that they may never even experience the urge to question, much less explore, a culture outside their own; something I personally find upsetting, as I can’t help but feel that such people, despite their indifference, are missing out. That being said, this is a great way for me to practise not becoming mired in a solipsistic worldview, as maybe the people I’m irrationally frustrated with for not being into all the things that I’m into would feel the same if I didn’t show the slightest interest in what they’re into. Sometimes we have to make a real effort to understand new concepts or things we may instinctively or automatically denounce. I happen to be wholly uneducated in the field of ‘plumbing’. Does this make me less of a human? Does this make me deficient in some respect, deserving of criticism or perhaps even disabled? I’m sure if, by some fluke of fate, I were to find myself at a little get‑together which consisted of exclusively plumbers I’d be tempted to go as far as to describe myself as ‘plumbically challenged’. I wouldn’t know of anything they’d be talking about for a start, and I’d be hindered further by my manual ineptitude and total disinterest in the subject, as the last thing I feel I was born to do, is plumb. I may well look as though I’m ‘slow’ in this context given my relative ignorance, but it would really just boil down to me being somewhere I didn’t want to be, having to make conversation to people with whom I have nothing in common. Luckily though, I would be able to leave whenever I felt like it. Imagine how many children feel like this at school? Do they have the choice to opt out if they want to? Of course, there is homeschooling, but some parents feel they are incapable of educating their children by themselves, and for others, due to work constraints, it is too impractical. So what options do we have for

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children who don’t fit the system and can’t access their potential in ‘the conventional way’ but have latent talents that reside within them, fertile and ready, just waiting to be tapped into? I know I was lucky to have come across a person like Felicity, and I wish everyone who experiences the world like I do could have that opportunity also. One thing I realised though, is that I may have had around me many human angels who held me up in times of adversity, but in the end, I had to do it myself, as I knew I couldn’t be wrapped in cotton wool forever, and had I stayed at ‘NatureKids’ for too long then I would’ve surely become institutionalised. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and one must be prepared for it. I learned to trust in my inner compass to get me where I needed to be and to steer me clear of places to which my temperament would not lend itself. I then realised how when I was at ‘school’, and later at ‘work’, my inner compass was always going nuts, which I mistakenly believed meant there was something wrong with me, when really it was only the environment that was wrong for me. I can remember a time when I was travelling around the United States and a lovely couple in Portland, Oregon kindly hosted me for a couple of nights. The woman happened to have a diagnosis of ‘ADHD’ and I told her that I did too. I came downstairs one morning to ask her if I could do some laundry. That was all I wanted to know, yet three hours later I was still there in the same spot. The two of us had enjoyed, and lost ourselves entirely in, the most scintillating and discursive conversation where we must have chewed over no less than 15 topics at awesome speed with utmost ardour. At the end, she said something to me which I can’t remember verbatim, but it was something she put across thus: ‘Wow, you can really tell you have ADHD by how you are able to keep up with a conversation that bounces from one subject to another at such a rapid pace.’ After a brief moment of cogitation, I replied:

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‘Isn’t it interesting how when people like you or I are at school, we are the ones who supposedly have a “disorder”? If there happened to be someone present for our conversation who happ­ ened to be “neurotypical”, would they really struggle to keep up? And if so would that make them the “disabled” ones, just like we are in certain situations?’ As it turns out, PDA-related problems don’t stop at school. In fact, for me they got much worse when I thought I’d give ‘work’ (cringe…shudder…) a shot. Euuurgh, if there’s one thing I cannot stand it’s that infernal word used in that context. Well, that might be a lie actually, as ‘money’ isn’t too far behind, and then of course we have ‘labels’ and ‘normal’. These concepts hold such little meaning for me. I promise you that you’ll have a clearer understanding of why this is by the end of this chapter, sensitive reader.

*** Apathetic, uncouth, disrespectful, oversensitive, arrogant, selfish and vain. Just a few words I’ve heard people older than me use to describe the millennial generation. I think it would be a rather lofty claim to say that these traits are exclusively millennial, but might we possess them more abundantly than people of other generations? I believe most of it is down to perception. I have been on the receiving end of many of these linguistic bullets in the past, and more often than not when I’ve been at, what one might call, ‘work’, where there seems to be a preponderance of ‘arrogance’ bullets fired at me. Do I really believe I’m superior to other people? Well, you only have my word for it, but no, I don’t. Though I can see why some people may assume this at times. The reality is that most of the time at school, and virtually all of the time at work, I couldn’t have felt more alienated, incompetent

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and inferior. What I have found is that many people, particularly employers, perceive my behaviour as arrogant when really I’m just refusing to engage in something, or with someone, I don’t chime with. What my employers didn’t realise is that most of my days at work are spent in survival mode, whereby all of my energy is used to protect myself from any oncoming fire and to parry the insane impulses I get. My mood is volatile. Some days I’m not as vocal or as sociable as I am on other days, which may be more noticeable in an overall animated personality. This doesn’t mean I’m being rude or cold, it means I’m probably processing a lot, and quite possibly overwhelmed, therefore time and space are needed for me to recharge my batteries. That being said, I really don’t expect any establishment to keep up with all of these stipulations. It’s no wonder really why so many people like myself struggle to hold down jobs. We’re just wired up differently, and, thereby, unable to cope with the sensory minefield that is the workplace like ‘neurotypicals’ are. In the workplace, one is expected to uphold a certain ethic. So here we can immediately see how someone like myself will incur a problem, because if something doesn’t feel right to me then I find it nearly impossible to do it. ‘Can you change the light bulb?’ or ‘Can you be polite to customers?’ could be like someone asking me to murder several family members before taking a bullet myself. There are so many things I need to be mindful of when I get a normal job so as to not lose my mind. Being in a busy place filled with gaggles of people, bright lights and maddening noises (and I’m not just talking loud noises such as drills, doors slamming and fire alarms which would annoy most anyone. I’m talking about noises that most people wouldn’t pay the slightest attention to: the weak, lethargic whirring of the heater or air conditioning coming on, the scuffles and squeaks of rubber shoes bouncing and dragging

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along the floor, people, who may have a cold, wheezing or clearing a tickle in their throat; believing they’re doing so on the sly, but, little do they know, are actually assaulting my eardrums. As crazy as this sounds, I take genuine offence to such noises as if they are brilliantly formed insults designed to crush my will to live), is enough to throw me at the best of times, but when I actually have to ‘work’ (do something for someone else) it makes me want to die. Imagine if, for the rest of your life, you were forced to work as a toilet cleaner but you were only allowed to use your tongue? Well that’s a little how I sometimes feel when I am faced with working the simplest and most mundane of jobs. I am not only pouring my efforts into doing a job properly like everyone else is, but I am simultaneously battling to keep a hold of my sanity. I have to adopt the ways, which seem so unnatural to me, of a species with whom I do not identify. Triggers are scattered around everywhere in the workplace and in the privacy of my inner world I have to be like a ninja swiftly dodging these triggers. Even small chores for other people outside of the workplace have been ridiculously difficult for me in the past. When I was 14 at Felicity’s, I would occasionally be asked if I could sweep the floor after lunch to which I’d reply, ‘NOPE! I’m allergic to sweeping, Felicity!’ There are many more little demands (spoken and unspoken) like this which other people would fail to notice, yet for me they are forms of harassment and violation. Let’s use being a shop assistant as an example. I swear every time I apply for said job I am invariably confronted with something like this on an ad in a shop window or on the internet: ‘We are a business who pride ourselves on our high standards, professional attitude and exceptional customer service skills. Do YOU feel you have what it takes to be part of our brilliant team?’ … Ummm, f*** off? So that’s the first hurdle I have to listlessly flop over. Then I am,

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for reasons beyond the realms of human understanding, expected to fall in love with every person who walks through the door in the most contrived, toadying and bollock-wrenching way imaginable. The process of falling in love, and the people with whom we naturally click, is largely beyond our control; it certainly cannot be switched on and off at will. I have no doubt in my mind that there are among us human males and females of such exquisite and almost ineffable beauty and grace that one would find it hard not to either lick them or genuflect before their majestic presence as they amble towards us. I do find it hard not to lick such people as it happens, but if I were to do such a thing at ‘work’, I’d be told off for it… ‘Be yourself,’ they say, ‘be kind and loving,’ they say, ‘it will be fine,’ they say… But there are also among us some right jumped up c***s. If my employers think for one moment that I will show the grumbling windbags of the world infinite compassion after they strut in like they own the goddamn place and treat everyone else like crap then they have another thing coming. What always baffles me is how the nature of most jobs is to essentially be another person, and whenever I stick to my principles and refuse to be fake it’s somehow seen as a crime? The customer is always right my anal cord. This may be prevalent in other PDAers too, but I can only speak for myself: sometimes I have urges to override and overthrow, not because I want to be in charge but because I want everyone to be on an equal level. At school I would often implement mutiny and rend a class to shreds due to my allergic reaction to the teacher’s authority. It would be my way of pushing down their heads and saying, ‘Go on. Down you go. There’s a good fella. We’re all equal here,’ like how water will always level itself out. One time I was not so unbending in my tendency to destroy was in Brockwood during Louise’s English class, and this was because she had no air of

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superiority whatsoever, therefore, I had no reason to equalise the set-up. I’m sure most of us are aware of how some managers can be dictatorial and complacent assholes. There seems to be (at least in my experience) a more prominent line of distinction between a manager and an employer than there is between a teacher and a student, and for this reason, the equalisation process can be much more agonising at ‘work’ than it is at ‘school’. That opening was a little longer than I had intended it to be, so let us pull up our sleeves and get to ‘work’ then, shall we?

*** Now I’m not going to expatiate on every single job I’ve ever had because there are too many of them and it would take far too much time. The last thing I want to do is bore you, my lovely reader. I will, however, with brevity yet density, talk about the ones that stand out among the pile. The first proper job I had was when, at 16 years old, I worked as a ‘model’ for a clothing company – let’s call it Huckleton. The inverted commas being the focal part of that sentence, as the word ‘model’ had been hijacked and abused out of its very meaning by the company. What they really meant was ‘shop assistant’, though this doesn’t quite contain the sheer ostentation that ‘model’ does. Huckleton is distinguished by its Californian, beachy and surfer dude ‘vibe’. I was scouted by Huckleton while shopping there with my mother one day in the summer of 2009. After entering one of the changing rooms to try something on, a manager approached my mother and asked her, ‘Was that your son? Is he looking for a job? Because he has the look we’re looking for!’ How very flattering. I was, as we say in the UK, ‘chuffed’, although attending

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the group interview was enough to arrest my tumescent ego. This congregation of about 20 people was comprised of those, like myself, who were ‘fortunate’ enough to have been blessed with the anatomy that lends itself to commercialism, along with the applicants: mere hapless mortals who had not been scouted yet felt ballsy enough to try their luck at becoming part of this exclusive club. We were asked individually to define ‘diversity’. I can remember one girl, bless her heart, suffered the excruciating ignominy of not knowing what the word meant. I really felt for her. One could easily tell she had been scouted though, as she still got the job. This is more or less how I deduced who had been scouted and who hadn’t, because if they had been then they were getting the job and that was that. It didn’t matter how abysmal their answer to the diversity question was, and it didn’t matter how little they contributed to the interview thereafter, they had the job the moment they were sighted by the prowling manager. The applicants, on the other hand, weren’t necessarily automatically out of the contest because they hadn’t been approached, but put it this way, it would’ve helped them greatly to pass the interview if they happened to embody the ‘Huckleton look’. The utter cheek of a business so steeped in shallowness as to only recruit those who they thought were good looking enough, and to then ask their applicants, most of whom would not get the job, how they would define diversity is irony of an inconceivable magnitude. This was one ‘exclusive club’ I did not feel in the least bit fortunate or proud to be a part of. I thought the interview was surplus to requirement, and I would have castrated myself to hear Huckleton’s explicit admission that they were only interested in people based on their looks, notwithstanding the boundless unprofessionalism that would’ve brought them into disrepute. I think it’s obvious at this point that I didn’t really

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like it all that much. Still, I was two years shy of adulthood, and according to gentle folk older than I, namely my father, it was high time to start making my own money and to begin con­ templating on what my ‘career’ was going to be, whatever the hell that meant… I have always been monetarily challenged, and for as far back as I can remember, the very concept of money has been anathema to me. I don’t know what it’s all about. Whenever I am forced to think about money at length it makes me carsick, and whenever I look at the world and everyone indefatigably engaged in the rat race, I feel sad and despondent. Why this is I’m not too sure. Being from a wealthy and patrilineally conservative family, I always felt it was my destiny to one day degentrify myself beyond recognition by perhaps living alone and naked in some remote cave subsisting on nuts and fruits. I hated being known as the ‘rich kid’ which I was so often referred to as in my childhood, mostly because I knew it was all bulls***. Opulence and prosperity may provide a sense of comfort that people of lower social standing may lack and long for, but it cannot be, in any case, a means for attaining long-term, or true happiness. Granted, some people could definitely do with having a great deal more money so that they needn’t worry about feeding their children or paying their bills on time, but I’m talking about how at the other end of the scale, the lifestyle so many would kill for really isn’t as rosy and exhilarating as one might presume. I am saying this because I’ve been there myself. I know what it’s like to have more than one needs. I’ve seen what having excess money does to some people, in the way it can insidiously divest one of substance and sense. Allow me to restate: I am not in any way pronouncing that the first world whimpers of the spoilt and rich should have priority over people in the less developed

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world whose lives are ravaged by war, corruption and poverty, I am merely disabusing people of the lie that the rich are among the happiest and most functional life forms on the planet. Do you want to know who the happiest people are that I have ever met? I travelled to Kenya once when I was 16 for my mother’s birthday. For a week we stayed right in the heart of the Maasai Mara, a vast national reserve contiguous with the Serengeti in Tanzania. While exploring one day we came across a small tribe. Now, these people had nothing, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing bar the clothes on their backs and their small huts which were, for the record, made entirely out of cow dung. I’m talking as primitive as it gets. I scanned my horizons and couldn’t see any water sources for miles and wondered how the hell they all managed to stay alive. I noticed how one boy wasn’t wearing any trousers or underwear and wondered if he had any more clothes at all, and after contorting my body in a most compromising position so that I could fit through one of the tiny entrances to their huts, I took in a hearty whiff and wondered how on earth they could bear the perpetual pungent odour of cow faeces. I wondered all of this, of course, with my Western mind. After a quick nuance in perspective, I looked around again to see something a little different: everyone was smiling sweetly, dancing joyfully, playing mirthfully and replete with unconditional love for every soul in the village. These people knew nothing of iPhones, Xboxes or anything else to do with modern technology; they derived enjoyment, simply, from each other’s splendid company, from their sharp imaginations that were unvitiated by trash TV and social media, or from leading an active lifestyle of hard work and running around on the planes. I wondered how the children of the tribe would react if they were witness to the things some Western

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children do, such as throw a tantrum after their parents refuse to buy them another toy at a department store, and they could only dream of, much less comprehend, the relative luxury of having to acquiesce to their mother’s homemade fish pie and boiled runner beans for dinner, with the knowledge they would be scarfing down a greasy Big Mac and fries had they been in Dad’s care. I have never felt so moved by a group of people in all my life as I did when I met the tribe of the Maasai Mara. I can remember thinking, ‘So this is the secret to a happy life?’ Granted, these people were probably at a higher fatality risk than ‘civilised’ folk due to the extreme weather conditions and the multitude of predators that were lurking nearby, but they still, nonetheless, had more heart and love for life than anyone I had ever met, and probably will meet. On a final note, as a person who once consciously decided to adopt a life of minimalism, and having progressed through this fine art for a number of years now, I have been delighted to discover, in a bit of an ironic twist, that the less I have, the richer I am. On my first day at Huckleton I arrived for my shift at 8am on the dot. I have always been quite punctual, and expect others to be as well. My manager that day arrived five minutes late which I was furious about. ‘How very dare he?!’ I spluttered to my mother on the phone who exhorted me not to say anything to him. It pains me to say that I went against my mother’s wishes and gave the manager a jolly good piece of my mind when he finally arrived. Not a great start; from him I mean. I kind of did my own thing during my brief stint at Huckleton. I tried to take the rules into my own hands to the delight of many customers but to the annoyance of my managers. There was only ever one person allowed in the changing room at a time, an absurd

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law which I strove to nullify by letting as many people share a single changing room as possible. There were a couple of tills at the back of the store which were never used even on the busiest of days. I could not get my head around why this was. It would p*** me off having to deal with the innumerable impatient and needy customers, who would often complain about the long wait time in the queue that was always sloppily coiled around the store like a bewildered anaconda, and knowing that there were two perfectly good tills at the back just sitting there doing f*** all. On a particularly busy day I flounced up to one of the managers and practically ordered them to open the tills and they curiously did as I said with confused haste. I really don’t get why they couldn’t just open them in the first place, there seemed to be no logical reason. Sigh, the mind boggles. This one time I was accosted by a frumpy middle-aged woman who proceeded to rant to me about how terrible she thought Huckleton was due to the fact she couldn’t find any clothes that suited her. ‘Well, this shop is for teenagers,’ I told her. Outraged at my response, the woman grassed me up to my manager who was most displeased with me. Apparently honesty is not appreciated in the workplace. The work was simple. One just had to ‘stand around and look good’. Now, how hard can that really be? I knew it would take a total bumbling clod to mess up such a straightforward duty, but I still managed to do so with an admirable bent. I, on more than one occasion, invited some friends to come and see me during my shifts who would usually be blind drunk and would wreak havoc within the store. I would go outside the shopping centre building with them on my break for a few cheeky swigs of vodka before finishing off my shift rather merry. The worst

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thing I ever did was give away clothes for free. I was rubbish at working on the tills; it was like giving a monkey a computer and expecting it to hack into the White House overnight, which, mind you, would have been more likely than me figuring out how to work that infuriating contraption. So, this woman approached me with a good six or seven items of clothing one not so very special afternoon. I removed the tags and handed the clothes back to her without thinking to bloody charge her. She stared at me quizzically and probably thought that I was joking around as I stared back at her with a s***-eating grin slapped on my face. My sincerity became apparent to her when I uttered the devastatingly cringe-worthy tagline, ‘Thank you for shopping at Huckleton, be sure to check us out on Twitter!’ She tentatively backed away from me before turning around and shuffling out of the store for her life. I spent three months in total trifling wilfully away at Huckleton. Apart from the expected insubordination, I always found the environment rather insufferable. It was gloomily dark in there, and the stench of shampoo, perfume and deodorant polluted the atmosphere along with the humdrum and bland chart music that noisily farted from the speakers. To me the experience of working at Huckleton was like being forced to attend an unlit nightclub in a coal mine. I could always sense the managers getting irritated and impatient with me whenever I failed to do certain jobs, or failed to process and follow instructions, correctly; this made me feel awful. I felt even worse when they began to realise just how hard I found some of the work and would consequently patronise me by treating me like an incompetent child and making special allowances for me; this was very humiliating. I handed in my notice one day because I felt like it.

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*** This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I once enlisted in Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s armed forces. I cannot say I was impelled to do so by a staunch and fiery sense of nationalism, neither was this on account of the worthlessness, fear, desperation and other emotional ailments I was harbouring at the time. Well, to say that the latter wasn’t at all instrumental in forming my decision would not be entirely true, as my stark paucity of academic qualifications was bugging me, and I knew that in the army one could take the exams they may have failed (or failed to take) at school. The overall spirit among my family and contemporaries was one of ambivalence, in which incredulity marginally prevailed. I tried keeping a track of ‘What the f***?!’ reactions I got before quickly running out of fingers. I am not delusional by any means. I knew why the thought of someone like myself voluntarily signing up to be transmogrified into a conservative killing machine was a difficult pill for people to swallow, but, as with everything else, I wasn’t exactly doing this for conventional reasons. To be completely honest, I still don’t know to this day what my true reasons were for enlisting. When I think about it, I may have been subconsciously seeking out some form of structure or discipline, both of which my life was woefully devoid of following my expulsion from Brockwood, and I did like the idea of becoming super fit, but mostly I welcomed in the challenge, and my goodness was it an arduous challenge that left me, on numerous occasions, lachrymose. One thing I did know, however, was that my time in the army would be transient. A quick and easy job: ‘get in there, get what you need, and be out in time for lunch’ I’d tell myself. I planned to do all the training and leave after obtaining enough qualifications so that I

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could then go on to do something I really wanted to do. At any rate, I joined up when I was 16 with pride and gusto. I attended a series of interviews and sat through a number of tests at a career’s office in Wembley, London. After scoring a high mark on an intelligence test I was advised in my final interview, by one of the senior officers, to ‘find a career more suited to someone of my education.’ Or words to that effect. I struggled to explain my convoluted backstory to him. In the end I just had to blag it. ‘You do realise you’re going to be trained to kill the enemy, don’t you?’ he asked with an uncertainty one would seldom associate with a tough and virile soldier. ‘Ummm, yes. I do realise that.’ ‘And are you going to be okay with that?’ ‘Yup…’ I bleated. He just didn’t buy it. No one in the army did, come to think of it, and I suppose my family and friends were the same. I, as always, continued to ‘follow my heart’, even though I could see it was taking me into very strange and unchartered territory. As I loomed through the main hallway at the Army Training Regiment of Winchester, my eyes roved around the room at the boorish and brutish lads who were accumulating in droves. Being a flamboyant Bohemian, slender in build with a rather fey and pretty face (though I say so myself) made me stick out like a sore thumb. I really didn’t do myself any justice either by turning up with my guitar. ‘What the f*** is that?!’ my platoon Sergeant growled before making me charge after my tearful parents to give them the guitar to take back to London. One would expect that an army barracks has got to be up there as one of the worst possible places for a person with PDA, ever. I wouldn’t argue with this. The collective mentality of the whole

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organisation is built on the injunction, ‘Do as you are told, when you are told to do it, to the best of your ability’ and if that isn’t the most provocative sentence for someone with my type of brain, then I don’t know what is. So why was I able to get through nine months of army training without incident? Well, quite simply, because I wanted to do it. For many months I was unaffected by the flurry of demands that pelted me in the face, and because I was in total control I didn’t really perceive many of these as ‘demands’. It was my decision to join the army therefore it was my decision to place myself on the receiving end of expletive-laden verbal onslaughts. I was prepared to be a little more submissive if it meant achieving my goals, a tactic I call inverted control; allowing others to dominate to keep control of the situation. I should also say that most of the time I would do things before I was asked to do them as a way of forestalling triggers. I would clean my locker, iron my uniform and polish my boots obsessively in the evenings so I would always have an immaculate turnout during kit inspections. Because the Sergeants and Corporals would never ‘pick me up’ (as they liked to say) for, say, having creased trousers or a dusty beret, they rarely had a reason to punish me individually. Of course the whole platoon would be punished as a unit, but to tell you the truth, I kind of enjoyed the group punishments (or ‘beastings’) as I was one of the fittest lads, so for me it was just a nice extra workout, plus an opportunity to show off my useful cardiovascular abilities. I was awarded ‘the best soldier award’ for displaying an allround level of competence after completing the first part of training. Because of this, the other lads, whether it was out of bitterness or not, began to tease me by calling me an ‘ass kiss’. I didn’t really mind this to be honest, as I was a little preoccupied with myself and my achievements as well. My behaviour had been mysteriously

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displaced from its usual trajectory and was doing stuff I didn’t recognise. The other recruits would muck around with one another in the evening and would occasionally sneak out for a drink at the bar on camp. I would never join them. My evenings would be spent alone and in silence mostly ironing and cleaning, but I’d sometimes go for runs and walks. I had given up drinking and smoking completely and abstained from junk food of any kind. This Yogilike asceticism, which did not lend itself to a military environment, was my way of staying in control. PDA had not vanished, it’d just found another way of expressing itself. I surprised myself at how obedient and respectful I was being to authority and how my need to be funny and interesting was almost non-existent with the other recruits. Where I was indisputably an extrovert on the outside, I had now become an introvert inside a military base. It’s strange. My motivation levels were kept high by avoiding my body and mind’s demands for me to drop out. I loved dis­ covering these new sides to myself that I never knew existed by persevering towards the unprecedented frontiers of mental and physical endurance. In one particularly gruelling exercise, we were kept awake for five nights straight digging trenches. I did not shower or sleep once, and every so often the instructors would put us through a kind of mock ambush whereby we’d be under enemy fire at ridiculous o’clock in the morning and would have to decamp, run a mile or so, wait until the coast was clear and then start digging another trench from scratch. By the third day I was hallucinating from sleep deprivation and couldn’t see my skin under the swathes of mud it was caked in. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so disgusting in all my life. As well as thinking ‘Harry, what in the sweet name of f*** are you doing to yourself ?’ I was concurrently urging myself on. Part of me wanted to feel worse. I just had to see how much I could take. I continued to morph into this reticent and, admittedly, more

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sycophantic person whom I did not like, and the bulk of my happi­ ness was expunged in the process. During the second phase of my training in Catterick, North Yorkshire, around the time I was probably at my lowest, I began to get bullied by not any of the recruits but one of the instructors. This puts one in a very invidious position because in the army, you do as you’re told. If I stood up to Corporal Cartwright, it would mean jeopardising my place on the course and potentially running the risk of being kicked out of the army altogether. So, to put it simply, I was stuffed. All I could do was put up with, what seemed to be, his disturbing obsession with me. I can remember his chilling stare; it wasn’t even that it was malicious, he was genuinely fascinated. That’s what creeped me out the most. He’d keep me in his office for hours in the evening and manipulate me into doing embarrassing things in front of the other recruits. To his credit, I sometimes think that he could see me in a way other military personnel couldn’t; that he could see how much of myself I was hiding, and how I was fighting to stay in control and not let my true self ‘leak’, and all the while I feel he was trying to trip me up whenever he had an opportunity to. I don’t recall when exactly, but at some point, around the time my parents split up, I realised that I really didn’t want to be in the army anymore but I just couldn’t bring myself to drop out. I carried on in a lacklustre yet tenacious fashion and scraped the completion of my training by the skin of my teeth. My heart was now set on getting the f*** out of there as quickly as possible, so I started to devise a plan to discharge myself. In my favour, I was 17 years old, so my parents had the power to remove their signature from my contract if I so wished. But before that happened, I had a meltdown that was long overdue. After enjoying a relaxing couple of weeks at home, I was sta­ tioned at a grim and dilapidated barracks in Chepstow, South

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Wales. My attitude was quite foul and rotten at this point as I was aching to leave and couldn’t have cared less about the army. My PDA symptoms were recrudescing at increasing speed. I didn’t even try to make friends at Chepstow, I became blunt in the way I spoke to the higher ranks and would either fail to adhere to timings or skive off lectures and training completely. The only positive thing that I drew from my time at this god-awful place was passing my driving test. The whole regiment was to deploy on a three-day loaded march across Dartmoor in Devon, and when I was given my personal instructions I decided to run away and hide in the grass at the back of the barracks for a couple of hours. As I lay there, my sadness lifted, a peculiar little smile spread across my face and I whispered to myself, ‘I’m back.’ The long and enervating role play spell had ended. I exulted alone for a while before strolling back to my accommodation block with this new-found confidence. After being scolded by an angry Sergeant Major for omitting my duties, I was summoned to the platoon office where a Corporal handed me a packing list. ‘These are all the things you’ll need for the loaded march,’ the Corporal said. ‘You have ten minutes to get your s*** together. Go!’ I snatched the list from him and tore it to shreds, kicked a bunch of random objects in his office, removed my shirt and beret, then burst outside and screamed to high heavens. Hordes of officers began to appear after obviously hearing the commotion, so I legged it and they ran after me. They eventually caught me and at least four of them had to pin me down. I wasn’t only back, I was back and crazier than ever! This was probably the most cathartic meltdown I’ve ever had; it was rather nice to release all of those bottled up emotions I’d been suppressing for the past year. I did break my hand after punching a brick wall which was a bit of a

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downer. It hurt like mad. The knuckle of my baby finger on my right hand is still slightly deformed to this day. Whenever I look at it and get reminded of this loopy incident, it always makes me chuckle. The greatest thing to come out of this meltdown was that it elucidated my insanity to the barracks. An unhinged soldier was the last thing that the army needed on the battlefield. After a plea from my mother to release me, I was finally discharged from the army in early October 2010. The sweet smell of freedom made me jig with joy. I felt like I’d been released from prison, and in a way, I had been. I certainly wept like a newly freed man. The world was once again my oyster, and I could do with it whatever I wanted. Where to begin? Where to begin?! Come on then, world. Let’s see what you’ve got for me… Failing Miserably to be Like the Humans and Punishing Myself Accordingly After a knotty adjustment back into civilian life, I got myself a job at a place called ‘Clown Town’ which was a filthy and insalubrious play arena full of slides, climbing apparatuses and ball pools. I was testing the waters here. I didn’t want the job, and when I applied I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. It was, more than anything, a way to pass the time. I don’t operate in the same way other people do, if I don’t want to do something, then I can’t bring myself to do it. I have no concept of ‘just do this for now and see how it goes, you never know, you might end up liking it.’ Yuck! If I truly want to do something I am willing to move mountains for it. Needless to say, I walked off Clown Town after a measly three or four shifts. This was finalised after having to pick up a used diaper off one of the tables after a birthday party. My time during this interlude was not merely restricted to

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dead-end jobs and dejection. I was still well into my fitness and signed up to do an intensive beach lifeguard course in Cornwall, and a pool lifeguard course in North London. After successfully obtaining both qualifications, I applied to be a lifeguard at a leisure centre in Central London. This went well at first, but my enthusiasm soon waned after getting back into drugs and alcohol. A few local friends and I would meet up on the weekends and plunge into an abyss of nihilistic hedonism. We’d rock up at pubs and cause mayhem which would invariably get us either barred or kicked out. We’d snort cocaine along with amphetamine, maraud the streets, vandalise property, and would often top the night off by getting into my car at around 3 or 4am (by which time we’d all be wasted), hot boxing it after lighting up a joint, whack on classical music (for some strange reason), and would then go for a little drunken drive around the streets. I’d like to point out that no one was ever hurt during this feat of unalloyed insanity. While discontentedly yet inescapably entangled in a life of self‑destruction, having to commute into the city to be a lifeguard (one who guards the lives of people), was beginning to seem a little ironic as I clearly wasn’t looking after my own. I was in no way, shape or form the right man for the job. One morning after a frightfully debauched affair, I woke up to find myself spooning a tree after spending the night on the street in a residential area a few miles away from my home. Another morning I was awoken in my car rather abruptly by a loud banging. I opened my eyes to find a man knocking on the car window. The man explained to me that it was market day and that I had parked my car in the spot he wished to set up his stand. After poking my head out  the window to see the hordes of people rushing around my car who were busy setting  up their market stands, I fully grasped just how inconveniently I was parked. Even though I was drunk and

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delirious, I still decided to drive home. Mother answered the door to me upon my arrival: ‘Harry, you’re absolutely p***ed out your head! Please tell me you didn’t drive home?!’ ‘…I’m going to bed,’ I announced. ‘But you have work in an hour…’ ‘Meh. They’ll figure it out.’ I treated pretty much everything with levity during this rudderless period. I was turning up to my job less and less until I eventually stopped going altogether. I remember feeling as though I had lost touch and sight with reality. I was a selfish and irascible mass of flesh governed by instinct and greed, leaving naught but chaos in my wake. I stumbled with every step I took, and everything I touched seemed to fall to pieces before my very eyes. I didn’t have a job for a long time after leaving the leisure centre, and, in retrospect, I think this was probably a good thing. I was far from employable, but more to the point I was in serious need of help. I went through a stage of self-harming and making myself throw up after meals. From what I’ve seen over the years, young people begin to flirt with these rituals, on average, between the ages of 11 and 14. It continues to bemuse me why I hadn’t commenced ritualistic penance until after I was 18. What was I waiting for? Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that I have more of an extrovert personality type and usually express myself in a rather explosive and animated way. At this point in my life, I had become withdrawn and diffident thus internalising my melancholy. Slicing my arm up was a plaintive echo of my shredded interior. The bulimia was inevitable. I was showing signs of body dysmorphia not long after I started swimming at the age of 11. I was a chubby boy who worked hard and got lean, but I was never satisfied with myself and my appearance. I became obsessed with

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my reflection and would squander a lot of time in front of mirrors looking for blemishes that weren’t there. My mother suffered from an eating disorder when she was younger and always feared certain patterns in her life would one day be reborn in her children. I’m not sure if any of my family caught on to my self-punishing habits. Nobody seemed to notice even though I didn’t make any concerted efforts to conceal the evidence. I walked around with fresh cuts on my arms and used the bathroom a hell of a lot more than usual, especially after eating. I even considered putting an end to it all one day. I was sat in my bedroom closet, unclad and vulnerable. My bedroom at the time was in the attic, so the closet was quite capacious. It was densely dark, and I sat dolefully underneath my clothes rail while twiddling a leather belt between my thumb and forefinger. I wondered how quick and painless suicide by asphyxiation would be. Was my time on Earth really coming to an end? ‘Why don’t I have a few glugs of whiskey and then wrap this belt tightly around my neck until every drop of life has been squeezed from me?’ I thought. I knew I didn’t want to be alive anymore. I was sick of not being able to do life. I am not attempting to coax the violins from their cases here, but death really was the preferable option. Still, I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to go through with it. I came to my senses and put the belt down, then left the closet. I was shaken after this little episode, I had scared myself in a way I hadn’t before. I began to feel there was no escape from my inner Loki and that there probably never would be. I cut my arms a few times then drew some deeply disturbing images over my bedroom walls. Because I wasn’t fully in my vessel, I have a real tough time trying to remember what it was exactly I drew and so do my family as the walls were repainted very soon afterwards. I can remember but two things: a bunch of grapes, and ‘HELP ME’ written in bold.

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Not long after desecrating my walls, I packed a bag and went for a drive. I ended up in a field opposite the house Felicity had lived in when I first met her, my happiest place. My panic-stricken mother, grandmother and Felicity all caught up with me eventually after following a clue that was part of the unbridled expression splatted over my bedroom walls. I was urged, and almost beseeched, to go home with either my mother or Felicity, but I said no because I wanted to do something for me, something lovely. They all went home after I promised Felicity that I would drive straight to hers in the morning. I opened the rooftop window of my car and wallowed under a magnificently spangled dark purple dome. I slept so peacefully. This was among the most blissful and tranquil nights of my life. I spent five months at Felicity’s slowly getting myself together again. I stopped smoking, drinking and taking drugs, got avidly into yoga and meditation, and religiously attended a few selfimprovement courses in London. I was on a roll. Where before I was spiralling deeper and deeper into a pit of misery, I was now trying to see just how good and healthy I could be. I think, at the time, a lot of my family and friends believed I was on some kind of dotty quest for enlightenment, and that these new and purer habits may have been a sign of cross-addiction from my old and seedy ones. Maybe I was on a quest, and maybe I was looking for something new to fill the rapacious black hole in me, but one thing was for certain, I was taking better care of myself than I had ever done in my entire life. It wasn’t all sun salutes and quinoa. I wanted to be free from all forms of tyranny and even resorted to smashing my phone to smithereens one day as a sort of zealous protest against consum­ erism. Despite the righteousness of my cause, I was at first a little

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bored without my phone; however, this is what precipitated me to pick up my bass guitar again for the first time in almost a year. I practised solidly for hours upon hours upon hours. Inside one of my guitar cases I came across a magazine that had probably been stuck to the inside of the front pocket for years. The advertisement on the cover caught my eye, which read ‘The Brighton Institute of Modern Music, Award Winning Music College’. I flicked through the magazine and read the ‘BIMM’ prospectus enclosed within. I decided right there and then that I would perfect my bass playing to a tee and book an audition. But before this happened, I was given yet another, and final, diagnosis. Felicity received a phone call one afternoon from the speech and language therapist, Margo Sharp, who diagnosed me with Asperger’s back in 2007. The two of them confabulated for hours. I recall going to bed late that night and they were still immersed in conversation. The next morning, Felicity shared some very profound and revelatory news with me. Unsurprisingly, I turned out to be the chief theme of the phone call. Felicity had told Margo practically everything I’d been up to since I last saw her at 14, and because I’d been through so much, this took up the majority of the conversation. Margo eventually dropped ‘PDA’, or ‘Pathological Demand Avoidance syndrome’ into the conversation. To Felicity and me, Margo’s words were like dropped pearls, as from that fateful moment, everything in my life, and I mean f***ing everything, started to make sense. The reason why I couldn’t do school and couldn’t just go to work had at long last been revealed to me from a psychiatric standpoint that I could relate to. Unlike my other diagnoses, and despite my hatred of labels, PDA actually felt…right, I suppose. After being offered a place at BIMM after passing my audition with flying colours, Margo Sharp gave me an official diagnosis of PDA.

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So, the day finally came for me to bid my friends and family farewell and set sail on my voyage to the liberal Mecca that is Brighton town. Felicity drove me to my new house which I shared with six other students, and Dad made his own way there to help with the moving process. Saying goodbye to Felicity was emotional for me. I gave her a hug and a kiss and thanked her earnestly for helping me with my move to Brighton, and most of all, for selflessly saving my life once again. ‘Do you think I’ll be okay now, Felicity?’ I asked. ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait and see, Harry, won’t we? No one can ever be too sure with you.’ I smiled and waved to her as she drove down the road and disappeared from my life once again. As I opened the front door and strolled into my new life of autonomy, I couldn’t help but reflect on everything I’d been through and marvelled at how far I had come. I was thrilled to be studying towards a degree in one of my most cherished passions, and I was over the moon to be in Brighton, and, above all, felt like I deserved to be there. Surely this was it, the making of me. Nothing whatever could derail me now. I was apotropaic, invincible even. Someone just try and stop me from– ‘Hey mate, would you like a beer?’ asked one of my housemates. ‘Yeah, go on then.’

*** Well that didn’t take long, did it? All it took was one measly offer from someone I hadn’t met before to decisively put an end to my stretch of sobriety, which I was fairly confident I would maintain for the rest of my life. There wasn’t a tincture of peer pressure here. It was like throwing a ball off a cliff for a dog who is too witless to realise he is plummeting to his own demise as he bounds off

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after the ball. I haven’t had a vanilla life by any means: I’ve climbed mountains, undergone military training, hitchhiked around North America in winter without a long-term plan or a penny to my name, and have done countless other things that require a certain amount of derring-do and mettle, but one of the things I find hardest of all is moderation; behind only doing as I’m told. Moderation is a mission I am yet to accomplish, but saying that, a mission I have no interest in accomplishing. The extremity, or hunger, resides within me, and it’s up to me where and how I apply it. I try not to overuse words like ‘addict’ or ‘alcoholic’ as they are heavy, negative words. To brand oneself with restrictive labels is to ultimately restrict oneself altogether. A label can never truly define us; it is, if anything, a ‘sub’ identity. Don’t get me wrong, I have boundless sympathy for people ensnared by booze and narcotics, and I’m not in any way belittling their plight, it’s just the ‘addict’ label of which I am a trifle wary. I’m sure many of my behaviours could be characterised as ‘addictive’ or suggestive of alcoholism, especially when my days of debauchery were in full swing. When I have a single sip of an alcoholic beverage, I am like a shark tasting blood. I will gulp staggering quantities of the naughty water until I black out, and then I’ll have lashings more while I am on autopilot, and more still before waking up the following morning dressed as Elvis Presley, groggy and senile, scrunched in a foetal position with my face in a kebab; with a gaping hole surrounded by grass stains on the seat of my trousers. I am now sitting here writing this book as a clean and sober man. I haven’t touched the stuff in two years, and this includes the copious pills I used to pop and the heaps of powders I used to inhale. I never tell myself not to do a particular thing, or to never do that particular thing again, because of course I will naturally defy my own self-imposed injunctions. For now, I am just a person

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who hasn’t had a drink or taken most kinds of drugs for two years, and that is all. I have, admittedly, had a couple of psychedelic trips (literally no more than two) since I decided to knock it all on the head, thus suspending my sobriety for a miniscule spell, but this was for no reason other than to give those staid and stubborn aspects of my sense of self a good ole pulverising, not because I felt I had to, but because I wanted to, as I feel it’s healthy to do that now and again (not the hallucinogens per se but to transcend beyond the shackles of one’s subjective experience). I was powerless over various substances that held sway over several parts of my life for years. Aside from mischievous antics such as climbing over bars to pour my own drinks, collecting traffic cones and road signs or antagonising bouncers outside nightclubs, I would engage in more worrying behaviours such as drinking heavily alone in my room, drink driving, panicking or raging if I ran out of drink or narcotics and there wasn’t any nearby, vandalism, and (perhaps most worrying of all) passing out on the street in the wee hours. I like to try and understand why certain patterns of behaviour exist before summarising them. Take alcohol, for example. I knew I was drinking so much because I didn’t feel ‘connected’ to anything. I could have tried going cold turkey, but that wouldn’t have addressed the root of the problem, and the underlying absence of connection would have continued to emanate its hollow cry. Going cold turkey can be useful as a first step so long as one listens and responds to what their mind and body are yearning for. I quickly realised that I was spending too much time with people who weren’t touching my heart, and spending too much time doing things I didn’t particularly want to be doing, in places I didn’t particularly like being in. Being drunk was a fantastic solution as it alleviated the overall discord between the mise-en-scene and

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myself and supplied a ‘faux’ or ‘quasi’ sense of connection. When I remedied all of the above, that is to say, found a way to truly connect with the world, I found that my need to drink myself silly had lessened. That extreme hunger, which is a stable and enduring part of my nature, will never go away, but when I am ‘connected’ I can apply it to more purposeful things. When that hunger is channelled during times of disconnection, it becomes addiction. When I am connected, however, it is simply an impetus (or a positive driving force). There is a body of opinion who are loyal to the conviction that ‘addiction’ is at best, a babyish excuse people make when refusing to take responsibility for their own actions, or at worst, non-existent. Now, even though I believe this view to be nothing more than a fallacy, I can actually see where those who hold such a view are coming from. Addiction is complex. What could possibly drive an individual to repeatedly engage in such selfdestructive behaviours? Is the constant pain and misery they inflict on themselves and their loved ones during their dogged and, above all, selfish pursuit of gratification really worth it, much less justifiable? What is going on here? As far as addiction and alcoholism are concerned, there is little point in endeavouring to ascertain the presence of some kind of malignant grue that wreaks havoc from within the brain, but it can, however, actually feel as though there exists such a creature at times. ‘It’s just a matter of willpower!’ is something I so often hear, and during the first few stages it is, somewhat. Nowadays, if I happen to be around carousing folk at, say, a party (which would be unlikely given my fickle relationship with humanity, but work with me), then forgoing even a tiny drop is of no trouble to me whatever. I may feel tempted, which can sometimes be the case, but at this point, that is to say ‘pre-sip’,

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the mental strength I employ is enough to deter me from having any alcohol at all. When I do have a sip, however, it is a totally different story. So, I may plump for one drink rather than getting slaughtered on many, which seems reasonable. I may decide this because, ‘Hey, everyone else is doing it. One won’t hurt, surely?’ And then, as soon as the alcohol starts circulating in my system, I will begin to feel ‘tempted’ to have another drink. As I said before, a little mental strength, or willpower, is all that’s required to kill this temptation. However, these temptations become stronger and stronger but don’t worry, reader, the temptation doesn’t win, as it is something I can subdue again and again. Then things get weird. Where at first I emerged victorious from my various battles with temptation, ‘addiction’ (whatever that may be) begins to corrupt my mind in other ways. My thoughts and feelings, at this point, are altered. I begin to long for another drink in a way I didn’t before when it was just temptation. I managed to successfully resist temptation, hitherto, because there was a part of me that plainly did not want another drink, but then, all of a sudden, I do want one. That valiant horseman of resistance remains but is gradually being engulfed by this swelling desire. He will try his damndest to ward off this ever-growing desire until he eventually succumbs to it and dies on his feet. My mind will turn against me and play tricks on me, and intrusive thoughts begin to rush in and graffiti my moral framework: ‘Hey Harry, what’s really so bad about having another one? Maybe some good can come of it?’ I will continue to justify it to myself in this way, until not a scintilla of moral scruple remains. At this point, my menacing thoughts and burgeoning anxiety have deluded a part of me into believing that having that second drink is now a matter of life and death. This is emotional and psychological dehydration; that second drink represents the first drops of liquid after a long and arduous crawl through the

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Atacama Desert. By the time I actually reach for a glass or a bottle, every single part of me is compelled to do so, lest I perish. Nothing in the world is more important than having that second drink. Addiction didn’t drag me here against my will and take control of my hands as they reached for the bottle, or my mouth as it opened to receive the malefic elixir. I started off by not wanting to drink, then I began to feel tempted which I was able to repress despite the ever-increasing intensity, but following the brutal war of attrition whereby my mind was insidiously bastardised, my thoughts, my principles, and a lot of my character, had changed. In the end, I am not resisting any temptation. I’m not even giving in to it. I drink because I choose to, but it’s the creepy and sinister process by which I arrive at this choice that in part makes addiction the disease that it is. Even if a person, of adamantine might, were to successfully command their volition and not reach for a bottle of booze or for a rolled-up fiver from which they will snort some kind of powder, then they would still be beset by the torrent of obsessive thoughts in their mind and the stinging anxiety in their chest. It’s not as simple as just curbing one’s behaviour. I think the main reason I am so averse to labels like ‘addict’, or other labels for that matter, is because of how they can bring one’s progress or growth to a complete halt. I will proceed, in the least narcissistic way possible, to use myself as an analogy: I have long hair, and some days I wear it in a man-bun while other days I let it all hang loose. I like to imagine that the hairband represents the environment, while my hair represents the symptoms, and together, as a synthesis, the man-bun represents the label (PDA, ADHD, and addict). A label only exists so long as the environment is holding the symptoms in place, much like how the man-bun only exists so long as the hairband is holding my hair in place.

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I am able to let my hair down whenever I want and this will lend my image a whole new character. The man-bun will cease to be, but this won’t in anyway diminish the person I am. It’s the same with labels. A label is only necessary and relevant within a certain environment; at school, at work, or in any other place that is not ideal for the person who is lumbered with the label. There are certain environments wherein I’ll need a man-bun more than others. When I go for a run, for example, in order to prevent my lustrous locks from bouncing all over the place and going in my eyes, I can tie my hair back and keep it out my face completely. Say I am at school (a hairband), I will be in an environment that will bring out certain symptoms (a hairband holding my hair in place), and therefore a label may be required to make sense of these symptoms collectively (a hairband holding my hair in place to make, say, a man-bun). The person doing the labelling may be oblivious to the fact that it’s the very environment which is holding these symptoms in place. When I am having profound conversations with other weirdoes, however, my label disappears (the hairband is removed and my hair falls into another position) because I have now moved into my natural habitat; therefore, I simply become a person expressing himself in the way he feels most competent, in an environment he feels most comfortable. The appearance of hair is contingent on how the hairband styles it. The label becomes redundant when we move into our natural habitat because there won’t be any problems, at least none of any consequence. We are free to be ourselves; an opportunity everyday life seldom grants us. As soon as the slightest upheaval occurs, be it some dunderhead interrupting a profound conversation with profoundly insipid questions, then I would, in this case, have been removed from my natural habitat, and I may begin to identify with my label of PDA once again. So, when I

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was diagnosed with PDA, my initial reaction was: ‘Great! Here’s a perfectly sound explanation for why I am the way I am.’ But instead of stopping there and allowing society to define me, effectively keeping the man-bun in place, the next step was for me to have a look at how and why certain PDA symptoms were manifesting, and to find a way to transcend them. If you are reading this and you are having recurrent problems at school then I ask you, do you really need to be in school? Is it causing more harm than good? If school really is causing you more harm than good then (and excuse me for what might be construed as a demand here) get the f*** out of there! A label serves as a concise, comprehensive definition of a collection of symptoms; it merely constitutes a fragment of our lives and who we are. I am more than just my man-bun (which I believe is dashing, though others disagree), there is, after all, an entire human being underneath it. Brighton, in a nutshell, was a hearty reintroduction to dissolution, though this time of a much greater intensity. Apart from the sordid misadventures, I, for my first year at least, did quite well at Music College. I wanted to be there for a start, which made it somewhat easier to conform, and I achieved quite a high mark for my end of year exam. My drinking and drug taking eventually got the better of me though, and my second year was more or less a total disaster. One of the music teachers said to a friend of mine, ‘Harry’s passion is just gone.’ And indeed, it was. One thing I always thought was a bit strange was how my attendance was actually really good but my behaviour was egregious. I would even turn up to the college early sometimes which must have made me look a very keen bean. Especially to the teachers who, upon their arrival, would see me outside with a twinkle in my eye and my guitar and notebook at the ready, only to see me go mad on entering the classroom and

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ruining the lesson, not only for myself but for the other students as well. My attendance soon petered out over time though, and my behaviour was becoming ever more destructive. I turned up to a live performance exam high on ketamine, and got every tenant on the upper two floors of my apartment building blacklisted when, on my 20th birthday, I broadcasted an invitation to my party that went viral. Needless to say, legions of people turned up and the place got trashed. At one point I was engaged in a debilitating love triangle with two beautiful and effervescent girls, one of whom was my girlfriend and another by whom I was subsequently smitten. This led to many tiffs, triggers and tears. Oh, and I also lost three jobs. One of which was nightclub promoting. It wasn’t a demanding job by any means, but, nonetheless, I couldn’t help but undermine its very nature. I had to dress up smart and patrol the circumambient streets armed with leaflets. The employees were required to put on this horrendous, brown-nosing act in an attempt to coax people into the nightclub. The dressing up smart bit I didn’t mind, but all the rest I shamelessly disregarded. I mainly saw this job as an opportunity to meet women on the sly and off the sly, and the small handful of times I successfully buttonholed an innocent passerby or two, or if they were to approach me to talk to me about the club I was promoting for, I would be more likely to advise them against going to my club (which, for the record, I disliked) and tell them to find someplace better. The manager kept a kind of score sheet with all of the promoters’ names on it so that they could keep track of how many people we were bringing in. A star would represent one person; next to my name (which, starting with ‘T’, would always be at or near the bottom) there would be a pitiful two or three stars, whereas the other names, towering over mine in both acclaim and on the page, would have an ensuing 30 to 40 stars. The facetiousness I incorporated into this job didn’t exactly sit well

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with the managers who eventually and judiciously stopped giving me shifts one day, and while all of this was going on, my drug use was becoming more problematic. Where cocaine was my drug of choice in my late teens, I had now fallen in love with MDMA and roistered in the euphoria it induced. I suppose I loved the warm embrace of it; ’twas like being fisted by an angel on a rainy day. One strange night after consuming more alcohol and MDMA than my mind could possibly filter, I returned home from a nightclub with my housemates and got into a spot of mischief. I removed some of my clothing, took someone’s butter out the fridge, opened the lid and urinated inside it, closed the lid again and put the p***-soaked butter back in the fridge. A few of my friends were in the downstairs living room and I randomly slapped one of them round the face, totally unprovoked. I passed out not long afterwards. The next day the dreaded comedown descended on me. In a manic attempt to extricate myself from seething anguish, I seized a metallic ruler from my drawers. It was a peculiar choice of weaponry for what I was about to do, but still, it had razor sharp edges so I knew it was going to do the job. I started hacking away at my left arm on a one-way trajectory from the top of my shoulder to my radial artery. Each strike of the blade left a trail of deep, red fissures which coughed and spluttered until my arm looked like a red fondue. I slashed my arm 13 times in total before stopping and blithely ambling into the kitchen where my housemates were congregating. Everyone’s hearts stopped when they saw the state of my arm. ‘WHAT THE F*** HAVE YOU DONE TO YOURSELF, HARRY?!’ one of them screamed. ‘What?’ I grunted. ‘LOOK AT YOUR ARM!’

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The pain and confusion I harboured were masked by a veneer of jocundity. Though my outward behaviour was questionable, I don’t think many of my friends quite gauged the extent of what I was really grappling with, though I’m sure a few suspected it. I dropped out of BIMM when I was writing my very last essay for the year. ‘All we have to do is a few thousand words, mate, and that is it,’ a friend consoled. As much as I appreciated his encouragement, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The qualification, of which I would be awarded by BIMM, just didn’t matter to me. I can remember being in school as a younger boy and feeling a similar way during exam time, that whole feeling of: well so f***ing what if I do this (exam) or not? It’s not as though it’s an indication of my potential or a testament to my intelligence. I didn’t complete my essay and I didn’t show up to any of the exams I was meant to sit. I avoided the demand. Goodbye BIMM.

*** Even though I had put BIMM behind me, I stayed in Brighton nonetheless as I had a few other commitments I wasn’t quite ready to relinquish. Just before I left, I joined a band with a few mates who lived in my apartment building who were looking for a bass player. Don’t get me wrong, I love jamming with other musicians, but the whole musician lifestyle I found wasn’t really for me. Whenever we’d play gigs, I would always perform halfheartedly, which confused me a great deal because I assumed that anyone who loved music as much as I did would leap at the chance to express their musicality to hundreds, if not thousands. Not long after I first took up the bass, I told myself that I would one day be a world-famous musician, but once I had experienced being on stage, and after getting a taste for the lifestyle, particularly

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after recording an EP which turned out to be one of the dullest and most excruciating days of my life, it dawned on me that music was a far better therapy for me than it was a career. I was a bit disappointed as well, for I had put in so much practice and hard work over the years and now felt as though it had all been in vain. I knew I wanted a stage, I knew I had a lot to share with people, but I also knew that it wasn’t going to be through the medium of music. Being the bass player/backing singer felt subordinate to what I was supposed to be doing. The only problem was, what I was supposed to be doing had not yet been revealed to me. Following a drug scare, I finally disembarked from the merrygo-round of narcotics. My friends and I, on New Year’s Eve, attended an illegal rave in London and purchased a wretched little bag of dust for an irresistible bargain of ten pounds. None of us actually knew what it was, which should’ve been the first sign not to buy nor take it, but we nevertheless proceeded to hoover it up all cosy in our nosies. We had a faint suspicion it might have been mephedrone, but none of us knew for certain. The only thing we did know was how intense, surreal and ‘fizzy’ this substance was as a high. Everyone else seemed to shrug it off after coming down from it, but I was affected very badly for a long time. Needless to say, it left my sinuses chronically inflamed and I had a horrible case of derealisation, whereby I felt as if nothing was real and that I was outside my body. My head was addled. Had I not been so frightened by this little incident then I don’t think I would have found a good enough incentive to stop, and I really was showing no signs of slowing down, let alone stopping. So, despite how bleak and depressing that period was for me, I am partly very grateful that it happened because I dread to think what was looming around the corner had I continued to swirl into the abyss. When I eventually quit the band, I returned to my home county

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of Hertfordshire where I hopped around from place to place for a bit before striking gold. I wasn’t getting along with my parents too well at the time so staying with either of them was out of the question, but Felicity was kind enough to put me up for a few nights, then I crashed at a friend’s house for a night, and finally, after this tedious spell of precarious living, I gained a foothold at a sheltered housing association in St. Albans where I stayed for a total of six weeks. One may turn their nose up at this, but it was actually a very illuminating experience. I was living with homeless people, drug addicts, ex-prostitutes, you name it. People whom many would regard as the underlay of society (namely those of my bourgeois past, many of whom I’m sure would have blanched at the sight my new milieu), but I was grateful to be among human beings that had really lived and had innumerable stories to recount. Having three diagnoses seemed to really work in my favour during my time at the shelter. I was given a social worker, a beneficent gentleman that specialised in Asperger’s, who kindly helped me find my own place to live. This took longer than I wanted it to take, but after a painful yet patient few weeks, the most ideal thing that could’ve possibly happened to someone in my situation, happened. After a tireless search, my social worker came across a block of flats in Great Ashby which were part of a housing association that provided accommodation for people with learning difficulties. This was a bit ticklish as one might presume, as I did not, in any way, shape, or form, come across as a person who had anything remotely wrong with them whatsoever. The scepticism during my interview was palpable. Had I not possessed three separate diagnoses, then I guarantee I would not have been offered a place to live on the basis that I struck the managers as such a sharp and

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able young man. As much as I bitch about my labels, I gotta hand it to them here; they got me a beautiful flat to reside in.

*** I must say, living independently was unspeakably blissful. I got myself a job as someone’s personal assistant in Essex. This man (whose anonymity and job description I’m respectfully preserving) required an extra pair of hands to help him with emails, phone calls and other administrative implications. I was also required to drive him around the country, which, I am proud to say, made me an official chauffeur. Not sure why some labels I’ll happily wear while others I scornfully shun? I guess ‘chauffeur’ has something a little exotic about it. At any rate, I considered this one of the finest perks of that job. Everything seemed to be going well at first and the guy even told me I was the hardest worker he’d ever employed, something I had definitely not heard before. Alas, this period of conscientiousness soon came to an end, and after a couple of months I was soon back to my old tricks. I once decided to give myself the day off. This wasn’t exactly premeditated; that is to say, I didn’t plan to skive off a few days in advance, and it also wasn’t as though I woke up one morning feeling particularly insouciant and thought I’d give it a miss. Halfway through a work day, while I was being watched by my boss in Tokyo on a camera that was installed in the office, I walked out because I felt like it. I’d actually made the effort to come into work that morning, but after a few hours I was like, ‘f*** this. I’m out.’ This boss was forever complaining about my rotten attitude towards him and his clients with whom I had to liaise. He fired me one day following a heated row we had in the car. I was distraught and begged him to give me another chance. Strangely enough, he

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did. I didn’t exactly like working for him, I just didn’t want to leave on his terms. I quit a week later after he asked me to build him a website. Sorry, but no.

*** After walking out on this job, I spent the next year not doing an awful lot bar helping out at Felicity’s and giving a few guitar lessons here and there. I had a fair amount of free time which meant that I was often a bit bored, but this boredom gave rise to a renewed love for writing. I would write many poems and stories of an evening, and I even began formulating the first draft of this book. The real game changer was when I developed an impassioned romance via FaceTime (a medium consonant with our modern age) with a friend I’d made in Brighton who had moved to the United States in late 2013. Mabel was a frisky maverick of cascading ame­ thyst hair, spellbinding chocolate eyes and sun-kissed velvety skin adorned in a tapestry of ink. The two of us would enjoy daily video calls and it wasn’t long before I decided to join her in the United States; a country I had been inexplicably drawn to for as long as I can remember. I handed in my notice to the housing association and a couple of weeks later moved back in with my mother, who now lived in Canterbury. Over the course of the summer months, most of my time was spent writing my book and trying to get as fit as I could through running and yoga. All of this was in preparation for my new life. Then, in September 2015, I packed my bags and flew across the Atlantic. Mabel and I lived in New Jersey at her grandmother’s for a good part of a year before we got in the car one day and drove off. We had no idea where we were going, but we were able to refrain from worrying about the destination while we were sat beatifically,

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soaking in the aesthetic landscape of rural America as we cruised on through it. After a tour of the South, the Rockies and the West, we ended up in Southern California where we decided to settle. We were living in our car at first which put a huge strain on our relationship, but we soon enough found a way of making money and an apartment in Orange County. Six months later Mabel and I parted. Our bond was beautiful and dynamic, though tempestuous. It started out so lovely, but, as with all things, it sadly, came to an end. Needless to say, the demons of the mind got the better of us. After much melancholy reflection, I decided to become a nom­ adic minimalist. I threw away most of my belongings, stuffed the few clothes I had left inside a camping backpack I had bought, attached a ukulele to it and embarked on an odyssey. I bought a bus ticket one day and endured a long and gloomy ride from California all the way to Montana. I then hitchhiked along the North frontier and into Canada at one point before being spat back out into the US in Niagara Falls, New York State. I did this in February not long after my 24th birthday, so the bitterly icy conditions proved to be taxing. One night when I was moving through Minnesota, I was on the side of the freeway in a snowstorm. The visibility was poor as it was pitch black, not many cars were driving past, and I thought to myself, ‘this could be my last night on Earth’. Thankfully, someone eventually picked me up and drove me to a nearby service station where I spent the night in a motel. Another dodgy incident was when I was in New York State, not long after I emerged from Niagara Falls in Canada. Someone I hitched a ride with had accidentally dropped me off at a service station for Westbound traffic when I needed to be heading East. The problem with this was that the service station for Eastbound traffic was 13 miles away. Undaunted, I set off on foot. I didn’t

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realise what a stupid idea this was until I was about halfway through the journey plodding along on an old country road with sore feet, an empty tummy and withering enthusiasm. Just to top it off, there was also a power cut that night. There weren’t many houses since I was deep in the country, but the few farm houses I did pass were candlelit which made me feel like I had been transported back to the 1700s. I remember feeling really angry at the infrequent cars that whizzed by me with my outstretched thumb and trembling lips that were tenuously mouthing ‘please, please, please, please’. Did those f***ers not have any empathy at all? Imagine seeing someone stranded in the middle of nowhere on a cold, dark night? When I was eventually salvaged by a heartbearing human after my dunning seven-mile night hike, I was driven to the highly sophisticated Denny’s diner which was located at the service station I was on a mission to get to. My saviour also dined with me. She originally intended to leave me after dinner as she thought I’d be able to easily hitch a ride from there, but after a very pleasant meal and conversation she invited me to come and stay at her and her boyfriend’s place. She then made, quite possibly, the most generous offer I had ever heard. ‘So, where is it you’re trying to get to again?’ ‘Vermont.’ ‘Oh wow, that’s about a six-hour drive from here.’ ‘I know. It sucks.’ ‘I’m going to drive you the whole way.’ ‘…Excuse me?’ ‘Yep. We’ll be leaving in three days though because I have work.’ She must have got tired of my relentless thank yous after a while, and, for the record, I am still not done. Liah, if you’re reading this right now, thank you once again! I was at a bit of a loss during those three days but I was in no position to complain. On the

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second day, however, I had the most fantastic idea. I took myself down to the river, whipped out my phone and started recording a video of myself talking about PDA. This was only ever meant to be an experiment to pass the time, but I thought I’d upload it to YouTube anyway. I wasn’t expecting much of a response if I’m being honest, but I watched in amazement as the views rose exponentially and oodles of followers came pouring in. Before I knew it, I had built up quite the following and was posting videos on a regular basis covering a wide range of topics, though all were related to PDA. It was while this was going on when it first dawned on me how PDA, and all of my labels for that matter, seemed to disappear when talking to people about stuff, because that was me moving into my natural habitat. That ‘wow…’ reaction I always craved as a little boy, and how I’d resort to such extreme lunacy to go about obtaining it, was still happening. People were still looking at me and saying ‘Wow…’, that hadn’t changed. What had changed was the method by which I could obtain it. I now didn’t just have silliness to call upon as a viable method, but I also had the luxury of being able to talk to people about stuff. This sublimation may seem drastic, but it is actually very subtle. My mucking about and acting the clown at school was exactly the same as me making videos and talking about stuff; the only difference was that I had now found and fallen into alignment with my ‘thing’. In other words, I now felt that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, or perhaps, born to do, and I now know that I had been trying to get there all along. Mucking around and being silly is but one facet of that visceral thirst to share something greater. My travels eventually brought me to New York City where I turned up with no plan and barely any money to my name, and by barely any money I mean I had a grand total of $60. For three days I held on by the skin of my teeth as I trawled for a foothold, and

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as luck would have it, I came across a family in need of a full-time live-in caregiver for their disabled son. The son, who was 15 years old, had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy, and was confined to a wheelchair. His disabilities rendered him totally reliant on those around him. He was, nonetheless, a delightful and charismatic soul with a terrific sense of humour. He exuded a warmth that made me feel perfectly at ease around him, which was very relieving because I was a little intimidated by this job at first as I’d never worked with a person in his condition before. My duties were to get him out of bed in the mornings, feed him, dress him, get him ready for school, bathe him in the evenings and put him to bed. Challenging work, but he loved my company. It was a shame that the fact this was now my working environment meant that I wasn’t going to be in his life for very long. This job lasted for about a week. I was fired after having a row with the boy’s mother. My sacking transpired thusly: after a long weekend in Maryland, the boy, his mother and I drove back to New York together. There was a weekly schedule for myself, and the other caregivers who also lived in the apartment with us though tended to jobs of a different nature to mine, such as housework and tutoring. The mother made one thing perfectly clear to me when I first met her: I would only be working four days a week and I would be left alone on my days off. Conversely, that evening the mother convened a meeting and informed us on a few schedule changes she had made. Now when she first read them out, none of us noticed any changes at all, so we asked her to repeat herself which, incidentally, made her a little testy. After I grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down what she said, I noticed that she hadn’t made any changes, apart from giving me an extra day’s work. ‘Didn’t you tell me earlier that my days off are my time to relax and work towards my personal projects?’ I inquired. ‘And why didn’t you just approach me and ask me if I was willing to work

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an extra day? Was it really necessary to fabricate an excuse and be so sneaky about it?’ ‘Is that manipulative?’ she asked, with an annoying grin on her face. ‘Well, yeah.’ Now when people pose a question like this, they should know that they are either going to get a yes or no answer and should prepare themselves accordingly, not commit the fatal mistake of assuming everyone is going to tell them exactly what they want to hear. So, when she replied with, ‘What?!’ I knew immediately that I was dealing with someone who really wasn’t used to not getting what they wanted. The next day after a squabble, I was asked to pack my bags and leave under the nauseating pretext of, ‘Harry, this job seems to be making you stressed. I’m not sure working with our son is right for you.’ What she really meant to say was: ‘Harry I don’t like that you’ve exposed me for the lying, manipulative, sneaky control freak that I am. Please leave so I can continue: 1) bossing people around who are more subservient than you, and: 2) getting my own way all the time. You are a huge threat to my position as the family autocrat, and it would be very upsetting for me, and me only, if I were to be deposed. Thank you.’ I called my mother up to inform her of my sudden vicissitude. ‘Can’t you ever hold your tongue, Harry?’ she asked wearily. ‘No, Mother, I cannot. And I don’t want to either. Someone needs to call people out on their bulls***.’ I knew then, after being let go from that job, that if I am to work for someone else, I can either do it their way and become depressed, or do it my way and get fired. After a fairly demanding few weeks of hardcore vagabonding, I soon wound up back in Southern California. My time here was slightly richer in novelty and excitement than it had been in previous places. I started off by living and working in some

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meditation centre in LA near the coast. This was lots of fun, but there were cultish overtones. The place was owned and run by a nice young couple on paper, but was actually being commanded by a scraggy and charismatic homeless man who had wangled his way into the business with his guile and (to some people) ‘persuasive’ agenda. He would claim to be channelling his deceased brother and, at times, Jesus, and would make wild predictions about how imminent earthquakes and floods would wipe out 95% of the human race, and it would then be up to the people associated with  the meditation centre to bring about a new world order. Of course I did not for one minute believe in any of this drivel, I just found the experience of living in what appeared to be a developing cult too exciting to pass up. I had a field day at that place as I secretly analysed everyone collectively and individually. Like me, the old man lived in the building. I called him the spiritual Fagin. The two of us would go dumpster diving at night through affluent neighbourhoods as that was where all of the unopened bags of food were. I would also accompany him on his night job which was cleaning a yoga studio in Santa Monica. I wouldn’t clean, of course, I’d take the stage and sing songs with a guitar and improvise little skits. We did develop quite a close friendship if I’m being honest. I did not respect his crafty and manipulative ways but he was very talented and did have a big heart despite his obvious demons. I realised one day how I was living in absolute opulence, yet I had no income and no expenditure. All of the food we ate was brought in by me and the spiritual Fagin, and I was working for my keep. I was given the boot one day for not being obedient enough and asking too many questions; which was going to happen sooner or later. In fact, many of my friends were surprised I hadn’t left sooner. I did have a lovely time at that meditation centre; there

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was much I didn’t agree with, but I couldn’t help myself. My fascination with human behaviour got the better of me. A lovely family from Hollywood found me on YouTube and offered me a place to stay after telling me how much my content had helped them. I got myself a job at a vegan restaurant in Venice as a host. I loved this job. A record-breaking three months had passed before running into a single problem. I had stacks of fun with the customers. All my job really entailed was standing at my booth waiting for people to come in, and when they would I’d burst into life and greet them with charm and grace before escorting them to their table. A local friend told me that I’d be better off serving at the restaurant as I’d make more money that way. I told him that that was the most preposterous thing anyone had ever said to me. I could be myself as a host, minimal demands were placed on me and I never had to do any manual labour or perform any other task that had the power to extrude me from my comfort zone. All I had to do was be me and get paid for it. I still got the ‘wow…’ factor from people, just as I did in my videos. This was a job where I did not have to leave my natural habitat. The only time I’d bristle was when I’d be confronted with privileged and entitled yuppies. Ninety per cent of the customers were deliciously easy. If the restaurant was busy, as it was most of the time, then the customer would have little choice in regards to where they’d sit and would have to make do with whatever seating was left. Nine times out of ten though, they would be perfectly happy to sit wherever I put them. The other 10%, however, weren’t half as cooperative. There were four booths in that restaurant, and two outside tables with beautiful Wiccan chairs. Now these are, hands down, the most popular tables in that restaurant. Everyone, I’m sure, would like to sit at these tables; however, one can’t just turn up to the restaurant

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and expect to be given one as no more than their due. One must either meet the criteria or at least earn it in some way. Occasionally, if it was quiet, I’d let smaller parties sit at said tables so long as I knew there wasn’t going to be a stampede of customers any time soon. So, just to recap, most people were happy to sit wherever I put them, but some were a little bit sassier and more audacious. One person came in and asked: ‘Can I sit here?’ Gesturing to the empty booth. ‘How many are in your party?’ ‘Just me and a friend.’ ‘Sorry, only parties of three or more are allowed to sit at the booths.’ ‘Oh, come on! Can’t you just let us sit there this once?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘But I’m a regular, so make an exception?’ ‘I don’t care who you are.’ ‘But I have a bad back?’ ‘We can stand here and discuss your maladies all day. I will not, under any circumstances, give you a booth unless you can demonstrate to me a good reason as to why you should be allowed to sit there over everyone else.’ ‘… Can you get me a manager please?’ I was ruthless, and would get myself into pickles like this all the effing time. What annoyed me most about it was how when the manager would intervene they’d always give in to the customer by letting them sit where they pleased. I gained a reputation for being overly precious about the – ahem – my booths and everyone found this rather amusing. I felt so alive behind my pulpit as I brought about humility by vanquishing snobbery and self-importance. In order to prevent me from having stand-offs with the customers, the managers had to institute a system whereby they would take over from me every

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time a pampered prune walked through the door. This was a bit annoying, but I was, admittedly, getting carried away. It was a business after all, whatever that means… I noticed, when interacting with the customers, how words can be used as either weeds or seeds. Now, I have an allergy to small talk, and this has nothing to do with the fact that I dislike it. I am just, as I said, severely allergic. ‘Hello, how are you?’ AAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH! This is a weed! This is a lacerating example from the societal script we all unthinkingly recite day in day out. No one ever f***ing means it. ‘Oh, but it’s just what people say.’ I don’t give a monkey’s! It is a phrase that has been denuded of all meaning, sense and sanity. I urge you, dear reader, to observe people when they robotically utter this question, and notice how no one really thinks about what they’re asking. People even say it as they are rushing past one another. ‘Hey! How’s it going?’ And then we must suffer the inevitable response of equal tedium: ‘Good, you?!’ Get. A new. C***ing. Word. What is it with people and the word ‘good’? The English language is a cosmic and bountiful masterpiece, and if your lucky mind has been furnished with it then don’t stand there and tell me that ‘good’ is the best you can do. It almost undercuts one’s wellbeing and will to live, even if they are ‘good’. And are you really good? Or are you just saying that because you have been rehearsing your lines? Are you saying that because you have nothing else to say? ‘Good, you?’ is what we’d expect to follow from, ‘Hello, how are you?’ And I wonder, is the questioner really concerned for the wellbeing of the person they’re asking? Would they really rush past them if they were preparing for a raw and honest answer? What if they’re not ‘good’? Come to think of it, when do you ever hear people respond with: ‘No! Life is s***!’? Who wants to be ‘good’ all the time anyway? Wouldn’t that be so boring if we were consistently ‘good’

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all day long without any peaks, dips, interruptions or variation? One of my favourite things to do when hosting at that vegan restaurant, was to obliterate these nasty verbal weeds wherever and whenever I could, or, better still, transmogrify the weeds into seeds. A customer would come in and ask: ‘Hey how’s it goi…’ ‘SPAGHETTI!’ ‘Ummm… Okay? You good?’ ‘I feel like a decaying piece of meatloaf, but tomorrow I will be slippery.’ The script is destroyed. The human malfunctions. Weeds are now seeds. Success!

*** On my last day working at that restaurant, I got a little bit cranky with a customer. She was sitting inside alone at a small table and approached me to ask if she could sit at the big outside table with the wicker chairs. I said no because the tables were reserved, and she was by herself. She asked again in a more exigent tone as if she hadn’t listened to a blind word I said. ‘Look, do you see anyone else whining? You are no more important than anyone else!’ I exclaimed. She was a bit hurt by my snapping at her and told me I was rude. About a half hour later the manager sat me down and asked me why I sometimes had such a searing lip with people. I told her that after living life on the road, I have zero tolerance for injustice, entitlement or first world bulls***, but those who do not exhibit such traits, I will treat with love and respect. I then went and sat down with a few other employees when my shift had finished as I wanted to say goodbye to them. Everyone was having a giggle about my recent altercation.

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‘You know, Harry,’ one of them said, ‘I really like you, but you have an edge to you.’ I handed in my notice with a tear in my eye. I was sad to leave, but it was time. After a little bounce from Mexico all the way up to Washington State, I drifted towards the East coast where I met with a friend in Vermont. I stayed here for a couple of weeks and worked as an Uber driver. Now this job is a PDAer’s dream if I’ve ever known one. I had no boss and no timetable, I was free to work whenever I felt like it and all I had to do was drive my passengers from A to B. The conversations were always first-rate, and then sometimes I wouldn’t talk to my passengers at all. We would instead sit there in silence and enjoy the serene car journey. In fact, Uber driving or hosting, and sometimes guitar teaching, are the only jobs I’ve ever had where I felt as though I was not even working, jobs where I could truly be myself and didn’t feel as though I was pretending to be something I’m not in pursuit of green, rectangular pieces of paper, depicting Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II or Charles Darwin in the UK, or a smattering of the founding fathers (and other presidents) in the US. No longer able to sustain myself living precariously in America, and adequately nourished from the many escapades I valiantly undertook, I returned to my island home of Great Britain in November 2017.

Chapter 6

Coexisting with Other Living Things on a Blue and Green Speck of Dust Hurtling Through Space

One of the symptoms of PDA is that we apparently: ‘Appear sociable, but lack depth in our understanding.’ I can be a sociable creature but in the most unorthodox of ways. For instance, I need a hell of a lot more alone time than many of my friends it seems, and when I don’t have these mandatory spells of solitude I weaken. At school or at work, it is sometimes mandatory for one to be gregarious, which is not ideal for someone whose sociability is beholden to a timer. One of my favourite things about having PDA is my enduring desire for everyone, and everything, to be on an equal plane. That desire in me manifests in a number of ways. One example would be my tendency to ‘equalise’ my environment at school or at work whenever I detect a gassy dictator of an authority figure, and another is my relationship with the natural world. I don’t consume animal products, only plants and fungi. If it’s got a central nervous system, then it ain’t going in my mouth. 167

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There are some people who would describe this as ‘veganism’, but I tend to eschew such divisive and ideological terms. I don’t even feel too comfortable calling it a ‘plant-based diet’ either; it is my default diet. I don’t identify with the label. I don’t wake up and say, ‘I am a vegan’, I don’t go grocery shopping and think, ‘time to get me some vegan food with which I will make some vegan meals and wolf it down into my vegan stomach all nice and veganly’, and neither do I plan on having the v-word on my gravestone as an epitaph. But, as with my label of ‘PDA’, I am aware that it is sometimes necessary to confer a name on a certain mode of behaviour, especially when I’m in an orthodox environment. I can’t expect people who cook for me to telepathically infer what my dietary requirements are. The hairband analogy I used in the previous chapter definitely applies here. When I am asked by some people, ‘How do you deal with being on such a restrictive diet when you have PDA?’ Well, the answer to that is simple. I don’t restrict myself. At all. I eat everything I want to eat, it just so happens that what I do eat doesn’t contain any animal products. The vegan label is redundant when people adopt a plant-based diet as a result of living ethically. But when the fearmongering cult of ‘veganism’ militantly peddle their agenda a la carte, the whole moral point of it breaks down. Veganism just doesn’t work when imposed as an ideology, not to mention some vegans are nothing short of annoying. I say this, even though I am, de facto, one myself. The last thing I wanted when I was transitioning, was some greasy bloviating freak reproaching me about my lifestyle choices, this would have had the complete opposite effect of what was intended. I got here through freedom of thought, mindfulness, extensive research and experimenting with new foods. My predisposition to equalise becomes relevant here in that I am not a subscriber to speciesism. That is to say, I am literally incapable of seeing how human beings are any more special or important than other living organisms on the planet. Sure, our

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intelligence is bad-ass, but what else do we have apart from that? Could birds of prey be considered better than us based on their eyesight which is far superior to ours? What if it the sense of smell ranked highest on the scale of sensory importance? Then surely dogs and bears would assume the high horse, no? And speaking of horses, look at how much mightier and speedier these noble beasts are than us. There is no objective moral hierarchy in the natural world. Maybe my thinking in this fashion is ‘part of my autism’, but whatever it is, it’s not just haughty teachers and bosses I have beef with, it is the unqualified arrogance of the human race I am so resolutely compelled to equalise. I could state, unapologetically, that my PDA characteristics have actually determined, or at least obliquely influenced, my ‘veganism’. So, let’s bring it back to human beings for a moment, shall we? There isn’t much left of this book now, but I could never bring myself to wrap it up without mentioning a few of the peculiarities of my love and social life. By virtue of the brittle and tenuous thread that connects my heart to the heart of another, friendships and romantic relation­ ships have always been a bit of a challenge and a mystery to me. I should state, quite frankly, that ingratiation has never really been something I’ve struggled with apart from when I was very shy when I was very young. I have, at times, been very popular over the years. My social ability, albeit unusual, still held water in the ‘ability’ department. I was able to make friends, but if there was something I was exceptionally bad at, it was keeping them. Ah, yes, losing friends was my forte. This would usually happen after doing something inappropriate, dangerous or just plain weird. I’ve learned that there are two types of people in this world: those who show an appreciation for abstract art and those who don’t. My earliest woes in the realm of relationships lie with my dear younger siblings. I should at this stage point out that it was more

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their woes than mine. I had a propensity to scapegoat as a young whippersnapper. When we were small I would tease my brother, Ben, but as I got a bit older I verbally took a lot of my anger and frustration out on my sister, Ella. Of course, I am riddled with guilt because of this. It was never out of malice, just the sheer confusion and incognizance of why I was the way I was, which isn’t an excuse I know, but I can safely say that my siblings and I all get along beautifully now. Notwithstanding the sporadic friction, the three of us have actually always been very close. We have waded through many quagmires together, having all lugged around the heavy burden of mental anguish since our characters first formed. We have bolstered our bond by maintaining our idiosyncratic and consoling sense of humour, our unique method of perceiving and making sense of life and of course our own brand of ‘weirdness’, which we share with no other, apart from maybe other neuroAtypicals who would know exactly the kind of weirdness I’m referring to. My brother is elegant and warmhearted, and my sister is sensitive yet strong, and in some ways, a more contained and enigmatic version of myself. With my first friends, and with my cousins on family gettogethers, I was often described as ‘bossy’. I needed to be in charge of the games, I needed to be the main character, I needed to be the funniest in the room, I needed to win and I needed to have the last say. If any of these stipulations weren’t met for whatever reason then I wouldn’t think twice about ruining everyone else’s fun in a most sociopathic and megalomaniacal fashion. I would stress that I was quite good at holding the games together which would have been met mostly with appreciation from other children, but insofar as I wasn’t being overwhelmingly domineering, which I mostly was. Since my presence would often prove too intense for many of my peers, I often sought comfort in playing with children

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a few years my junior (which would be ideal for everyone involved, as I could act the clown all day knowing that I’d never receive any judgement from my audience or bore them in anyway). A couple of things that have always made me seethe with rage is when other people comment on or hazard a guess at how I might be feeling, or gratuitously narrate my life. It feels like I’m being boxed into some kind of prison of opinion. Once when I was a child I was subjected to a bout of ribbing by some other children. It was all light-hearted and good-natured. I was often on the receiving end of banter and taunts, which I sometimes minded and sometimes didn’t, but I was becoming rather flustered in this particular instance for whatever reason so I decided to withdraw into myself in order to better process everything that was going on. A boy came up to me and said, ‘Harry’s gone quiet’, so I punched him in the face. Now, no disrespect to this person; he meant no harm, but this comment, that would be totally harmless in any other context, was the absolute last thing I needed to hear at that moment as I was very busy trying to mentally digest everything that’d happened; I needed total space in order to do that. He halted the process with that one measly comment. He was right; I was being quiet, but I didn’t want to know. I sometimes feel, and this is going to seem a strange word to use, ‘maternal’ about control; as if control is my baby I need to protect. I have always been a lot more sure-footed on a one to one basis than I have been in large groups, unless of course I am dominating them. I am prone to feeling a little hemmed in by people en masse and will resort to drawing attention to myself by being silly as an attempt to deal with sensory overload. I think the reason I love talking to one person at a time is because I feel very much in control in this context. There is, after all, nothing to dominate, unless that person is constantly interrupting and larking around (there are

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times when the feeling of being interrupted is so unbearable that I feel as though I’m being annihilated). They speak, I listen, and then I speak and they listen. I have said this before and I’ll say it again: autistic people can be like walking environmental barometers, in that when we are upset, people assume there is something wrong with us when in reality something is wrong around us.

*** It is almost impossible to resist the urge to pursue those who take our breath away. And for people with PDA especially, as that desire is tenfold. Desire is what drives us and, simultaneously, consumes us. While it is important for people with my type of brain to choose wisely, the very act of discriminating between people in an attempt to winnow out the more logical or convenient options is to miss the point of romance and love entirely. I say, if you are drawn to someone, then go for it. The intellect need not engage in this field. The intellect is crucial in the arenas of academia, politics and science, but not the human heart (unless, of course, you’re a cardiologist). Some feelings really aren’t meant to be rationalised, they are simply meant to be felt. I think the person who taught me, inadvertently, how to treat women was my cousin, Rosie. Rosie and I grew up together, she is a year younger than me, and the two of us were inseparable as children. She was my first best friend, and, perhaps, my only true friend, come to think of it. I mucked about with other children, but no one connected to me as deeply as Rosie did. I trusted Rosie, and felt I could allow her into my world. She always listened to me and helped me to feel less alone. Rosie accepted me just the way I was, as I did her. We were always mischievous and could be a bit of a handful for our parents and grandparents whenever we’d get

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together, but we had a more serious side to our bond. When the two of us were put to bed, and our silliness and laughter eventually ceased, we would talk into the night, sometimes for hours; I’d never want our conversations to end. Rosie’s friendship helped to foster in me a tact and chivalry, and ever since I have always preferred the company of females to males. Seducing girls for the purpose of, say, a kiss, a one-night stand, or some other casual tryst, has always been an area where I demonstrate considerable proficiency. However, as soon as I develop actual romantic feelings for a person, I can turn into a bit of a maniac. I noticed, in my teens, how I had a bit of a problem with recognising boundaries before a relationship kicked off, for example, sending too many texts! One thing I started doing in my early twenties whenever I acquired the phone number of a girl I liked was to delete their number every time I sent them a text, lest I overwhelmed them. If they text back, then great! If they didn’t, then it wasn’t meant to be. That limbo stage is torture for me, but I calm right down once it becomes ‘official’ which often comes as a surprise to girls. Conversely, it is in romantic relationships when my PDA is at its most pronounced. In the past, I have felt like a cornered animal in a relationship, in that when someone gets too close, I bite. I have even found the ‘boyfriend’ label to be suffocating at times. It’s almost like signing a contract at a new job; one cannot escape without rigmarole. Whenever something goes wrong in a relationship I have found that there is no better remedy than talking about what happened. Communication is key. That was probably the cliché and no‑brainer of this chapter…but I have found that it helps me when I share with my partners on a regular basis. That isn’t to say, have mundane conversations about work and the weather. Talk and connect deeply – really embrace each other’s internal worlds.

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Review the week: did everything go smoothly? Is there anything we could be doing to improve a certain aspect of our relationship? I used to have ‘sorry ceremonies’ with one of my girlfriends in the past. As we’ve established in Chapter 4 and a half, meltdowns are like an epileptic fit in that once they start then stopping them is out of the question. One must simply wait for it to pass. Following a tiff with said partner, and after mustering a sufficient level of humility, I’d approach her, embrace her, apologise for any damage caused and then ask, ‘What went wrong there? What have we learned? Is there a way we can prevent that from happening again?’ Blaming her for everything while refusing to take any blame myself may feel like the preferable option at first, and perhaps that is what one feels when they are at the peak of a meltdown rapidly purging emotion from their system, but once everything settles down then a quick shift in perspective is paramount. It takes two to tango after all, and I like to see the PDA-related episodes as ‘co-creations’. Strictly the PDA ones though… Of course, if one of us were to arbitrarily whack the other person round the head with a golf club then it would be downright unfair to expect the victim to admit to being just as culpable as the attacker, and then be expected to apologise for being a ‘co-creator’ when they were merely sitting there minding their own business before being assaulted without provocation and nearly killed. When I get triggered in relationships, I like to see it as my partner exposing or highlighting a part of me that had been shaded before that point. As if she’s bringing something in me to the surface that needs to be addressed, repaired or gotten rid of. I might flinch and recoil and tell her, ‘NO! You leave that where it is!’ But my PDA is not sacrosanct, I do not require a ‘safe-space’ in which I will be held back and kept in a fearful delusion. I may even

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thank my partner for shedding light on a part of me that I never knew existed. My girlfriends really have been my greatest teachers. One thing I’ve noticed that calms me down when I am in the throes of a volcanic moment with a romantic partner (and I can’t quite put my finger on why this might be) is when they start crying. Perhaps the vulnerability is a good antidote? Whatever it is, it jolts me right back in control. Saying sorry is something I have had to teach myself to do, I would never say it as a child for two reasons: 1) grown-ups might have told me to say sorry (need I go on?), and 2) pride. Over the years I watched other people who didn’t say sorry and quivered and cringed at how foul and repulsive it is. No one wants to be that person, so I slowly changed my ways. Nowadays I say it a little excessively, or so I’ve been told, but I’d rather that than to never say it at all. It’s important to learn to say sorry if you have PDA because when we are triggered we have it in us to say hurtful things. Yes, we don’t usually mean it, but it is still highly unpleasant for the recipient. I am going to say this as well for those with PDA who are struggling to make their relationships work. I have had to do my best to prevent meltdowns and fights. It is not solely up to my non‑PDA partners to live their lives in fear, tiptoe around me and do all the preventive work. None of us is perfect, and the unfortunate truth is that our partners will trigger us occasionally no matter how hard they try not to. I will reiterate, PDA is not sacrosanct, and we, as PDAers or autistics, are not infallible. To say otherwise wouldn’t be too many steps away from domestic hegemony. Learning to become self-aware and keeping track of how my behaviour might be impacting those around me has saved my life. It is also crucial to be aware of what it is exactly that will set one off and to know

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one’s role in the relationship. I happen to love making the bed so that has always been my job. I get uncomfortable when someone else makes it. My most recent girlfriend felt the same way about the kitchen sides; she’d get uncomfortable if I were to go to clean them, so I left the kitchen sides for her to clean, and she left the bed making to me. Teamwork. Everyone can find their way of contributing to their relationship. If you love to cook, cook! If your partner loves to do paperwork, then let them! Perhaps there are some things you can do together without snapping at each other after a few minutes into the activity? Like cooking as a team, or doing the shopping together. But if cooking as a team or shopping together is likely to predispose you to triggers, then avoid these activities and find something else to do. With regards to the autistic person’s difficulty with ‘changing the picture’, then yes, this is something I am not great at myself, and of course it is impossible to swan through life without ever incurring a change of plan of some nature. The pain of change can be akin to heartbreak. I always ensure I know exactly what I’m getting myself into before committing to it, but I personally prefer living spontaneously and not making any plans at all, because when I make a plan, I have to stick to it or I’ll freak out. Surrendering to the natural course of events has helped me considerably over the years to become more flexible in my routine. If a plan has been made, however, and, for whatever reason, it changes, then one thing I used to do as a child was to pretend I had the plan chalked up on an imaginary blackboard in my mind. If it changed, then I’d take an imaginary eraser, delete the plan and then chalk up a new one. Perhaps even have a backup plan ready; one that’s equally exciting as plan A. The main objective should be having a good time rather than having a good time by means of a particular

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modus operandi. Even incorporating change into one’s routine can prove effective, in other words, make constant change habitual. One thing I catch myself asking in relationships is, ‘is this fluid or is this forced?’ If things are forced then this shouldn’t be ignored. Perhaps our time as a couple has expired? Or maybe we just need a little break? These issues need to be talked about while they’re in their infancy otherwise they may exacerbate over time. We often feel that we become a unit in relationships and forget that we are individual people who constitute a relationship. I have found that retaining my sense of individuality in a relationship, by focusing on my own passions, what makes me happy as a person and simply finding time to bask in solitude has been instrumental in maintaining a stable relationship. Should the day come for my partner and me to go our separate ways, be it temporary or permanent, then provided that both of us have infused our res­ pective lives with meaning, the initial pain of severance won’t be quite as intense knowing that we both have something in our lives worth living for.

Chapter 7

Inhale and Exhale

One of the last things about my brain I’m going to share with you, patient reader, that the PDA symptom list also tells me I should have, is the irksome and destabilising way in which it goes from a really happy state to a really sad state. I have an internal shuttle service that plies between the doldrums and cloud nine. The journey time will vary anywhere from a year to within an hour, and this service has been operating in me since time immemorial. I used to resist these extreme mood swings ever such a lot, but nowadays I am able to weave in and out of them, and even utilise them. I refer to these fluctuating states as my ‘inhale and exhale periods’. My inhalation period is when I am feeling down and listless. I see this as prime time for reading more, playing a bit of guitar, sleeping for longer, observing more, essentially absorbing some of the nutrients of life. It is important that when I am feeling this fragile that I don’t force myself out of it. If I don’t feel like

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exercising then I won’t, and if I don’t feel like socialising then I’ll be a hermit. I just sit there and exist. I soak everything in. My exhalation period is when I emerge from hibernation and marshal the nutrients I’ve absorbed. This is when I am more alive and productive and expressive. I’ll exercise, I’ll talk to people, write something, make a YouTube video, and find an adventure to go on. Where inhalation is all about absorption, exhalation is all about expression. One could argue that my natural biorhythm could be consistent with bipolar disorder, and perhaps it is, but this would not stop me from putting a more positive spin on it. The trick is not to resist it, otherwise everything gets muddled up. I see life as a bit like waterskiing: the boat represents time, we are not in control of it and its engine will start and move the boat forward no matter what. How we respond to being moved forward is up to us. We are sat in the water behind the boat gripping a rope attached to the boat; waiting for life to begin. When the boat eventually starts we will either try to use the momentum of the boat to hoist ourselves upright so that we can ski behind it, or we can be dragged along in the water with our faces being pummelled with backwash. Provided we are up and out (or on top) of the water, we can make good use of the wake and glide between it, or, if we are feeling daring, we can move out of it and have an entirely different experience. We are always somewhat limited in how much we can manoeuvre, but we always have plenty of space to utilise before the boat (time) comes to an end. The poor chap being dragged along in a floundering mess is a little out of sync, and that’s exactly how I felt in school or at some mundane job that failed to touch my heart. Today, I am up and out the water, and skiing rather ably. Another practice that has helped me immensely over the years is meditation. I know its woo and mystical connotations may be enough to put some people off, but meditation doesn’t have to

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be sitting in the lotus position on the floor, opposite a portrait of Lord Krishna chanting ‘OM’. For me, it is a mental technique with which one can immerse themselves in the present, quell or at least quieten the ongoing chatter in the mind, maybe even transcend or disassociate from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and bask in a brief yet golden hush. Not for everyone, but I have been reaping the benefits of mindfulness meditation for many years now. Perhaps it’s better for a person like myself whose mind is susceptible to clutter. I like to start my day off with a quick plunge into my inner landscape and give it a good sluice. It is an essential nutrient for me.

*** To end on an upbeat note, not all triggers are negative. Some triggers, which I refer to as ‘light-hearted triggers’, don’t always end in tears and anguish. They can even be the source of amusement. It’s assumptions that always get me: ‘Oh my God I have this friend who’s coming over to hang out with us tonight. You are going to love them, Harry!’ ‘No, I won’t.’ ‘Yeah, you will! They’re so cool!’ ‘I despise them.’ ‘But you haven’t even met them yet?’ ‘I can’t stand them. Never have done, never will.’ I would go on to meet said person and end up loving them. Then of course we have leading questions: ‘Harry, you like orange juice, don’t you?’ ‘NO!’ ‘Oh, but you drink so much of it. I saw you drink a whole…’ ‘NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!’ As a matter of fact, I do like orange juice, Mother. I love it, even. But when people put words in my

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mouth…they will see that I have the power to manipulate my taste buds. Even people introducing me to someone is too much: A friend or relative: ‘This is Harry.’ Me: ‘Hi, I’m Jason!’ Everyone: ‘…’ Denouement So, that’s my life. I haven’t been alive for that long, but I’ve gotten around, and I can proudly say that it’s been a rich and worthwhile existence, so far. As I sit here and round this book off at The Beast’s house, I notice that it is just under a month until my 25th birthday, whatever that means… I try not to pay much attention to artificial constructs or points in the Earth’s orbit that human beings like to underpin such as birthdays and national holidays. I ran away and hid on my 21st because I couldn’t stand the unreasonable fuss that surrounded it. But to pen my first quarter century of life seems rewarding somehow. I hope, glorious reader, you now have a better understanding of autism and PDA, and how they are not solely disabilities. When I am in control of my own life, I have no need to exert control over the outside world. I’m not saying that I’m ‘cured’, but I have learned how to manage my condition (most of the time). One of the most important things I’ve learned is that as soon as the world leaves me alone, then I get to ‘work’. Autism, when looked at in the right way, really is a gift to the world. Perhaps I should leave you with something to ponder on? Am I supposed to do that…? If I am then that makes me not want to do it. Haven’t you had enough already? Are you wondering, now that I’m done with this book, what I’m going to do next? Well, I don’t know, and I don’t want to know either. End.

A Final Note from the Author’s Mother

Harry has taught me so much in life. More than any doctor, teacher, school, college or any professional in any field. I’m not talking about facts and figures although he has taught me many facts from all the intensive and often obsessive research he has undertaken on certain topics from a very young age. I’m talking about intuition, wisdom, judgement, instincts and following your heart even when your head is giving you the easiest option. Choosing what you feel is right even when others are telling you what they think should be done. With Harry I have had to learn another way. Another approach. Another school. Then another and then another until we both realised it was never going to be any school. I’ve learned not to listen to those who cannot relate to my experiences with Harry, my challenges of which there have been so many. I’ve learned that ‘mainstream’ is a shambles for children like Harry and a voice needs to be heard to change things. 183

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I’ve learned that ‘normal’ does not exist. We are all strange. We are all different and it is these differences that are our strengths. Harry is the most intelligent, articulate and charismatic person I know. He has an astounding awareness of what he needs and what he has to do. With Harry’s dynamics come many difficulties and challenges as I said. Over the years Harry has done an incredible amount of work on himself and it shows in the man he has become. Harry has shown me to love, with a compassion, understanding and empathy I haven’t fully realised yet. Harry and I share many times and many things, but it is our profound conversations I always crave. Jo Thompson