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The first Covid lockdown in spring 2020 was, for Millie, a welcome relief. “You weren’t allowed to go to school, you weren’t allowed to leave the house, nobody was allowed to come round – it was good for her.”
I was touched to find this, - a mother writing about what a relief Lockdown was to her autistic child - as I relate to it so much. For those of us on the Asperger's /Autism spectrum human contact is stressful and puzzling. It is something we continually get wrong.
The photo is of the young me and my mother in the 1940s. How young she was! I hope so much I will see her again - and my father - when the time comes for the resurrection. And I guess the 1940s must seem as distant to the young of today as the Victorian times did to me as a child - if not even more so. And yet, it was only yesterday.
And had it been possible to refuse to go to school back then, I would have done so. I hated it, and I am sure it was no fun for the school either. Not that I was badly behaved in any deliberate way, it was just so hard for me to understand what was going on and what was expected of me - and, of course to get on with my classmates.
I have been asking my friend Pete what strategies he used to cope at school, and beyond. Not that you know they are strategies at the time of course, it is ways of coping with problems you don't even know you have. You just feel like an idiot and try to mitigate it. It's possible that my current eye problems are connected to an early strategy that I can remember. One day as I was mooching round the junior school playground on my own, a very popular and powerful (in playground terms) little girl came along, with her entourage. "I don't like her, with her half closed eyes", she said, pointing me out.
Aspergers children can never have that oh so useful entourage.
Many years later, I was working in Richmond - dealing with apprenticeships for boat builders of all things, one of the nice girls I worked with said that she had passed me at lunch time. I hadn't seen her, even though my eyes were wide open. She said my eyes were odd, unblinking.
So I think what I had been doing, without in the least realising it - these were in no way conscious strategies - was going round the stressful atmosphere of school with my eyes slitted almost shut, trying to reduce the amount of information coming in. As, essentially, IF I am understanding this right, Aspergers/Autism is an information processing problem - damaged connections in the brain. I was getting much more info coming at me from all directions than I could process.
So, having been shocked into realising firstly that I was walking round with my eyes half-shut, and secondly that this was socially unacceptable, I must have tried to keep them wide open, unblinkingly, but just try not to see what I was actually seeing. To sort of look inward with my mind and try not to let myself notice what was going on around me.
That at any rate is what I assume. I now have a problem with dry eyes, and an Optician told me that there is something wrong with my blink reflex.
Another strategy I remember is akin to the strategy Donna Williams described, i.e. jumping out of the cupboard before they open the door on you. By which she meant talking very very fast all the time so that they would not be saying anything to which you would not be responding properly. And that would make you appear more normal. Of course, it doesn't. But I guess it appeared to me that other people talked fast about nothing all the time, and I was trying to fit in.
Once again, I was shocked awake by a girl at school. well on a school trip - my first time abroad, to Switzerland. It was not expensive back then, especially as a school trip - we slept in the hotel attic - or I would not have been able to go. She and I shared a ski-lift and she mentioned that I had just talked non-stop at her. She wasn't being nasty, she was a nice girl, and I think she wanted to make me aware of it for my sake. She had clearly been bombarded by a lightning speed monologue that may not have made much sense. I think at that point I returned to being quiet.
Though I definitely remember trying once again in my student days - which is a time when I think even the most confident and outgoing among us can find difficult. I can remember consciously deciding that I would ask people a lot of questions, as that way I would get one of these apparently essential conversations going.
Did it work? I doubt it. It was probably just annoying, as I don't think I really listened to their answers, I was too busy working out my next question to keep things flowing. I notice that some of the young interviewers of politicians seem to work in much the same way these days - aspergers or incompetence/inexperience? I don't know.
Anyway, that is as far as I have got with it. And I don't want to over-egg the pudding here anyway. We are all born damaged and dying, as our first parents had made that fatal choice to cut themselves and us, their unborn children, off from their Creator, their Source of life.
There is not one of us that has a perfect body or brain, and so life, which should be nothing but joy, is a struggle for everyone. And I am at the mild end of the spectrum. Maybe it does give me an idea of what deep autism must be like, when nothing connects and makes sense. But only maybe.
Talking of damaged bodies, I have spent the last three days with a very painful UTI, and have been clinging on to the Bible's promise that there will come a time when no resident of the earth will say "I am sick". (Isaiah 33:24)
The antibiotics seem to have kicked in, thank God - and I am also very grateful to the NHS. And I plan to go to the Hall for the meeting today - especially important as I am on tea and coffee duty after the meeting. Col is off metal detecting. And tomorrow will be just another day.
As we should have been having an excellent turkey lunch with all the trimming, he bought himself a steak and we have mushrooms, tomatoes, onions and potatoes to go with it. And I have made his favourite dessert, an apple crumble. We also have custard.
My diabetes would allow me to have a steak dinner, provided I left off the potatoes, but I don't like steak and really only eat meat on social occasions. So I plan to make a veggie curry or chile this afternoon - with beans not rice - which will last a couple of days and then turn into soup for both of us.
We had a bit of a scramble last minute shop when we realised we would be here over the holiday and the shops had that frantic Christmas air. It all seems so stressful now, almost hysterical.
Do people really enjoy celebrating it - I mean apart from getting together with the extended family? And, sadly, not everyone even enjoys that.
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