The Opposite of Normal
“What we perceive, may not always hold true”


By
Andrew Boggan


Throughout all the struggles in my life to be apart of society’s norm – I would personally like to dedicate this book to the following people
• Kay and Paul – my loving and supporting parents
• Kathrine – My sister
• Noel – My brother
• Mark Ashby
• Mark Jeffrey
• Caitlin Henning


A very special thank you to these people for making me believe that I have the power to be proud of having Asperger’s Syndrome


I heard once that the population of the world currently sits at 6,602,224,175 people. Out of that number, I wonder how many people think they didn’t actually belong to this world, or that perhaps their existence came from another force other than the human race. The answer would probably be a high number of people in this world that would actually think that, but really how many people in this world spent their entire life trying figure out why they were put on this planet and for what reasons.

Everyday I walk down the mall in the middle of my city. Each morning it’s a sea of people, all in a mad rush to get to work. Occasionally I like to sit at the top of the mall and watch people pass by as they race off to work chatting away on their mobile phones and answering pagers. I’ve seen a wide variety of people from all sorts of physical types such as skinny people, obese people, people in wheelchairs and even drunk people looking for another place to serve alcohol. Physically the people I see seem to look the same, they all have eyes, ears, a nose, arms and legs but from those observations I have to stop and think, and ask myself what’s really below the surface of their skin.

I don’t think I’m that different to the other people rushing past me; I have two eyes, ears, a nose, arms, legs and a heartbeat. Okay so physically I probably the look same, but underneath that, there’s a different kind of person, more than what the passers by would think. There’s a big difference between them and me. They belong on planet earth and I’ve been thrown into an ocean of people and not able to swim to shore.

I’m Asperger’s, and while I sit in the mall watching the passers by go to work, through the slightest glance nobody would be able to tell what makes me different. Sure I might look the same as them, or look similar to you but I act differently to most people, I act different to you, I possess obscure habits and I perceive the world to be a very different place. Sometimes the world seems to know your every fear and whatever it takes for fate to throw those fears in front of you she’ll do it. Sometimes I see the world as a breath of wind where I’m the lost leaf being flown about to different places that aren’t within my control, and sometimes the world is just the centre of my inner peace and harmony.

As I sit here now, like I do almost every morning with my soy latte and a cigarette, the people I see rushing to work each possess a quality to turn this world into a place of fear, anxiety, a mentally catastrophic nightmare or realign the world to be a beacon of hope. With each new day arises a new hurdle to cross. The qualities of these people will shine through as the day progresses and I can only sit and wait to see how I will perceive the world today.


Chapter 1


“The Rainstorm – come walk with me”


THE RAINSTORM – COME WALK WITH ME

I want to take you on an incredible journey. I want to take you into the mind of somebody with Asperger’s Syndrome and show you how we perceive the world.

In my mind, living with Asperger’s Syndrome is sometimes like walking through a rainstorm. It can be heavy with intense pressure while the dark grey clouds fill you with a deep sense of alienation from the world and other times, it can be the most comforting and wholesome experience. Sometimes every rain drop that falls from the sky represents a symbol of my many emotions that I quite often experience. The emotions fall from the sky with no control and sometimes, when my emotions are heavy, they tend to flood my mental state of mind often drowning me out. There are times when I can swim through the flood, and then are times when I drown not being able to swim to shore.

When I tell people I have Asperger’s Syndrome, usually I always get the same response “Oh I didn’t know you had anything, you seem perfectly normal to me”. Well, what’s perfectly normal I ask myself and why is it always human nature to take someone at face value? If you see a disabled person in a wheelchair or deaf person wearing a hearing implant, you automatically know that something is different and you have to be sensitive to their needs. Whereas people with Asperger’s Syndrome, don’t automatically give away signs that we are different and therefore people immediately take as at face value, make their own judgments and assumptions and then isolate us.

Perhaps life would be easier for us Aspies if we were to always hold a sign or wear a shirt that said “Careful, autistic person straight head”. Sounds good to make people aware even before they cast their own judgment on us, but that kind of sign immediately separates us from the majority and all chances of being integrated into society like everyone else is shot.

People always seem to make many misconceptions about people with Asperger’s Syndrome. A number of people I’ve had dealings with assume those affected by the autistic spectrum disorder possess many inabilities such as extreme poor motor skills, clumsiness, poor speech or even a disfigured body posture, however that’s just the stereotype. Many people fail to realize that some of the world’s greatest people are affected by Asperger’s Syndrome. I was once told that Albert Einstein had the condition and apparently Stephen Spielberg and Sir Richard Branson have it too. Very uplifting to people affected by ASD.

Another misconception people make about those affected with Asperger’s is that they often prefer to be alone and away from the crowd and segregate themselves from friendship circles and social activities. For me personally this is certainly not the case. Nothing would please me more than to have a wide range of friends from diverse backgrounds and participate in a number of social activities. When I was in primary school I would watch all the other kids join in social activities in the classroom. I’d see their smiling faces and hear them crack jokes and enjoy each other’s company. To them it was pure nature but to me it was a foreign language.

Imagine arriving into a foreign country without having any knowledge of the local dialect, customs and local culture. In a situation like that it’s very simple to offend somebody because you lack that knowledge. For people with Asperger’s, this is an everyday occurrence even in our own culture. The art of socializing, cracking jokes, knowing when to speak and knowing what’s appropriate to say that relates to the relevant conversation at hand are all foreign queues that can sometimes never be taught no matter how hard you try to learn them. Although we go to make the effort to learn this foreign language, we are automatically excluded because we gave off the opinion that we are ignorant, tactless and anti-social. For me, it didn’t matter how hard I tried to learn these concepts, it never sank into my mind and I reached the point of deliberately not socializing with other kids at school because the challenge was always just too humiliating to bear. The worst part about it was to sit at the back of the classroom and talk to myself yearning to be apart of the group but you couldn’t be apart of that group because you simply didn’t fit in. Seeing the smiling facing of other kids having a good time in the classroom is like a permanent burn scare on your body. It constantly reminds you what happened and how it was out of your control.

Even now, in my adult life, this still proves to be a challenge, especially at work. When everyone finishes work on Friday afternoon and heads to the local pub for their knock off drinks, the invite never comes through to you because you haven’t built the kind of rapport with your coworkers that warrants an invite to the pub. I know in my job I often need to ask questions and a lot of the time it’s the same question, and no matter how many times you ask the look you get from the managers for asking a question can be too much to bear. Sometimes it’s easier for me to go head and perform a task, knowing quite well that I will make a mistake because asking “How do I” ends up to be too humiliating and an assumption is made that your incapable of performing the job.

When I walk into work each morning, I immediately fall into my very structured routine. I put my bag down, turn on the computer, open my files and head to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. As I walk from my desk to the kitchen I pass several people sitting at their desks. As much as I want to look at them in the eye and say good morning, my mind simply does not allow me to do it, then instantously, coworkers assume your anti social. If only they knew that I wanted to say good morning when I arrived. With each new work day comes a new approach on how to deal with everyone in the office. Some mornings I have to force myself to be social and attempt to join in on other conversations but knowing when to contribute is the hard part. There’s been several times when I’ve gone to contribute to a conversation and I tend to create a deafening silence and then the subject topic is changed. So your left with questions in your head such as “Did I say something that was inappropriate, did I cut somebody off from talking or was I talking down to them and not at them” What makes it worse is that your always alone when this happens and nobody is there to guide you into the right social queues. Usually I’ve always ended up embarrassing myself and then people creating the wrong opinion of me.

Other mornings when I walk in and follow my routine I choose to never say a word to anybody unless spoken too. I can be in a perfectly happy mood but coworkers then make assumptions that I never smile enough or that something is wrong, or perhaps I’m in a really bad mood and they avoid me all together. There’s a correct approach out there in how to deal with people in the office and after working full time for 10 years now, I’m still yet to find what that approach is.

When you’re left to your own devices at work, in some ways it feels like your being punished yet you have no control over the situation. How can I be punished for something I didn’t deliberately do?

My own personal qualities certainly don’t extend to the same level that the other famous people mentioned earlier do, but I possess a few qualities that the average every day person wouldn’t. When I was 5 or 6 I read the Brisbane City train time table twice and remembered every single train station that existed in the Brisbane Metro area. I read an Australian Airlines timetable once and remembered the flight number and time of every Australian Airlines flight between Brisbane to Cairns return from Monday to Friday. During high school years I had the lead role in 2 plays and I remembered all my lines in a matter of several hours as well as other people’s. As boring as this may seem, one of my many obscure hobbies is to read a book and memorize it word for word. I had even done this with some of my favorite movies from when I was a child.

Now that I am an adult, I sometimes experience a high level of isolation, particularly on Saturday afternoons. Saturday afternoons during the summer are great for relaxing with friends over a few beers at the local pub or going over to friends houses to have a few drinks, dinner and get ready to go out to the clubs. The hardest part for me on Saturday’s is to sit in my bedroom playing computer games knowing there are hundreds and hundreds of people out there doing what I so eagerly desire. I guess the lucky part for me is that I don’t have the hangovers the next morning. Although occasionally this does happen for me, the occurrences are very rare and are always with the same 2 people.

Being in clubs are just has as hard too, especially when venturing into them alone. From the moment I walk in the door I get this awful feeling that goes from my head down to my toes that everybody has stopped to stare at you. While that may not be the case, you can’t help but wonder that’s the way it is. Quite often I would buy my beer from the bar and find a nice quite spot in the corner of the club where I can “people watch” for the night. There have been a few instances where other patrons have come over to say hello, ask how I am or even invite me in for a game of pool. Subconsciously, I must be giving off some kind of bizarre vibe because I only ever attract the wrong type of people. Now I hear non aspies say this too, but when I stand alone in bars hoping to meet somebody nice to have a drink with, the old sleazy kind tend to offer me drinks and much more.

It can be very embarrassing standing alone in a bar watching the crowds of people inter mingle, especially in the gay scene where everybody appears to be too critical of your own physique. Sometimes I will stand and stare at other people standing alone and try to imagine “why” they feel so comfortable standing alone or walking up to other people and begin socializing. I guess the bottom line is different from my perspective, they are standing there alone in a bar hoping to meet somebody for a one night encounter – I’m standing there just hoping to meet somebody to have a beer with and be sociable.

Once again, because we don’t have anybody beside us to teach us or tell us how to stand proper and look normal, subconsciously those bizarre vibes are sent out to others and people avoid you.

In 2005 I headed off for a 2 month back packing trip around Western and Eastern Europe. Whilst sitting on the plane going over filled with adrenalin and pulses of excitement, I began to realize that I didn’t speak any foreign language and I knew nothing about the local customs or cultures that I would encounter. “How to handle this” I said to myself. Well, one explanation really: Handle the situation the same way that I would in the Australian culture. I couldn’t grasp the social queues of the culture in my home town so what chance did I have learning it in another culture. The one thought that helped me relax about the entire situation was the fact that if I stuffed up and made myself to look clumsy or stupid it didn’t really matter because I was overseas and who would really remember.

Whilst visiting cousins in the UK, I was taken to the only gay bar in town. As soon as I walked to the door my breathing stopped. A small enclosed social environment in a group of people I had never met. From where I was standing at the front door to the club it looked like a prison. There was only one way to find out how I would get out of that prison and that was venture inside.

As terribly frightening and distressing as it was to walk into this situation, I had been left with no choice. I reached a point in my life where I got so sick feeling trapped and people making judgments at me that I was anti-social, there was only one way to defeat that predetermined image. Dive into the deep end.

I managed to dive into the deep end of the social swimming people, and for some reason I wasn’t drowning. Obviously my feet had been able to touch the bottom to keep myself afloat. Within a space of 1 hour I had met more people than I would have met in 12 months and I was sitting at a large table with over 20 people all eager to listen to me speak and hear what I had to say. This was the social life I had only ever dreamed about, certainly a shame that I had to venture to the other side of the world just to find it. For a few brief hours my Asperger’s didn’t exist and it had no control over me what so ever – I was the one in control. I’m not sure what came over me that night, but whatever it was, it allowed me to make eye contact, talk to strangers, crack jokes and help others to have a good time.

I think the biggest thing that night was the fact that I had an Australian accent. People at the pub found it so unique and different that it automatically drew people’s attention. Once they heard my accent it made people sit up and listen and learn that I was actually intelligent and this seemed to have swept a few guys off their feet. Back home when I spoke, people weren’t interested in me and would turn away but in England, everyone seemed to listen. I think at home, had there been something very special about me then others at home would sit up and actually take notice of me. Then I wouldn’t be just another face in the crowd.

During the rest of my trip through the UK and Ireland I was comfortable to just walk up to anybody standing alone at a bar and begin a conversation. If only I had those abilities to do this at home. None the less I was able to do it and never had my inner self been filled with so much pride and confidence.

I had a total of 6 weeks across England. After my second night of going out to a bar with my cousin, I had a whole list of names and phone numbers of people who actually wanted to spend time with me. Unlike home, it wasn’t a quick attempt to get me into bed; these people were actually interested in my own personal qualities and what I could give in terms of friendships. John and Alastair had become my 2 closest friends whilst travelling in the UK. Several times when I would be laying on the couch at my Auntie’s house they would come over and drag me out for coffee or to the pub. Never could I have imagined at home, somebody actually showing up to my home unexpectedly to drag me out for a good time. Why is it this would happen while I was overseas but not in my home? Oh well, I guess that’s the interesting thing Asperger’s Syndrome; it can play tricks on you.

Before I was ever diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, my family and friends had always just assumed that I was somewhat wired. As a teenager at school, most kids my age enjoyed getting outside to play handball or touch football while I was always found in the library reading books on a wide variety of topics that later turned into obsessions, some of these topics included the Brisbane Metro Train Network, the history of the British Royal Family, Physiology, weather and natural disasters, chemistry studies and even the events of world war 2.

I might have sat in the library all alone every lunch hour for 5 years without any true friends but I never questioned myself and why I struggled to make relationships. I always saw my peers in another perspective. Their interests compared to mine were boring and unchallenging, why would I want to act differently to who I am around other people and carry on like a fool when I can sit in the library and enjoy the peace and quite before going back to class.

I often saw a number of people at school get bullied, apart from myself,f and yet the ones who were doing all the bullying were the ones that had the large number of friends and I often said to myself “If having friends means I have to beat up on other people then I don’t want any”. So from that moment on I never made any attempt to have friends, it always seemed to be the most violent of kids in my school were the ones who enjoyed a large social life. How come they get to walk all over people and cause social injustice to others and yet they were the ones voted in as school captains and other significant roles in the school. I’m sure I could have beaten up on people if I wanted to but why be untrue to myself? There was simply no point.

Having Asperger’s Syndrome didn’t just affect me throughout my school years, although these were the toughest times, my mother had always said I displayed rare behavior patterns from 5 months onward.

Could my Asperger’s journey have started the moment I was born into this world? I might not have been able to communicate or build relationships but my mother had always told me she had a vivid memory of the first few moments of my new life where the Asperger’s might have had complete control over me.

I was born at 11.50am on Thursday October 21 1982. Using all the power in my lungs, I screamed blue murder from the minute I entered this world until 5 or 6 hours later. New born babies scream for so many different reasons; from hunger, lack of sleep or ill health, but my mother firmly believed it was somewhat of separation anxiety. Imagine spending the entire 9 months of your life inside your mother where you’re completely safe from the world where nobody can do you any harm. The comfort a mother can give can be the most fulfilling experience for any child and for mother and baby to bond creates that crucial foundation of a relationship. Some children get attached to this bond while others eventually learn to leave on their own accord.

My first experience as a 6 hour old baby probably came down to separation anxiety. From spending 9 whole months in a bubble of complacency, then to enter a new world, could have very well been the first panic attack I had to endure.

After the doctors and nurses had spent many hours attending to my piercing screams and examining me for ill health, an old, but very experienced nurse had wrapped up an old nappy and placed it next to me while my mother was nursing me. From that moment on I had gone completely silent while I hugged into the nappy and dozed off to sleep. One tiny nappy had proven to be the answer to a small baby’s trouble. Although I have no recollection of this ever occurring, I’m sure the process of what I would have gone through would have been separation anxiety thus leading into a fearful panic attack that would have had a profound psychological scaring which would reappear a few years later.

As I later grew up into a toddler, separation anxiety began to rule over my life, although I didn’t know it had complete control of me. My mother was always the focus point of my separation anxiety, wherever she went I followed. After raising 3 other children my mother had natural maternal instincts to know when one of her children suffered with emotional distress and anxiety. As a toddler, there two ways to overcome this problem every time it had occurred. Place my favorite teddy in my cot or give me the belt of her blue satin night gown. Either of these 2 things would bring me back down to normal levels where my emotions weren’t out of control. Holding these two material possessions in my arms relieved the horrific tensions that I was in

At the age of 4, my parents had gone out one evening for dinner and we were left with my big sister. Every time my mother had left the house my sister was to take over and I had always looked up to my sister as if she was second mother, a substitute perhaps. My world would crush when my parents stepped out the door to leave the house. I would sit at the front door for nearly 2 whole hours crying for my mummy to come back, but she wouldn’t until the morning. The distinct smell of my mother’s perfume would linger at the door where I was to last see her would provide some level comfort but it was never enough. After emotionally gathering myself together and running out of tears to cry, I would venture down to my parents bedroom and drift off to sleep. I knew exactly where my mum kept her dressing gown belt which was always placed under the bed. I would walk into my parents room, grab the belt off the gown and hug it like a giant pillow and fall asleep at the bottom of the bed – simply waiting for a new dawn to break so that my mother would be sitting at the kitchen table the next morning having her tea and getting my breakfast ready with her beautiful comforting smile.

Even now, as an adult, if I channel my memories hard enough remember these times when my mother would leave the house, I can still feel the crippling emotional turmoil I went through and my s always begin to weep with sadness. I’m just very fortunate these days I can process the emotions behind the separation anxiety.

Learning to sleep in my own bed proved to be somewhat of a difficult challenge as well. Although I could sleep in my own bed, the thought of my mother not being in the same room would often keep me awake and I ended up having to find many different ways to make myself fall asleep. I would walk into my parent’s bedroom in the middle of the night with my pillow and place it down onto the bedroom floor at the bottom of my parent’s bed. There wouldn’t have been any room for me in their bed so I would make myself comfortable on the cold hard wooden floor and doze off into dreamland.

Another example that specifically comes to mind was when I was 5 years old in the 1st grade at school. On a Friday afternoon my father had picked me up from school and drove me to his parent’s house. My dad had a bag packed in the boot with my overnight clothes. It turned out I was to spend a night with my grandparents at their house.

As most children do, I loved my grandparents deeply but the thought of spending a night away from home made me feel as if my whole world was about to crumble. I might have only been staying there for up to 12 hours but to a 5 year old 12 hours can seem like 12 years. From the moment I saw my overnight bag in the boot of the car, tears began flowing, not because I didn’t want to stay with my grandparents but because I couldn’t bear the thought of being away from my mother, I needed her to be close by.

If ever I was sick during the night with my asthma as a child, the only person that had the potential to make me better was my mum. In the shivering cold of one icy winter when I was 4, I woke in the middle of the night with an asthma attack. Not thinking about what would happen I went to wake my mother up out of bed so that my mother could make me better again. My mum had been fast asleep and my father attended to my ill health. He toke me to the kitchen and grabbed me a glass of water and half a tablet to settle my breathing difficulties. The anxiety from that, moment had taken complete control of my brain and nothing existed at this point other than the fact that I so desperately wanted my mum to give me water and tablet. My dad had handed me the glass of water and tablet and because I couldn’t have my mum I tipped the water over the kitchen floor and refused to take it. The only way I would have taken the tablet was if my mother had attended to me. I remember running back to my bedroom crying, feeling so heartbroken and scared because my mother wasn’t there for me. Although I loved my dad, he just didn’t seem to have that connection with me that mother’s have with their sons. Even to this day I feel so terrible what I did to my dad by tipping the water onto the kitchen floor that it breaks my heart. It sort of makes me feel as if I was a rotten child as it would have made things difficult for my father. But as a child in that moment, his feelings were the last thing on my mind and that was incredibly selfish to think of only myself. I regret doing that even to this very day.

From as far back as I can remember I always suffered a heightened sensitivity to noise. One of my worst fears as a child was a raging thunderstorm overhead; hearing the crashing thunder and seeing the blinding flashes of lightening. It wasn’t so much the storm that I was afraid of; it was the crashing sound of thunder.

I believe my fear of thunderstorms stemmed from the afternoon of January 18 1985. This was one of the most violent and costliest thunderstorms Brisbane had ever endured. An apparent tornado had touchdown in the western suburbs of the city causing millions of dollars in damage. I can’t remember the build up of humidity that day but from what I am told by others, who remember this storm clearly, it was one of the most uncomfortable summer days ever and people could apparently feel a huge event was building up in the skies.

My mum used to babysit her best friends 2 daughters; Lucy and Naomi. On the day when the heavens broke loose my mum had been babysitting the two girls. In the afternoon the three of us were sitting on the couch watching cartoons whilst we waited for my brothers and my sister to get home from school. We had been sitting on the couch when the storm arrived. Every second passed with a horrific crash as armageddon set itself upon my house. My mother was never keen on storms and always had somewhat of a fear of thunderstorms herself but on January 18 1985 nobody would have ever guessed that my mum was scared. It felt like the world was coming to an end when flying trees and debris began crashing into the side of the house. My mum had picked up us three kids and moved us to the bathroom and shut the door until the storm had passed. With the sound of flying debris, smashing hail, crashing thunder and flashes of lightening; my fear of thunderstorms and loud noises began. Little did I know that a fear of thunderstorms and loud noises would stay with me for the rest of my life.

During late spring as the weather changed into summer, every year I would begin to panic about the coming months and what the storm season would bring. The thought of crashing thunder day in day out for several months was sometimes too hard to bear. I always knew that thunderstorms couldn’t hurt you, but it was more the loud noise of the thunder that would scare me. I have many vivid memories of sitting in my parent’s bed as a very young child riding out the passing storm until it went away. When I look back now at my fear of thunderstorms, there was also another phobia I had that was probably at the same level as thunderstorms; the fear of not being able to have control. As I aged slightly, I began to realize that I couldn’t control the thunderstorm and that it had the potential to do anything it liked and the fear of not being able to control a thunderstorm was just as scary as the sound of crashing thunder. Perhaps I had control issues, or perhaps I was simply feeling vulnerable deep in my subconscious.

My dad tried to make several attempts to help me get over my fear of thunderstorms. One Saturday night when I was 5 years old a thunderstorm had approached us bringing with it very heavy rainfall and lots of lightening. My dad thought the best strategy for me to learn to cope with my fear was to watch a thunderstorm in two separate stages. The first one would be to watch it from my bedroom window with the lights on and the second would be to watch it from my bedroom window with the lights off. However there was only one way he could entice me to do it. In the fridge my Dad had special yoghurt that my Mum would always buy for him. He had a range of different flavors and I was always attracted to the design on the container. On this Saturday night I had asked my Dad if I could have a yoghurt and the only way Dad would let me have one was if I would watch the storm with him in his suggested stages.

Given that I so wanted to have yoghurt after dinner I gave into Dad’s request and watched the storm with him from my bedroom window. In a very comforting way my dad grabbed my hand and toke me into the bedroom where we sat and watched the lightening with the lights on. We sat on the bed for 2 minutes, even tho it felt a lot longer than this, we stayed and watched the lightening. My breathing began to go erratic and I can remember working up a sweat. The lightening would dance across the sky as I my dad sat there appreciating it and I sat in a state of horrific shock with tears streaming down my face. Even to this day I can still hear his exact words “See it can’t hurt you”. He then proceeded to go over to the light switch to turn it off to commence stage 2. The moment my dad had switched the light off a blinding flash of lightening lit the room followed by the sound of a freight train crashing. The bang was so intense that all the hairs on my body stood up and I ran out of the room screaming looking for Mum. My dad did end up giving me the yoghurt that night; simply because I tried to get over my fear of thunderstorms. Unfortunately I was unsuccessful in eradicating that fear.

Many more storms were to follow throughout my life. Every time the sky changed color or I heard a roll of thunder, panic would set in and it didn’t matter how much I tried to surpress the fear, it always had control over me rather than me having control over it.

One year when I was around the age of 3 or 4, my parents held a bbq with many other families from the neighborhood coming along and of course the extended family. I can’t remember what the occasion was but for some reason I clearly remember a very tall woman with brown hair in a blue dress and her name was Pam. Pam was sitting at the kitchen table talking to my mother while my Dad was down the side of the house with my grandparents and my cousin Mandy and her boyfriend were sitting on the couch watching the premiere of The Never Ending Story. I remember seeing lightening off in the distance when I walked from outside into the living room but that was the last of my fears, I was more frightened of the movie playing. In the movie The Never Ending Story, the beginning part with the rock biter slowly making his way through the forest would scare me and I hid behind the couch while the scene happened. Mandy and her boyfriend thought it was cute and they tried to entice me out from behind the couch. When this part of the movie finished, the storm rolling in from the west had finally hit our neighborhood and it was time to batten down as the storm blew through. Everybody who was downstairs came rushing inside as the rain and wind pelted the side of the house and my mum had closed the front door of the house to stop the rain from coming in.

While I stood watching the commotion of everybody coming back inside the house, a very loud deep rumble of thunder rolled above our house, shaking the foundations. As I started crying from the noise of the storm; Pam told me it was her husband. She said that her husband was a truck driver and that he liked to drive around the block in his truck. At the time I truly believed it but now I learnt it was just a way to try and calm me down. At 4 years of age I didn’t have any solutions to the anxiety issues I faced with loud noises, in particular with thunderstorms but I often wonder if every time I cried and was hugged by an adult, if that increased my anxiety of the storm as I never really learnt how to cope with a thunderstorm until I was in my late teens.

During the summer months of my childhood when many a storm would roll in off the Darling Downs in the middle of the night, my mother would often come in and check on me. If I was lying in bed and a storm came in the middle of the night, I would be hiding under the covers with my fingers buried into my eyes, and then I would feel somebody pulling back the covers. It was always Mum who used to come in and check on me, then bring me into her and Dad’s bed to provide a level of comfort that would take away the fear of the storm.

Not only did I have a fear with thunderstorms but I also had a fear of fireworks. I used to think the sound of fireworks was like somebody letting off a gun next to my head. The flashing colored lights that would dance across the skies during all sorts of celebrations were too pretty to miss for most people, but for me it sent the same level of panic throughout my body as what thunderstorms did. When I was much younger I used to wish that I was deaf. I didn’t mind watching lightening or seeing fireworks but if I was deaf then I wouldn’t have had to worry about thunderstorms and fireworks. Although I loved to watch fireworks, the sound of the bang at the end of each lift off was always the scariest part and every time I sat to watch fireworks I would be waiting in chronic anticipation for the bang to come and go.

In October of every year, the community in my neighborhood put on a group of weekend festivities known as the Jacaranda Festival. It was usually a compilation of artwork done by the various schools in the district with dancing, music, arts, rides and entertainment. At the very end of festivities, the local council always donated fireworks to wind the festivities. With my mum and dad by my side, we all sat down to watch the fireworks. I can still remember how beautiful and pretty they looked and everyone feeling inspired by the many array of different colors but I sat there on my dad’s legs holding my fingers deep into my ears to block out the sound of the crashing fireworks.

Because I had a natural fear of loud noises, I was attempting to block the noise out but as I tried to hold my fingers in ears my father would keep pulling my arms to try and stop me. I can remember him telling me “you’ll never get over your fear if you don’t try and face it”. While that might have been the case but there were certainly many other different ways for me to learn to cope with my fear.

As a human being, I’m certainly not guilty, nor am I innocent; I was just trying to survive. As a very young child the thought of finding ways to cope with fear and anxiety didn’t exist and my parents had no clue at the early stages of my life about the attention and extra support that I needed. Perhaps I was walking alone in a deep ocean of fear without a hand of support, struggling to stay on top of the surface; even though I had somewhat of a lifesaver attached to me; my parents.

Some people always wished that they had some guardian angel to warn them about the future ahead so that they could put in coping strategies prior to the events in the future, but in a way I have always taken comfort in knowing that I never had any indication of what the future would hold. What has happened to me from childbirth until now has made me the person that I am today. I may not be the strongest person living on the planet but everyday is just another way to try and find a new way of coping with day to day life.

I’m certainly no expert when it comes to dealing with parents of autistic children but the only advice that I could give to any parent who’s children might be affected by a strand of autism is to heed the warning signs, access support as soon as possible and flourish the child into a wonderful human being. It may not be noticed as a child, but when adulthood settles in; great things will soon come from the very unique different individual.

During the summer months of the mid 1980’s, our family would take many day trips up to the Sunshine Coast or down to the Gold Coast for a day at the beach to swim in the surf, play with the sand on the beach and have a picnic lunch. Usually this was a great opportunity for my dad and my two brothers to play beach cricket while I built sand castles with my bucket and spade.

While the days were always memorable and as a family, we certainly will never forget them; my parents had to fight tooth and nail just to get to the beach; regardless of how rewarding the day would be.

We walked from the car and through the bush land just to get to the beach which was a few hundred meters away. I would be walking in the middle of mum and dad holding their hands while my brothers and my sister would run several meters in front trying to get to the beach as quickly as they could. As we slowly approached the beach a deep intense, but overwhelming fear of panic would stop me dead in my tracks and I tried to climb up my dad’s shoulders and started screaming at the peak of my lungs. The sound of the waves lapping on the beach caused me to start another panic attack. As with thunderstorms, it was the horrific crashing that always made me feel my world was about to collapse. As we got closer to the beach the stronger the anxiety would be as the crashing and booming of the waves got louder as we got closer. Mum always told me that every single time we went to the beach I would try and run up dad’s shoulders and hold on for dear life, even chocking my poor father to a degree. All that my mum could do was tell me that everything would be okay.

Just like a thunderstorm, my panic would start when the roar would be begin slightly off in the distance, it always reminded me as if something big and nasty was about to come and take me away. In some ways I kind of thought the world enjoyed playing with my mind, especially in summer. Summer was always the worst for me as a child. I was terrified of thunderstorms and terrified of the beach, even the water to a degree and yet at summer time I had endured them constantly.

Even now as an adult, when I go to the beach with my friends, as soon as I began to hear the slightest noise of the roar from the waves lapping the beach, my body freezes for a brief moment, yet I can keep going on. My mind works differently now that I am an adult, I can tell myself it won’t hurt me and I know it’s true. I may not be over the fear of either thunderstorms or the beach, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve just learnt to deal with the anxiety better.

In the winter months of every year, our city comes together in what is known as “The Ekka”. It’s a 10 day event for country folk to come to the city and showcase their cattle breeding, enjoy thrilling rides and have good old fashioned family fun. Every child in Brisbane always got excited at ekka time because of the level of excitement that it would create. Even myself; having a fear with loud noises I too would get excited whenever Mum and Dad were loading up the car to take us kids to the Ekka.

We could always tell when it was Ekka time. The days were cool and brisk and fierce blustery cold winds would blow across the city sending the smell of cooked Dagwood dog’s across the city. Yes it was Ekka time in Brisbane.

Everybody always enjoyed the last few hours of the ekka. This was usually when we all headed down sideshow alley to watch the big rides and enjoy the wood chopping in one of the small arenas. On of my favorite spots were the colored chickens and the cattle in the breeding halls. As we walked towards sideshow alley my Dad had me on his shoulders. I felt like I was sitting on top of the world. I was completely safe with my dad right below me and I could see all the smiling faces of kids getting off the big rides and watching some of the rides in their many beautiful and bright colors shoot high into the sky followed by screams of thrill and pure excitement. What would attract me the most to sideshow alley was all the different colored lights the rides made as they span around, upside down and side ways. In a way the colors put me into a trance as it grabbed my attention the most.

With the biggest smile on my face, we all began walking down sideshow alley. I was very alert to my surroundings and I was eagerly examining every ride that we passed. But within an instant, that was about to change.

I could see a dark a red house up in front with grey and black flashes happening on the outside. On the side, stood a skeleton echoing its evil laughter as people entered the haunted house. On top of the house was a fake window and a little red devil would pop out and rub his pitchfork as if he was conjuring up an evil demon or spell. The stand was so well put together that the little devil that popped out of the window had tiny steely grey eyes that you could see off in the distance, and the eyes moved.

As soon as my eyes made contact with the devil, I started screaming and begging for my dad to turn around, but he wouldn’t, he just kept going. As we got closer to the house I could feel the beat from the music was pulsating in my blood and I simply had to get out of there. From the top of my lungs I screamed, with such fear driving me I nearly made myself sick. My dad knew I was scared but I can’t work out why he kept going. Dad, why did you keep going? You knew I was scared.

Imagine seeing a tiny little boy with sandy blonde hair and laughing blue eyes filled with tears while those little eyes look all around for something to make them feel okay. Is it right to let a little boy feel so vulnerable? I remember I needed somebody to hug me but I was on top of my dad’s shoulders and there was nobody tall enough to reach me and give me a hug to make me feel better. The only person that was at my level was the devil at the window of the house and he was just about at my side as we approached. When I look back at that moment now, I have many mixed emotions about it. As I sit here writing this part my eyes have filled with tears. Is it because I’m sad or is it because I was such a cry baby? I don’t know why I’m crying at this part. I guess it’s because I felt so vulnerable at the time that it’s still left a permanent psychological scar embedded in my memory. In more ways I was somewhat angry at my dad for not turning around, he persisted in walking past the haunted house. I guess that’s where myself and my father have always had our differences. Our approaches on how to deal with fear and anxiety are very different. His way of thinking was to always just throw yourself into the fear and try and swim – my opinion was has always been “approach with caution:”

Because my brothers and sister were much bigger than me, they could always brave the big rides, and although I enjoyed watching the rides I wasn’t old enough to go on them. Instead my dad had taken me to the part of sideshow alley for toddlers. This part of sideshow alley was filled with magical rides like the carousel, small pirate ship and the tea cups and I used to think that I had entered the fairytale of some children’s storybook due to the magical colors and excitement that filled the air at this part of sideshow alley. We found a ride that my dad thought might have been suitable for me to sit down and enjoy. I can’t remember the name but it was a giant pool of water that had small boats in it and the boats would float around the pool for 5 minutes. There were all sorts of colored boats from red to blue to green and pink. I can still remember wanting to get into the red boat. As my dad had lifted me up into the air to place me into the boat, unknowingly why, I began screaming at the top of my lungs as my dad started to raise me into the boat. I can clearly remember seeing the little boat float on the water that appeared to be a bottomless ocean. What if the boat had capsized, I couldn’t swim so would I have been able to survive? Well any person in their right mind would think “yes, what are you stupid?” But the truth was I never knew that I had a fear of water. Until that day at the Brisbane Ekka.

As an adult I instantly know what causes my panic and anxiety attacks to go off, I’ve learnt growing up what I can and can’t handle. As an adult I live every day trying to avoid whatever situation that would result in an anxiety or panic attack. But as a child you have no idea what these factors are and the only way to find out where the boundaries are in the comfort zone of a child is to just simply live life and see where how far those boundaries can be stretched. To me, I was simply being myself as a child given that I didn’t know any different but from my parents perspective, I often wonder if I was too much of a needy and codependent child, if this is the case I am yet to apologize.

My fear of loud noises continued to be a disturbance in my life as a child. The sound of a lawnmower shredding through the oversized grass in the backyard used to be like a thousand nails stabbing me in the ear drum. When I was much younger and began to display reactions to noise, my mother would always need to calm my anxiety down whenever the lawnmower was switched on. In my early days when I was still sleeping, dad would go under the house and retrieve the lawnmower to cut the grass, the moment he switched it on and began working the mower over the lawn I would wake up in a horrific state of shock from the sound of the lawnmower, this apparently persisted for a number of a months until my mother had lifted me up to the front window to show me that Dad was working the lawnmower. Whenever I saw dad working the lawnmower, I would calm back down to a peaceful state of mind.

As I have become older I still have an issue with loud noises. At my work, some tradesmen are building a footbridge to link the city with the south bank parklands and for every few hours, every day for the last month there has been constant banging as they thump the concrete pylons into the river. While this banging happens I can’t concentrate on my work and I’ve ended up making a few mistakes. Every now and again I have to get out of the office and go for a walk around the block as the anxiety from the sound sends a thousand needles down my body. Even tho I know what the sound is and where it comes from, the only way to make the anxiety dissapate is to use some form of coping skills but I need to be careful how I exercise these coping skills – I wouldn’t want my work colleagues knowing what my problem is.


Chapter 2

The Age of Innocence


From the age of 3 upwards when certain behavior patterns become very much known to my parents, my mother had always said I was very particular to whom I responded too. There were 3 people in my childhood that I would always respond too given their position in my life. Those people were my mother, my grandmother and my sister. I always saw my sister like my second mum. If ever mum wasn’t around to give me the attention that I needed or yearned for, I would go to my sister who could somehow fill that missing void. I have a very clear memory of one hot summer night when a thunderstorm had rolled in about 2 am and as usual I was trying to hide away from the storm by burying myself under the covers with my fingers blocked into my ears. My mum had picked me up and had taken me into my sister’s bedroom where I slept in her bed for the rest of the night. The comfort of knowing my sister was there always made the fear disappear and when you have somebody in your life that can make any fear or anxiety disappear, it’s a natural thought process to want to keep them in your life.

Even tho I saw my sister as a second mother, there were numerous occasions when she would make fun of me for the hell of it. One Saturday afternoon my sister and her best friend had put a dress on me and covered my face in make up, changing me from a male to a female and they walked me down to the shops. From recollection of my memory, I recall having a pearl necklace on and blue eye shadow. Now as an adult I would probably see this as detrimental to a child but in all honesty, the thought of this rather hilarious. My sister had always said that people around the shops had come up to my sister and said that she had a beautiful little sister. Little to their knowledge I was actually a little boy. My sister always had a number of friends come to our house for sleep over’s and I can always remember being invited to play with my sister and her friends. Because I didn’t have any other friends I remember vividly being able to just be me – a child who might be a bit strange but loved to enjoy myself. I even recall one time in summer when I was playing under the sprinkler and my sister and her best friend Renee came out to play under the sprinkler with me. There were a number of friends that my sister had as a child and I got along with all of them. Perhaps my lack of social skills was just not clearly visible at this stage of my life. On Christmas Eve of 1990 my older brother and me had woken up in the middle of the night and were talking about the Christmas presents we were hoping to get. Despite the excitement of Christmas, the heat from a typical summer night had made us incredibly thirsty and we both needed water. My sister had heard us make a move out to the kitchen and she followed us. All 3 of us slowly crept down the hallway, ever so quite so that we did not disturb our parents. As we approached the living room we could see all the Christmas presents sitting under the tree and the feeling of excitement certainly lightened up the room. My sister had taken us into the kitchen got me and my brother of glass of water with ice in it. Even tho we didn’t need somebody else to do this for us, it must have just been a natural reaction for her to just get the water and ice for us.

Perhaps my sister always had a natural maternal instinct when it came herself and her brothers. Her presence always managed to fill the void of when our mother was not around, especially for me.

I always found my sister very hard to interpret; from my perspective there were many mixed messages from her non-verbal behavior. Having said that, I’ve always known that I could go to her for absolutely anything.

Whenever my sister talks or describes something that I need to do, I always interpret this as her going off at me for something, and when I am in her presence, my natural reaction is to always feel like I am much smaller than her, even tho I know I’m not. My sister is not the type of person I can explain my deep dark secrets too, but she certainly is somebody that I know I can go to for help if and when I need it. It’s a very strange relationship that I share with my sister because although we are close, part of my brain holds back when I communicate with her. It’s probably because I give her the same respect that I give my mother.

On July 21 1997 my sister gave birth to a beautiful baby girl with laughing blue eyes and reddish brown hair. Since then our family life has never been more fulfilling. My little niece was and always will be the centre of my world and she gives off a special light into my family, one that is certainly irreplaceable. However when I found out my sister was first pregnant, part of me had died that die. Because I used to see my sister as my second mother, that feeling had died because there were would be some other child now who needed my sister more than what I did. While it is true to say I felt strong feelings of jealousy about the new baby coming into this world, my main fear was that my sister wouldn’t be there for me anymore because the new baby would need her more than what I did.

My brain began to process the thought of accepting the fact that my sister was no longer there for me. While this was the basic assumption that I made on my own I didn’t realize how things would actually turn out as life unfolded. For 9 whole months I asked myself this question on a daily basis: “If my sister can’t be there for me anymore when my mum is not around, who do I go to?” In fear of looking like a fool, I never did ask my sister this question. Although I don’t regret not asking, I often wondered what the answer would have been. Perhaps deep in my subconscious I always knew what the answer was but I probably just needed to hear it from her own mouth.

As I began to grow older from a child into my teenage years, I began to interpret my sister in a much more complex way. I’m still not sure if she got more complex in communicating or if I just toke on a different perspective when I was around her.

In the early morning hours of July 21 1997, my parents arrived home from the Ipswich hospital. As the icy mood of that cold winter’s morning gripped the house, I wondered into my parent’s bedroom as they got into bed. I simply asked “what did she have?” With a proud grin that went from ear to ear my mother softly said “a beautiful baby girl”. I didn’t quite know what to think but as I went back to my bed to sleep I began crying. I hadn’t cried like that in such a long time that the top of my bed sheets were absolutely soaked from the tears that gushed from eyes. I didn’t know if I was happy about a new baby coming into our family or if perhaps that was the end of the close relationship that I shared with my sister. If it was the end of our relationship, then at least those natural maternal instincts my sister so deeply posses, at least it was going onto a new baby girl who deserved all the love and attention in the world.

Late that afternoon my parents picked me up from school and drove me to the Ipswich hospital so I could meet my baby niece for the first time. I quietly walked up the hospital hallway, not quite knowing what to think but I was about to meet a new family member for the first time. For 15 years I had always been the youngest member of my family and now there somebody below me.

I walked up to the white curtain that was drawn across my sister’s hospital bed. Without even thinking about what I was doing, it was if some greater force had control over me at this point and was directing me where to go. The curtain was drawn back by mum and I sat down on the hospital bed. I couldn’t see the little baby sitting in the hospital cot nor could I hear her but I knew the new baby was there. My sister picked up her newborn and placed her in my arms for the very first time.

The world around me had suddenly gone out the window. The horror and fear from school and the bullies suddenly didn’t exist; all that was alive at that moment in time was life’s pure gift sitting in my arms. A very warm and peaceful feeling had taken hold of me and I looked down at this precious baby girl curled up in my arms with her little arms huddled in. Although she looked so vulnerable my instant reaction was to provide a warm and safe place of comfort in my arms for this wonderful little girl that was pleasantly sleeping in my arms. In the very heart of the moment I didn’t worry about how this would have affected the relationship I had with my sister, all I wanted to make sure was that I could be as close to her as possible and always look out for her.

As time evolved and I got used to the fact that I had a beautiful little niece, the worrying about what kind of relationship I would now have with my sister eventually faded over time. Things never really changed and although I spent 9 months worrying about it; it never really happened. Perhaps what I perceived and thought didn’t hold true and at the end of the day, I was just worried over nothing. Although the relationship I had with my sister did scare me as too which way it would go, I never discussed it with her and I probably should have, otherwise I wouldn’t have spent 9 months mentally preparing myself to grieve for something that was never really going to leave anyway. Now that I am an adult and my beautiful little niece is almost a teenager, my relationship with my sister is still the same as it was many years ago and the only thing I’ve learnt from this event is that I know she’ll always be there for me as she always has been and that my perception of looking at her like a second mum is still the same.

Around the age of 3 years old, my mother had noticed a sharp change in my eating patterns. From the age of 3 I couldn’t chew food. Some of my earliest memories of my bad eating habits came to my mind only a short time ago. I can remember one night, well before I commenced at pre-school, sitting at the kitchen table with the family eating dinner. Mum had cooked up mashed potato, beans, carrots and diced beef. Eating my vegetables was always okay but when it came to eating the diced beef I couldn’t eat it. I can remember having to sit there and just chew, chew and chew the food until it was gone but the more I chewed the more it tasted horrible as my mouth filled with saliva drowning out the flavor. So, being the child that I was I pulled it out of my mouth and told mum that I couldn’t eat the meat because it was filled with bones. At the time I thought that was a very reasonable excuse not to eat but now when I think about it; it was such a story yet at the time I believed my parents had fell for my excuse.

I never had any idea why my eating habits changed as I got older, I never gave it any thought, and I really just assumed that’s how I was. On one occasion I when I was very young I can clearly remember sitting in the living room and totally refusing to eat what my mum had put out on the dinner table. I’m sure my parents would have been somewhat angry that I refused to eat dinner but I can remember mum giving me dry rice bubbles and spaghetti put into a green bowl and I sat on the living room floor and happily ate what was put in front of me. At the time I was very happy but when I think about this instance in my adulthood, I’ve become quite upset over the situation because I know that I would have caused my parents worry and anger about my refusal to eat certain foods. As a child I just flavor over what was healthy for me. Although I am not a parent I can totally understand why parents get upset with their children when they refuse to eat and knowing quite well that I would have upset them by acting this way as a child; it is very upsetting to think that I hurt my parents but this was probably just one of those many situations where my Asperger’s as child had more control over me rather me having control over the Asperger’s. To my parents; I apologise for causing heartache and distress when it came time to feed me as a child.

There were many foods that I remember not wanting to eat when I was younger. Most of these foods I can eat now as adult but when I was younger it was totally a different story. As a child I refused to eat mashed potatoes, stew, soups, beef, chops and a number of other things. Even today as adult I still refuse to eat potatoes or bananas and I have never been a fan of stews and soups to this day. Now, when I eat potatoes or bananas, the squishy and mushy feeling of this food in my mouth seems to make feel like I am going throw up so I can’t even put these foods anywhere near my mouth.

Today when I cook for myself, most of my meals are still very bland. As I am a very routine based person I tend to cook the same foods every day. Usually my diet consists of lamb chops with steamed vegetables – without the potato, chicken stir fry or sausages with vegetables. While I get the regular intake of fresh vegetables, I don’t like the thought of learning to cook other things and I only stick with what I know when it comes to preparing food. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I get bored eating the same foods all the time but by cooking these same foods everyday I know what is going into my system and that’s what is the most important thing to me.

I’ve shared homes with a number of different people and I’ve never really adapted to their cooking. In my last relationship my partner had a real passion for cooking, especially exotic international dishes. One night when I came home from work my partner had cooked up an Indian dish. When the plate was put in front of me my first reaction was “who threw up on this plate”. I watched him dig right into the meal, absorbing every bit flavor in the food while I sat there staring at my plate for 5 minutes. My partner knew that I stuck with very bland meals but I was begged to at least try it. I somehow managed to eat everything on the plate but after several hours later the food didn’t agree with me and I begged my partner to never make another international dish for me again. I was probably so sick from the food because my body wasn’t used to having different spices go through my system. Well it was either that or I had some mild form of food poisoning.

My eating habits have no doubt had a major impact on my life in terms of what foods I eat today, however I want to apologise to my parents if I made them upset when I was younger. I know now it was unnecessary stress that I put them through and for that I am deeply sorry.

In my much younger days, my mum used to babysit her girlfriends 2 daughters while their mother went to work. Her daughter’s name was Lucy and Naomi. I don’t remember when my mum started babysitting the two girls but I do that I formed a very close relationship with Lucy and she was probably one of the very first people in my lifetime that I made a friendship with. There were many days before I started preschool where we would sit on the living room floor watching the morning cartoons or playing with toys in front of the television.

Although I didn’t have my own bedroom, I always shared it with my older brothers; when they were at school I could call the bedroom my own room. I had lots of great toys when I younger like a massive model aero plane collection, huge set of matchbox cars with the streets on a plastic map and of course lego blocks. My matchbox cars and play mats were my favorite toys as a child. It was a game I could always play on my own where I didn’t need anybody to compete with.

One morning Lucy had came in to play with me. She walked in uninvited and began playing with me. Immediately I started kicking and screaming in a huge rage of emotional anger. My mum said she had coming rushing down to the bedroom only to find that I was throwing this around the room while my face was glowing red. Lucy hadn’t done anything wrong to me, but she had invaded my personal space – uninvited.

Perhaps this was the first sign that something was not quite right when it came to my social relationships. I had always seemed to have gotten along with other kids totally okay. I always played with the friends of my other siblings and was close to my cousin who was the same age. Although I was too young to recall, I am pretty sure there would have been more than one occasion when this incident happened. It’s not that I didn’t want to play with Lucy, in fact I remember enjoying having her around, and it was more of the fact that my personal space had been invaded by an uninvited person.

As an adult my personal space is extremely important and those who know me to the bone know very well not to invade that space. It could have also been that this incident was the first sign where I started to learn how important my personal space was. My personal space had always been my own little comfort zone where I could let any level of emotion flow free with repercussions. In any other normal child when they were playing alone, I’m sure if another child joined in the other child would just accept it and they would both continue to play freely but with me it had the opposite effect.

I commenced pre-school in 1987, and we used to always play with toys from what I can recall. Once a week we played pass the parcel and I always watched the other kids rip a sheet of paper off the parcel. One time when we played and the parcel had got to me I started to rip the paper off the parcel because I wanted to have a go. It seemed like everyone else got a chance to rip the paper off the parcel and I wanted to have a go. As soon as I began to unwrap everyone started screaming “no” at me and suddenly everyone was looking at me. The feeling was very embarrassing because at the time I didn’t remember that it was your go to rip the paper from the parcel when the music stopped. Perhaps here when I first started to learn how to socalise on a much larger scale, that the very early signs of Asperger’s syndrome became visible.

From memory, one particular day at pre-school stands out in my mind. During one cold winter’s morning of 1987 all the kids had congregated on the carpet for show and tell. At the end of show and tell I can recall the teacher allowing everyone to have 15 minutes free time where we all had to team up with 3 other kids and pick a toy from the toy box. It had to be one toy per group. Even tho I quite clearly heard the teacher’s instructions, my instincts had taken over and I walked up to the toy box by myself and grabbed a toy all for me. Without making any effort to team up with anybody I sat alone on the mat and played with one toy all by myself. I probably looked like a lonely child but I knew that I was perfectly happy sitting by myself playing with the one toy. However I do recall the teacher coming up to me and asking if I wanted to join the other children, I think I politely declined.

My teachers must have observed changes in my behavior and how I related to the other children in my class. The teachers had become rather concerned with my social interaction skills with the other children and had advised my mother to make an appointment so that the mum and my teacher could sit down and have a chat about my persistent choice to play in isolation. Looking back at these events now, I can honestly say it wasn’t a choice to play in isolation, as a 4 year old you simply do whatever comes natural. If only the medical profession was aware of Asperger’s syndrome at this time during the 1980’s then perhaps my teachers would have been able to implement better techniques to try and get me to socialize with the other children more. At 4 years of age I was doing what naturally came to my mind and little did I know that the adults in my life were beginning to get concerned with my life.

Prior to me, my mother gave birth to three other children. 2 boys and 1 girl. My brothers and my sister were all very sociable and outgoing people. From the time that I was born right up until they all moved out of home, we always had people come over to play with my brothers and my sister. My sister usually had her girlfriends stay over on weekends while my brothers were out the back playing cricket with the other boys from around the neighborhood.

On one beautiful summer’s afternoon I followed my 2 brothers and their friends down to the park which was at the bottom of our street. I can’t remember if I was invited or if I asked to go with them. None the less I followed the older boys down to the bottom of the park. A new slide had been constructed which was bigger and better than the old one and everyone was eager to give it a go. We all raced off down the street, all competing with each other to see who could get to the slide first. I happened to have come last at this race and unfortunately I missed out on getting a chance to have a go on the slide. So I decided to go over to the swings and sit and watch the older boys play on the slide while I sat on the swings until they were ready to go home. I do remember feeling somewhat disappointed, because had I been able to run faster than I would have been noticed by my brother’s friends and I could have joined in on their game; however that was not to be. As I grew up, this was not the last instance where I was forgotten about, I didn’t know it at the time but there were many more times just like this that I would have to face in my life. Because now that I am an adult, my social interaction skills have become somewhat predictable and when I’m faced with social interaction, I can’t help but become the “quite observer” by sitting back and analyzing the crowd around. I’m still trying to work out if that’s through force of habit from my days as a 4 year old or if it’s some sort of protection that I have to mentally and emotionally protect myself from embarrassment.

As time had progressed by through my pre-school and primary schooling, all my teachers through one way or another had some dealings with my parents about my lack of inability to social or choosing to remain isolated from the other kids in my school. My mum had known that things weren’t quite right as my brothers and my sister had been the total opposite of what I am when it came to choosing friends or socializing with other people. Mum had begun to put a lot of blame on herself about these instances and she truly believed that she failed in her part as a mother. I do often wonder if other mums of asperger children feel that they have failed in their role as a parent too, however looking at myself today with the values and beliefs that I presently hold, I can honestly say that there was simply no way that both of my parents had failed in raising me correctly. While it’s true that each child learns to make up their own mind and develop their own true identity, my parents have had a major impact in my life when it came to developing my own identity and I feel nothing but pride for how they have shaped me become the person that I am today.


Chapter 3
Make Me Normal


I looked in the mirror that morning as I got ready for school, I didn’t recognize the young boy looking back at me. Sure I’ve seen him all my life every time I go near the mirror, I mean I grew up with this guy so I should have the common sense to know who he is but I don’t.

There’s only one thing in common I have with the puzzled stranger looking back at me: Same physical appearances.

At 14, I guess I have become pretty concrete in my ways. I need lots of routine and my day needs to be very well defined and structured. I always try and make sure that every event that is to take place in my day happens within my strict schedule.

Each morning I wake up at 6.45am, eat breakfast until 7.00am, shower and get dressed for school until 7.15am, then its cartoons on the breakfast shows until 7.30am and then its time to talk down to the train station for the 8.00am train. No doubt that my routine sounds very anal retentive but it needs be, otherwise a wave of anxiety and chronic panic attacks with sweat outbreaks can occur, and right before class, this is the last thing I need. I make very good use of my time when I walk to the train station each morning; this is a time for me to mentally prepare myself for the day ahead and attempt to get ready to conquer the repercussions from my peers for wanting to sit in the library and read books at lunch.

So many thoughts go through my head at this point in the mornings and I try and examine every possible avenue to minimize conflict with the other kids in school. I certainly couldn’t use any force of physical violence and I’m not one to mentally challenge somebody when its time to stand my ground. The easiest way for me to deal with the conflict is to keep quite, don’t make eye contact and stare only at the ground allowing my mind to search for answers to questions that have been designed to have no set answer.

It’s certainly a beautiful Tuesday winter’s morning. Just as I’m approaching the train station the warmth of the morning sun seems to provide some level of comfort and self satisfaction, it’s giving me hope that I’m going to have an enjoyable day and go to bed with a smile later tonight. It was like the warmth from the sun covered me with confidence within myself to face any challenge that could arise today. My confidence suddenly came at an accelerating pace so I marched off over the bridge and onto the train platform. Yes, I’m ready for a brand new day.

I was really of the opinion that if I felt confident and happy, then I looked it and that somehow I would beam like ray of sunshine onto other people. My mum had always told me that when you feel good you look good and that good vibes rub off onto others and can attract the most amazing of people. Wow, if this is really the case this could also be the perfect opportunity to grow socially and make a real friend. I’ve never had a real friend before, just people I hang out with from time to time so if today’s events would turn out this way, what a wonderful world we live in.

“I see trees of green, red roses too, I see em bloom, for me and for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world”

I lined up for my Geography class and, as I always do, I sat out the front of the classroom door waiting for the teacher to come and let us into the room. With so much commotion going on between all the other students it was so hard to make sense of what everyone was talking about, sure it sounded like gibberish but they were all discussing a wide variety of sports and television shows from the night before. I quietly sat there on the floor outside the door reading my geography text book, unknowingly hiding myself away from the world that my classmates were caught up in. It wasn’t that I deliberately chose to hide away from their world; it was just the content of their conversations. The boys were discussing tackle moves from the latest rugby match and imitating their favorite players. Their choice of conversation certainly didn’t strike my attention. None the less, there’ still them and there was me still overwhelmed by the comfort from the early morning sun I decided to keep reading.

“Brendan, your sitting on my bag” said Anne-Marie in a sharp tone. Her bag was next to me but I certainly wasn’t sitting on it. In a very subdue manner I told her that I wasn’t sitting on her bag and I continued to read my geography text book. I was trying to memorize all 52 states of North America. My head was buried so far into my book that I couldn’t see what was actually going on around me. Anne-Marie had kicked my leg whilst clenching her teeth. The confidence that so wonderfully overwhelmed me earlier began to fade at the speed of light and I could feel myself emotionally shrinking. At this pointed all I wanted to do was lock myself in a cage where it was safe. Funny how one small negative display of behavior can knock your confidence out at extreme levels. Some people would call that weak and perhaps to a degree I think that’s true.

The commotion from all the classmates was reaching its peak, and Anne-Marie slowly bent over, pushed my book down with her hands and glared at me directly in the eye and said “Move off my damn bag you stupid idiot” My brain didn’t automatically tell me how to handle this situation, and so like I’ve always done, I’ve just given in and I got up moved to the railing instead. I know I really wanted to stand my ground, and really say what I thought, but there would have been so many repercussions associated with that, but how do I stand my ground without looking like a fool? I just couldn’t do it and where ever there is conflict; my mind seems to race away way before I can catch up with it.

I stood on the side of the railing, turned my back on the people I was sitting next too and focused my attention on the crows playing in the nearby rubbish bins. When conflict arises it’s very crucial that I focus my attention elsewhere as it’s an attempt to try and discourage any sort of violence from occurring. The crows certainly looked like they were having fun playing in the rubbish bins. Part of me wishes I was one of those crows, or perhaps some kind of bird. If ever a war of conflict fired up I could always spread my wings and fly away but being the human being that I am I feel so grounded and trapped.

“What’s the stupid text book you’re reading Brendan?” Anne-Marie asked. I slowly turned around to her and said in monotone “Atlas of North America” without making any sort of eye contact and staring directly at the ground. Suddenly without warning I think I just got run over by a truck and I struggled to stand up stand up straight whilst my eyes attempted to roll back in my head. The laughter from all the other classmates was piercing. It felt like their laughter were a series of bow and arrow’s being shot directly into my body piercing the bone sending sharp pains all over me. Anne-Marie had used her iced up water bottle to smack me across the side of the face at an accelerating speed, probably faster than a speeding comet because I certainly didn’t see it coming. Now the Asperger’s was to take over and handle the situation. I stood there simply laughing at her saying “Didn’t hurt”. I can still hear other classmates yelling “good going” and “do it again”. By the time realization had occurred of what just happened the geography teacher came wondering down and it was time to get into the classroom.

The teacher had given us a quiz to take in the classroom. The silence in the classroom was certainly deafening and you could hear a pin a drop as things were ever so still. Everyone was busy focusing on answering all the questions on the paper. I think the only person in the classroom that didn’t care was me. I was too busy staring out the window still focused on the crows playing in the rubbish bins. At this point the crows played such a significant part of myself being able to keep it together, had the crows not been playing in the rubbish bins what else could I focus on, I certainly wasn’t up for the geography quiz now. So much sunlight had lit up the classroom, and although it was beautifully warm, the comfort of confidence I was overwhelmed with earlier, made the sunlight icy cold. I used up every piece of strength I had to fight back the tears that so desperately wanted to flow from eyes. Every few seconds I kept on squeezing my eye lids to absorb the tears.

I simply couldn’t understand why this happened. Sure Anne-Marie and I had never actually spoken to each other but I didn’t see that as a reason to hit me. Perhaps I always gave off a presence of extreme vulnerability without being aware of it and that people liked to play on that. The biggest question that always went through my mind from this day was “I never did anything to hurt you so why did you want to hurt me”?

I always liked to thing I’m a nice person, I think I’m pretty intelligent and can be a fun person too but I don’t understand why people never gave me a chance at this. Was it because I spoke different, was it because I look different or was it because I’m just me? Who knows but after this incident I honestly felt it happened simply because I existed.

People always say kids at school can be so cruel and while that may be the case, the biggest shame that exists today is that this cruelty can leave very deep emotional scaring which for some people, that just simply never heals. Just because somebody is slightly different, that’s no reason to beat them up is it? If it is I don’t understand that and I probably never will.

I’m 14, and I know all to well I’m so different to the rest of my peers. And here’s my reason why. I’ve got the maturity of somebody who’s 30 but behavioral characteristics of somebody who’s only 10. So there’s a level of extreme on both sides and I seem to fit in the middle of the extremes. My peers display the maturity level of somebody at the age of 14 along with behavioral characteristics of somebody at 14, that’s an equal match. They relate to others due to this balance and share common interests with those around them, but not me. I’m sitting on a different scale at different levels never quite balancing out to that of my peers. Could this be the reason why I’ve been bullied at school? Nobody asked to be like this, and like everyone else in this world, I’d like a friend too that I can connect with, but other 14 year olds appear to be existing in an entirely different world. How come I’m living in a separate world?

Ω

It was time for the next class. Health & Physical Education. Anything that related to sport had totally lost of interest. We all stood in the middle of the school oval with the entire class gathered in a small crowd. I quietly stood on the outside of the crowd ensuring the distance was kept between me and everyone else in the class. Mr. Harrison was getting the class ready to play a few rounds of soccer. I stood on the side line of the crowd trying to slow down a racing heartbeat. I could feel panic set in and I began playing with hands looking up at the clear blue sky. Once again, attempting to focus my attention elsewhere during a state of anxiety. Mr. Harrison’s aim was for everyone to join up in groups of 3, throw a soccer ball in the air and for somebody to catch the ball and kick it back to their to the other members in the group.

Everybody disbursed into their groups of 3 and I was left standing on my own. This came to no surprise because I used to being left out and in a way I preferred too but Mr. Harrison assigned me to 2 other guys in the group. As it turns out they weren’t the easiest of guys to get along with. Stephen obviously came from a rough background and enjoyed playing rugby with an extreme level of tackle and Colin often loved imitating his favorite boxer. Stephen kicked the soccer ball into the air with such force the ball went at least a mile high into the air and Colin quickly dashed off down the school oval to catch the ball. Colin put such force behind his leg to kick the ball that it went flying back to Stephen and vice versa. Alone I stood watching the ball bounce back and forth whilst playing with my hands. Stephen grunted “Brendan” and raised the ball with both hands over his head shot the ball down the oval. It was my turn to catch the ball and had to show these guys I was actually worth something when it came to performing. So I sped off like lightning down to the other end of the oval to catch the ball. Whilst running at the speed of the light I could hear a crowd laughing but I just assumed they were laughing at other people.

I eventually caught up with the ball and stopped it from going any further. I had to look around for Stephen and Colin so I could kick the ball back to them but they had disappeared and I discovered what all the laughter was about.

It must have looked like I was standing on a theatre stage presenting stand-up comedy. One side of the oval there was me and at the other end there was the entire class pointing and laughing, some other kids even crossed their arms over their stomachs in fits of laughter. The joke had been how I was running to get the soccer ball.

When normal people run they bend their elbows in the form of a jogger and hold their heads up high breathing in the air to keep them going pushing all force into the legs. I ran in a way that came only natural to me. I pushed all force into my legs to give me my running strength and ran with my arms stretched out as wide as they would go occasionally skipping steps rather than running. I probably looked as if I was running to hug somebody. However my classmates found this utterly amusing and they enjoyed a comic relief at my expense whilst I stood on a podium of vulnerability trying to mentally process what just happened. My eyes couldn’t stay focused, they kept on shifting from side to side and without realizing it, I dropped the ball to quickly play with my hands. The panic felt like a thousand needles stinging my face and the sweat that I had worked up felt like a bucket of ice was thrown all over me. I wasn’t able to stop trembling or stop playing with my hands. The school bell rang for the next class and it was time to leave, had the bell not rang for the next class I’m not sure how long I would have been frozen standing in the one spot. The other classmates calmed down and hurried off to class and I slowly picked up the ball, paced myself with my head hanging low and slowly walked up to get my bag.

I didn’t feel as if I wanted to cry this time, so many things went through my head at that time, that there really weren’t any words to describe it. In a way I was kind of used to being laughed at, I guess this came from recent swimming carnivals, but I enjoyed swimming too much to let their laughter bother me. Although I was not one to enjoy a game of sport, what mattered the most to me was being able to kick and catch a ball the same way as everyone else.

Several times I watched Colin and Stephen rush to catch the ball and kick it, I focused my energy on watching how they kicked and ran for the ball, ever so hard attempting to act how they do and try to fit it. From several observations it looked easy and I thought if I could put into practice their movements then I would look the same when I go to catch and kick the ball; however this was not to be. When I ran to get the ball something had full control over my body to present an obscure posture, and although I couldn’t control it, I certainly wasn’t aware of how I looked. The entire time of running to get the ball I honestly thought I looked just like them, normal. But I wasn’t, and some greater force made me look foolish and I was completely powerless to stop it.

Ω

Ms Allen was a great Modern History teacher. Every time she walked into the classroom she graced the room with such presence and certainly made Modern History an enjoyable subject. Her abilities as a teacher to work well with a diverse range of teachers made it easy for everybody to maintain interest in the classroom. Modern History is a particularly favorite subject of mine as it deals with so many events in history that seems to spark my interest.

I never really presented a high IQ in most of my subjects at school but for some reason or another, I excelled at Modern History. In the first part of the school year my brain was able to read a summary of events about a particular issue we would study in class and it would stay in memory. Without attempt, I read the 5 year leap program in China based from Mau Si Tong and the series of events seemed to stick in my brain like glue. Naturally, being able to so rapidly absorb this information worked in my favor when it came to exam time.

I was still very much alone in the classroom but I didn’t care, I had access to a wealth of knowledge to learn from that whatever my classmates thought of me at this time, I simply didn’t care.

The end of the school semester was fast approaching and Ms Allen offered everyone a chance to study their own area of interest that related to Modern History. I decided to focus on the life and times of the Victorian/Edwardian British Royal Family ruling over the British Empire – The land where the sun never sets.

What an opportunity this was for me, not only did I want to learn more about this area of interest but I already had developed a high level of fascination with this topic and often when I sat in the library alone at lunch to read, I would hunt down any book I could find relating to the British Empire at the turn of the 20th century.

So much had I already learnt about this, that I could talk for at least 3 to 4 hours on this topic alone. I was able within 5 to 10 minutes draw a complete family tree of Kind Edward VI and Queen Alexandra outlining every single family connection the British Empire had to other crowned heads of Europe. My brain held such fine detail from dates of birth to dates and causes of death, dates of coronations, scandals and world turning events that impacted the royal family and lead up to the disintegration of the British Empire. I had one aim with my area of topic for Modern History, and that was to prove to my other classmates I wasn’t as dumb as what they thought I was. I truly believed that I was somebody of importance and this was the perfect opportunity to present my importance to other people.

Across a 6 week period I spent every single lunch break sitting in the library hunting down every book I could find on the British royal family and trying to piece as much information together as possible. My mind never worked out what I wanted to say on my essay, my fingers always did the work for me. Id go hunting for the materials and my hands did all the work, I always imagined that I had tiny brains in the end of my finger tips and that my knowledge came from there and not the brain in my head because my fingers always seemed to work harder than my brain when it came to writing about the British royal family.

It was now about 3 weeks before the essays on our chosen topics were due. Ms Allen went around the class and asked the other students to say what they were choosing to write about. There was a wide variety of different topics people were writing about. Some students chose the Vietnam War, others chose World War 2 and another student even chose the American Civil War. Eventually it was my turn to speak. In a very soft mono-tone I replied “The British Royal Family at the turn of the 20th century” A number of students raised their eyebrows at me and others tried holding back from laughter, I didn’t know how to react but begin vigorously playing with my hands and look at everyone’s reactions around me. Before the panic attacks could set it, Ms Allen said “Oh my goodness that’s fantastic” and a deafening silence filled the classroom. Ms Allen appeared to be really impressed, and I had her encouragement to continue with the topic so I guess it didn’t really matter what the other students thought of me, but in a way I couldn’t help it.

For the last 3 weeks I worked solidly during my lunch break and on my weekends researching, reading, writing and drawing timelines and diagrams to present with my essay, I sure made use of this opportunity to pull out every fine detail out of my brain and present it on paper.

My grades at school certainly varied from subject to subject. I was placed in the lowest level of Mathematics for starters, and I just couldn’t seem to grasp basic mathematical concepts, whenever the maths teacher went on about algebra, fractions, percentages and long division my attention span would snap and I couldn’t concentrate, it was as if the teacher was speaking in an entirely different language. As soon as we moved on to Geometry and Trigonometry, I was able to absorb all the fine details by reading the text just once. I could never fully understand why I couldn’t get a handle on subtractions but yet I’d fly through Geometry with flying colors. That always seemed to be the way with my learning, I’d both pass a subject and develop a strong base of knowledge about a particular subject, or I would flunk it all together, I never found myself in the middle when it came to my schooling.

The time eventually came when we were given the results of our hard work for our chosen topic in Modern History. I sat in the classroom sitting at perfect ease watching the stress take hold of everyone else around me. I didn’t really think I had anything to stress about, I was writing about a topic that I had a passion about and I simply knew I presented good quality work. Ms Allen began walking around the classroom handing back everyone’s assignments. There mixed reactions in the classroom that morning, some students had obviously failed by the look of extreme disappointment whilst others might have passed but not as good as they were hoping for. Eventually Ms Allen handed me my work, as she handed me my essay she looked down to me, and with a peaceful look gave me a smile and a wink, at the top right hand corner in a big giant red circle stood A+.

I felt as if I was able to project my mind into the future. I knew I would have gotten a high grade for my assignment but even this blew me away to a degree. By no means was I expecting an A+, I thought at least B+ to A-. I was more than overwhelmed, and my confidence received a gigantic boost. I could feel the bottom part of my face beginning to stretch and I sat there for a few moments wondering what it was, as it turns out I was actually smiling for my hard work. The other students didn’t ask what grade I got, they either weren’t interested or jealous. Not that I know how they felt when it came to the grade I received for my work, but the feeling of actually being able to present quality work and give myself a feeling of hope and encouragement was more than something I could possibly ask for. This was certainly a rare moment and one I know that I would cherish for many years to come.


Ω

The entire year of grade 9 was one hell of an emotional and mental rollercoaster. There were many ups, downs, loops, sideways and backwards. Although I had a very set routine structure in place from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to bed, 99.9% of the time this structure and routine was always thrown out of place. I was constantly facing horrendous bullying at school but my home life certainly made up for what I was missing out on at school. 4 out of 5 days within the school week I went home an emotional wreck and mentally exhausted from my brain having to process astounding levels of stress, anxiety and panic attacks.

I had always heard people say that high school is meant to be one of the best times of your life, and for me this certainly wasn’t the case, which always left me questioning when would be the best time of my life? It definitely wasn’t going to be at school.

Every person is created as a unique individual and I know for a fact that I am certainly different to most off my classmates but I could never fathom why. My morals were very clear in that I firmly believed you never ever, under any circumstances hit a person unless it’s in self-defense, never make fun of somebody less fortunate than yourself and always respect people’s backgrounds. But yet, for some strange reason I’m always made fun of and cannot work out why. Occasionally I felt as if school was a gigantic jigsaw puzzle where everyone connects together to create a bigger picture and I’m the piece that was accidently put into the wrong box, only to be left outside of the bigger picture.

Why did people enjoy making fun of me? I know I talk different, and I know act sometimes strange and have a few bizarre habits but I cant control this and I probably never will be able too, is that a fair enough reason to be bullied and beaten up? When these events keep happening to yourself it’s incredibly hard to think that you don’t deserve it considering it keeps going on. I’m beginning to think that I do deserve the bullying and the beatings. I’m so sorry that I’m breathing, I’m so sorry that I’m alive. I didn’t ask to be like this.

The end of the school semester had finally come around, it had been a long time coming and I felt as if a kilo of bricks had been taken off my chest because I could finally breathe. I didn’t have to worry for the next 2 weeks about copping any form of abuse from my classmates.

I got off the train that afternoon and headed over the bridge, down the road and into the park. It’s a short-cut home and usually gets me there quicker. I walked through the park and down into the creek bed. The sound of the birds chirping in the trees and the sound of the running water splashing over the rocks made me stop dead in my tracks. For a few moments I had to look around but I was standing there alone. I was standing in the middle of nature and not a soul knew where I was. When I hear the sound of the birds and the sound of gentle running water on the rocks I know I’m in the middle of nature and can attempt to make a deeper spiritual connection with the earth, I know things are about to let loose.

My tears began to overflow, even faster than the water already running in the creek. The build up of emotion from the last semester has finally dropped a bombshell in my head and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. It was like a ticking time bomb that’s finally exploded. I dropped to the ground holding my head in my hands crying like a new born baby, the wave of emotion resembled a tsunami drowning me out and wiping away my integrity. Take huge deep breathes and releasing with a cry for help, I kept on crying and crying and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop it.

I couldn’t work out which feeling hurt the most, I don’t know if I was sad, angry, annoyed, confused, happy or thrilled. All I could determine was that my emotions were at boiling point and the bomb had finally exploded. I found a piece of log that had obviously fallen from a tree and I picked it up and began banging it on the rocks using such force the noise echoed through the park every time the log hit the rocks. I was screaming at the top of my lungs “Why me? What the hell did I ever do to you, Why me, I never tired to hurt you why did you hurt me? Just leave me alone, leave me alone”

Eventually I came to stop. My breathing was so erratic that I even felt dizzy. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I gave myself a minor stroke. I picked up my bag and walked out of the park throwing my back pack around pretending to hit people with it. It’s certainly surprising as to how much strength one person has when they become angry. I’m pretty sure I was alone at this point, or had somebody been watching me they didn’t dare try to approach me.

As I walked out of the park and onto the foot bridge, a shopping trolley was blocking the path in the middle of the bridge. Without question and with great difficulty I lifted up the trolley, and placed it on the railings of the bridge. For a few moments I stood there visualizing that all the people this semester who made my school life a living hell were all tied up in the shopping trolley and for once I had control of the situation. Completely distracted from my irrational behavior and without any sort of hesitation I pushed the trolley over the railings, sending it flying like a cannon ball through the air, the trolley made a terrible crashing sound as it hit the rocks at the bottom of the creek bed.

“That’s what you deserve” I said to myself softly and I walked away.

I came off the bridge and decided to cut through the caravan park which backs onto my street. I walked through the middle of the park and found the old telephone box, so I began pegging stones at it until the glass box shattered into a million tiny pieces then I ran off down the back of the park. I’m not sure why I did this, I’ve never been a violent person ever before and I even surprised myself with my own strength.

While I was standing in the middle of the park, reality finally began to sink into my head; I deserve what happened to me because I simply exist. My body felt like a pot of boiling water on the stove about spew over the top. My bombshell might have blown earlier but I felt this wasn’t the end. I began to feel so angry with myself for existing, and for breathing that I could finally begin to understand where my classmates were coming from. There was one common interest that I now shared with them, the hatred and disgust of myself – I had to be punished.

My back pack was loaded with a few heavy text books which made it quite heavy to carry. I lifted my bag into the air and started throwing it over my shoulders making it hit my back with extreme force.

I swung once, then bang. I swung second, then bang and then I kept on going and going and going and going until I couldn’t stand the pain any longer. The pain was excruciating and I could barley walk. The other people at school didn’t hit me hard enough and I had to finish it off for them. My arms struggled to keep the bag in the air, as I swung it high into the air my veins looked as if they were about to burst out the skin. I kept on swinging and swinging but eventually I had to stop, purely to give my arms a rest than my back.

I kept on thinking to myself, if I continued to hurt myself with pain then it would wake my stupid brain up and make it to behave normal for a change, or if I was to cut myself open and the let my blood run free then all the dirt and disgust within myself had a chance to escape and I could start fresh next semester. If I did all this now by cutting my body open to bleed, the old me has a chance to escape and a new, proper normal me could grow. I was never very big on pain, and as a child needles used to freak me out, but I was going to do what was right and what had to be done to enjoy a better school life and a better person.


Chapter 4
They said I was different so it must be true


The school semester was well underway. I didn’t have any friends to hang out with over the school break so I was pretty much left to my own devices. I had eventually calmed down from my serious emotional outburst which has left me mentally crippled at the moment and I’m not sure when it will pass. At this stage I’ve doing a good job by keeping it hidden from my family, I certainly wouldn’t want my parents to have seen me in the state that I was last week. I think it would have crushed them.

So many emotions were going through my every second of the day, and it was beginning to interfere with my sleep. Over and over again I kept having vivid flashbacks of fists go flying across my face, or fingers being pointed directly at me and the sound of my classmates laughing at me keep playing over and over in my head like a cassette tape that can’t be stopped.

For Christmas the previous year I was given a typewriter. My parents brought it for me because I often used to enjoy writing short stories as a pastime and usually submitted my short stories into competitions when in primary school.

On a bitterly cold winter’s morning sitting in my bed staring at the ceiling I suddenly began thinking of different stories that I could write as a pastime whilst on school holidays. I had one concept in mind about writing a feature film with a thriller concept to it, so I pulled out the old dusty typewriter and began jotting down a few ideas.

I didn’t really start thinking about plot summaries and character descriptions, I just had ideas flowing through my head about the structure of the movie so I began putting those ideas down on paper, and as I went along the feature film script began to take on some kind of well planned out structure even tho I had not given this any thought. As quick as my little fingers could go words and storylines began flowing from my head, down my arms, through my fingers, on to the typewriter and on to paper. For 7 whole hours I sat there not leaving my desk - I had completed my first feature film script “The Gate on Mullhullen Hill”.

The script was about a young family whose father is suddenly killed in a terrible work accident and the mother and son are forced to move to the mother’s sister’s house in an attempt to sell the family home and start a new life. The young boy eventually finds a hole on the top of the hill several meters away from his Auntie’s house. But there’s a deep dark secret beneath the hole. Little does the boy know, it’s an entrance to the demonic underworld. Basically a war is on between good and evil

I sat on my bed that night reading my script over a dozen times and the more I read the script, the more I could visualize movements going on in my head that my mind began to present the movie that I had written in a powerful and chilling way. Could this be a new turning point for me? Have I found something that I’m actually good at? My first aim when I started writing my first script was to pass the time, not to present what I would call a work of art.

I might be only 14 years old but I decided to develop a script based on my recent events at school and how I emotionally copped. I guess you could say it’s a short version of my memoirs.

For 2 entire weeks I worked tirelessly on writing and putting together feature film scripts. As I began writing each story my fingers did all the work. I never thought about what I wanted to write about until my fingers hit the typewriter.

I quickly learnt that from suffering the emotional anguish I recently went through at school, writing opened up a whole new world to me. It allowed me to develop stories of any nature and level and to spread my wings and grow, even if it was just on paper. I began to see that writing became my one and only pass time over the school holidays and it soon turned out to be a great distraction from the recent mental anguish. I truly felt that within my mind there was a door, and behind that door was a world of talent, strength, ability, peace and serenity. Somehow this door opened every time I sat down to write a feature film script.

It was the last night of the school holidays and a peaceful silence filled the night air outside. Inside I was sitting next a tiny lit lamp at my desk with my typewriter. I was in a huge rush to complete one more script prior to returning to school. Because in my scripts I could develop any character that I wanted, I always felt a deep connection with every story that I wrote about and I focused all my attention on this last script. Probably because I was going to back to school in a matter of hours I may have been subconsciously attempting to distract myself from falling asleep.

The clocked ticked over to 1.15 am and I knew I had to get to bed for the school the next day but the ideas in my head was still flowing and nothing had the power to stop me from writing. Come 1.30 am I had finally finished my last feature film script of the holidays. Over the school break I never actually counted how many scripts were written, I just kept writing and writing, but as I completed my last script I counted 25 feature film scripts plus had started work on a novel. Until my next school break, I’ll wait to write until then.

Back in school and back into my set routine and structure – well to a degree at least. The bullying and beatings kept coming and it was the same confrontation with the teachers as well who claimed they helping the situation but it was always making things worse. My attention in the classroom began to suffer as I could think of nothing but writing.

Today I was sitting in the Speech & Drama class. Ms Anderson was a great speech and drama teacher who thoroughly enjoyed writing herself and putting together performances for school events. Although I had never enrolled myself at the beginning of the year to take speech and drama as a subject, I just enjoyed going down to that classroom on my lunch break and reading through the different theatre scripts Ms Anderson had on her desk.

I decided to tell her about all the work I had done over the school holidays. When I explained I had completed 25 feature film scripts she nearly blew off her seat with excitement. “That’s just unbelievably amazing Brendan” she said to me. I went on to explain to her the various plots and scenarios about my work and how I enjoyed just sitting at my desk writing away. To me there was no greater passion than writing and I began to think I was developing my own area of expertise.

“What do you want to be when you grow up Brendan” she asked me. I didn’t really have an answer to that question. I always wanted to be a pilot or a meteorologist but I struggled with great difficulty in maths and physics so that ruled out those two occupations as a career. She asked me “Do you ever sing” I went all coy and red but smiled when I answered “I’d like to but no, I’m a terrible singer”. Ms Anderson said she always loved to sing and growing up in Melbourne, herself and her flat mate would often frequent inner city karaoke bars looking for a spot to sing and dance. “You know what the first thing is that I think of when I wake up in the mornings” she asked me. I just shacked my head, I couldn’t really answer, “Um, karaoke?” I said. “Singing, singing is the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning. When you woke up this morning, was writing the first thing that popped into your head” she asked. “Without a doubt” I said. “If you wake up in the morning and you cant think of anything but singing, then boy your meant to be a singer, and if you wake up each morning and you cant think of anything but writing then you’re supposed to be a writer my boy” she told me. Suddenly I started to have images of my future working as a movie director on the back lot at MGM studios or Universal. Could my passion really take me that far? I’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds I guess to answer that question.

“Here Brendan, I really want you to consider this” She handed me a piece of paper. It was a writing competition for the under 16’s presented by the Queensland Theatre Company. The top 5 winners would have their plays produced and staged. “What a wonderful opportunity for you to show off your work” she told me. I didn’t really thing my work was of such a strong caliber to make it through this competition but I had to explain to Ms Anderson that my writing was simply a way to pass the time; I didn’t really anticipate taking my writing any further than just a hobby.

Ms Anderson could clearly see where I was coming from. Although I didn’t explain to her the real reasons why I began writing, she could see within me the potential to grow my work. I kind of thought that if somebody else truly believed I could make it happen then I had to least give it a shot.

That night I went hunting through every one of my scripts determining which story line would best suit for the competition. During the school break I created a script called “The Waiting” and it was about a group of 3 medical practitioners who claim they had a developed a vaccine for a major flu virus. The 3 doctors go through the clinic injecting their patience’s claiming it’s the vaccine. Little do they know, they were actually being infected with the super bug deliberately planted by the doctors. The super bug has no cure and a team of university medical students attempt to develop a vaccine and a cure for the deadly super bug before it wipes away the population of a small rural country town.

I ended up deciding to submit The Waiting. Ms Anderson was absolutely thrilled that I decided to enter the competition. We both agreed now it was a waiting game ourselves until we await the outcome of the competition.

A few weeks later and it was time for the entire school to gather in the assembly hall for our quarterly parade with the principal. The parades are usually pretty boring and most students in the hall aren’t even paying attention anyway. The principal usually stands up in front of the entire school and talks about the different curricular activities going on, results from major school sporting competitions and academic achievements, well I certainly wasn’t up for one of those.

I was sitting in the hall with my other classmates who were busy poking my ears with bits of paper or blowing spit bubbles at me but I was pretending they didn’t exist. Ms Anderson got up as she requested to say a few words. “Id like to talk about the Queensland Young Play writers Competition presented from the Queensland Theatre Company” she said. Suddenly she had caught my attention and my ears pricked up along with every strand of hair on the back of my neck. She wasn’t going to mention my name was she? “Several weeks ago one student from our college submitted an application to the Queensland Theatre Company; the winner would have their script produced in front of a live audience. Well I have the results here with me today and I would like to thank this student for all the time and effort this person has given up purely to enter this”. I suddenly froze yet I could feel every pulse rush gallons of blood through my body in time with my heart beat, all of a sudden my senses were heightened and my breathing appeared to have stopped out of shock.

“120,000 submissions went through for the Young Play writer’s award and 5 were selected. Our student has come 12th in the competition. While it may not be within the top 5, I, the principal, and the Queensland Theatre Company would like to thank Brendan McCall for his huge and timely effort and utilizing a remarkable and creative touch and putting it into practice. To come 12th out of 120,000 is simply an astounding and commendable effort. Congratulations Brendan” The entire assembly hall clapped but I got a few evil eyes rather than a hearty congratulation from my classmates.

I was so overwhelmed in the fact that got 12th out of 120,000. Sometimes we never truly believe our true potential until somebody else sees it first. I have to admit tho; Ms Anderson saw more in me than what I would see myself. I never could have imagined that I had capabilities that could go to this level. I was certainly filled with pride at the outcome of the competition. To be honest with you, I really thought I would have come last, not 12th and although I didn’t get to have my script produced, I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

The outcome from the competition had me on such a natural adrenalin rush for days that I started doing some serious thinking about my true writing potential. I said to myself I wouldn’t do anymore writing until the next lot of the school holidays, but I didn’t think I could wait that long. There’s a strong deep urge to write and, to write about so many different things that affect my life, and other things that affect the world that we live in.

My weekends filled up with writing. I was determined to get to at least 30 feature film scripts written by the end of the year. Who knows, I could even sell them to a movie producing company and make a million dollars. Yeah well that’s highly unlikely but the feeling to be able to just get in there and write in my spare time was more than enough for me, and it was a great distraction from the harsh reality that I faced everyday at school. The one thing that makes me proud about writing is that I know it’s a rare quality to put forward a great story, but I feel that I’ve actually accomplished something and all I want is to rub that into the noses of my classmates. To me that would be my own version of revenge.

I’d now made an official commitment to myself: To write write write and more write. If this is what will take me far in my life then I have to pursue it as much as I can.

Ω

The persistent bullying at school had almost turned into an unwritten law. After spending countless nights replaying events over in my brain, I simply couldn’t fathom why this was happening to me. I’ve heard many people ask “what is normal”, well I’m certainly not one to be able to answer that question and to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have a clue what defines the truth of normal, but what I am sure of is that I’m not normal. It never mattered how hard I tried to be normal it simply didn’t work, particularly when placed into a social environment.

I often thought of my schooling as a war that just could never be won no matter how hard I tried to fight it. Perhaps my classmates probably never saw it this way but I always had a habit of looking at things from a totally different perspective. I’d see myself standing at the bottom of a towering hill and an army of classmates would come rushing at me with their sadistic intentions and no matter how hard I attempted to run away, a bone chilling cold snap would freeze me to the core and I couldn’t move. The end result, my vulnerability would be left open for the world to exploit and destroy any sense of integrity within myself that ever existed.

It was a warm late spring afternoon and the sun was beating down on the dry brown grass and not a sole could be seen in the park. The only existence of life that could be heard was the sound of baby birds chirping in the trees which seemed to echo from afar. The afternoon sun began to set behind the trees in the park causing the sunlight to slowly dissolve. As I sat and watched the sunlight slowly slip away, part of my emotional soul when down with the sun, disappearing into horizon and probably never to be seen again. As the dark night sky consumed the remainder of the day, a change was taking place within my mind. There were no stars that night and it was almost as if the night was empty and lifeless. As an empty and lifeless night set upon me, I soon realized my soul had drowned in the setting of the sun.

Ω

Last night my soul had passed away, and as a person so open about my emotions I couldn’t cry anymore. A sea of tears had dried up the night before taking my emotions into the unknown abyss. Only then did I realize I was just the ghost of that young boy that existed last night who passed away at sunset.

Another school day was finally over and the only piece of emotion that I could feel was the excitement to get home and begin writing. As usual I sat on the train by myself reading through my geography textbooks completely oblivious to the hype and commotion of the other school kids on the train. One of the guys in my class, Daniel, happens to be an obscene moron. He’s got the ability to use such offensive language and thoroughly enjoyed intimidating people with his hollow threats. Daniel had never really bothered me in the classroom before so I didn’t feel that worried he was sitting opposite me on the train. If I kept my head buried in my book and didn’t make eye contact I was sure I could stand the situation until I got off the train.

About 3 stops away I put my text book into my bag so that I could take in the view before exiting the train. I heard Daniel mention “I’m bloody starving mate” and yelled out “who’s got any food”. Well I noticed a piece of fruit that I had in my bag left over from lunch. “Daniel did you want this, I’m not going to eat it” I said as I politely handed the apple to Daniel. With my brain subconsciously blocking a serious incident that had just occurred, I was almost certain I just experienced a seizure. My entire body felt like I was just slammed into by a truck and my head was about to split in half whilst I tried to recover from the blurred vision that had just so blinded me. As I bent over to reach for my bag a wave of vomit immediately began flowing from my mouth onto the floor. Several people began moving out of shock whilst a few others were laughing. I couldn’t believe I was vomiting because I don’t remember feeling sick or even lurching forward. My vision started to return to normal and I looked down to see the evil substance that so quickly threw itself out of me. I hadn’t been vomiting, copious amounts of blood was spilling from my mouth, down my body and onto the floor. Blood had even ended up on the window of the train. Daniel had violently hit me across the mouth.

I started reaching my arms out for help but everyone kept on running away from me. It was almost like I was drowning in the ocean and reaching out for a life line but nobody was willing to rescue me. I ended up stumbling through the train carriage, blocking out the deafening sound of evil laughter and headed for the train guard to get off at the next train station and call an ambulance. My cousin, Eliza, who I was somewhat distant with, noticed what happened when I stumbled into the train carriage and sat me down outside the guard door waiting for help to arrive while her friends called for the ambulance. Never could I have imagined feeling blood so icy cold that felt like a million razor blades slicing me open.

The humiliation of what had just occurred was too much to bare and my balance had completely gone from beneath me. Turning into jelly I fell onto the seats. Eliza and one of her friends were gracious enough to help me back up and sit me properly onto the seat until help arrived. At this point the train guard had been notified and an ambulance had been summoned. Turned out that my entire left bottom lip ripped open like a piece of paper and I received 35 stitches across the mouth.

I will probably never know the true meaning behind this violent attack. I simply did what any normal person would do and that’s offer food to someone who’s hungry, or perhaps that’s just not the normal thing to do. I tried to be friendly and I got pelted for it.

The recent events pushed my lifeless soul even further into darkness and I became so overwhelmed in the fact that the only existence of me was my physical being. It was time for this to end. I truly believed that physical and emotional existence had to live in peace and harmony together. Without the two, I had become nobody.

After the violent attack on the train I made a personal oath to myself: To put an end to the emotional and physical torture.

Luckily for us, my parent’s house sat on a set of stumps allowing extra room under the house for storage. There wasn’t really extra room as all the space was taken up with card board boxes cluttered up above each other. On my dad’s old dusty work bench was a 5 meter rope and his work stool. I found the ingredients that were needed to end the torture and anguish. As I began tying the rope to the wooden ceilings I suddenly began to feel a smile on my face. I was overwhelmed with a soothing comfort of joy and happiness and perhaps this was the feeling that I had been searching for, the end had finally arrived and I was about to place my physical being into darkness with my soul. I had the rope finally tied up on the ceiling and placed my goodbye letter onto my Dad’s workbench. It read:

I so wanted to be like you. I would see you all come in each morning smiling gleefully with joy and embracing each other’s diversity and backgrounds. You always gave your friends a fair go and no matter what, stood by your mates regardless and showed the true meaning of friendship.

I did everything I could to be like you. I treated you all with decency, dignity, respect and courtesy.

If I breathed I was punished, if I talked I was ridiculed, if I walked I was beaten up and if I even looked at you I was humiliated. Yet you all toke pride in poking fun at me and making me deaf by your piercing evil laugher. Never had I gone out of my way to make your life a misery but you turned mine that. Never had I done anything to you but exist.

You’ve all killed me leaving my physical being to survive without a soul. Your wish has finally been granted. Today I am leaving you all and if any blood spills in this process, my blood will be on your hands today.

It’s too late to change things, you’ve caused the damage and I can no longer return. May god have mercy on your soul.

I stood up on the chair, slowly placed the noose around my neck, smiled and quietly said “It’s finally over”. I then kicked the chair out from underneath me. Immediately struggling to stay conscious I could feel myself fading away into darkness while the rope started to cut into my neck. My body was going through a series of violent jolts whilst I waited for the new life that I longed for to come and take me away. A bright light suddenly appeared out of nowhere and I don’t know if my vision was starting to the feel the effects but the blinding white light seemed to be a beacon of hope and faith and I began to relax. The new world was opening up for me, ready to take me just the way I am.

The white light was as bright as the sun, but it didn’t hurt to look into it. The light was a symbol of hope and faith, ready to take the shattered remnants of my heart and piece it back together. Although I couldn’t see it, I was certain that a group of angels stood behind the light with their arms open wide to accept me just the way I am. That was a far cry compared to the bullies at school that forced me into this situation.

The rope began to cut deeper into my throat cutting off my breathing and blood circulation. Then, much to my surprise, the rope snapped and I collapsed to the ground. My attempt was squashed and I was still alive. Barely moving on the cold concrete below, I could feel my pulse slowly beat away, attempting to move the last bit of life through my veins.

Due to the loud crashing noise that was heard as I fell to the ground, my father came rushing from upstairs to see what all the commotion was about. He was as white as a ghost as he stood at the doorway looking at the broken rope dangling from the wooden bar. He could see the look of desperation in my eyes as I lay on the floor lifeless and not moving. I never had any intention of telling my parents what I had planned to do, but now my secret was out and my planned had been foiled.

I didn’t sleep that night. I just laid in my bed staring up at the ceiling trying not to move my neck from the paid I had recently inflicted. Whatever attempt I had made to try and live a life full of happiness had been squandered and I questioned how much longer I had to live like this. At age 14 my life was just beginning and if this was an example of how life was to be for the rest of adult life, I couldn’t be apart of such a world.

Ω

My father was never one to freely display his emotions. The next day he sat in the kitchen looking at me with tears rolling down his eyes. Tears that I never knew existed in my father eyes until now. I didn’t know it until then, but if I had killed myself then I would have killed my parents. Fate certainly intervened that day, but if it intervened because of me or to save heartache from my parents I will probably never know.

My parents immediately began looking at putting me into counseling. I certainly didn’t refuse. I knew that I needed help and this was probably the one and only time in my life where I just didn’t feel the need to ask, help was just a given. While my parents did the work of looking for counseling, I spent my time reflecting on what happened. I questioned several things: Did I not tie the rope up properly; would my classmates at school felt guilty had it gone through properly, would my parents have been able to survive? Was I saved by some supernatural force I didn’t know about? So many things I wanted to question and not one person on this earth had the answers I needed to know.

I was about to begin a journey of getting better. And over the several weeks of looking for an appropriate counselor, the temptation of repeating my previous actions were difficult to resist. I wasn’t really into the belief of the Christian faith, but I did question if “God” had intervened that day. What if God was actually trying to tell me “Not now, its your not your turn to go”. Certainly this was a possibility but not one that I would have believed at this point in my life.


Chapter 5


“Asperger’s – The Label of Separation”

Jenny Westwood always presented a beautiful smile. Her soothing her voice allowed my mind to open up and discuss the many issues about the recent months of social anxiety, suicide and depression. From when I first started going to see Jenny Westwood, it didn’t take long before I had built a good rapport with my counselor.

The first few sessions were probably the most grueling sessions I had ever had with a counselor. In my primary school days I had visited various school counselors who I didn’t quite connect with, and although I enjoyed talking with all of them, Jenny was probably the most understanding counselor I could talk too. It was such a rare occasion that I could actually talk to somebody and have the other person understand where I was coming from. For once I didn’t feel quite alone.

After my fourth session with Jenny, she was able to answer the constant question I had always asked myself “What’s wrong with me?” Jenny had diagnosed me with Asperger’s Syndrome.

At first I didn’t quite know what to think, and at 14 I had very minimal to no understanding of Autism little lone its spectrum disorders. The word Asperger’s didn’t quite bother me; it was the word Syndrome that I had the issue with. My thought patterns had always associated people with different syndrome’s as physically sick or having acquired a genetic disease, not part of the autism spectrum.

Jenny was very adamant that having Asperger’s Syndrome was nothing to be ashamed of, and that I could still continue living with the condition no matter what. She strongly enforced suggestions about how to cope rather than how to try and cure it.

A new part of my life was unfolding before my eyes, quicker than I could gather the strength to try and stop it.


Chapter 7


“Closing the door to the past”

Those close to me have always whispered in my ear “When one door closes, another opens”. I never really did understand the true meaning behind those words until the morning of November 26 1999. The last day of high school had finally arrived and it was soon to leave those dismal dark days of high school behind. I now had the opportunity to throw the emotionally crippling memories and take forth a new chapter in my life.

Some people always said that saying Goodbye is probably one of the hardest words to say but for me, leaving school on this day, Goodbye was the easiest word to speak. In the final hour of the year 12 farewell ceremony, the school principal played “You say it best when you say nothing at all”. I could hear the tsunami of emotion taking a strong hold on my classmates around me. Whilst they sat and cried at the true meaning behind the lyrics of the song, I perceived the words from that song to be a little different. To me, my classmates always said it best when they said nothing at all. In my eyes that meant if they said nothing to me, I was being shown how distant I was to the rest of my classmates. When they didn’t speak, their actions were truly speaking louder than words. Whist everyone around me reflected on current friendships, I kept waiting for my chance to break into another world and create a whole new me.

At the end of the farewell ceremony, the entire grade 8 class created a guard of honor for the year 12 students as they exited the assembly hall. The majority of the graduating students walked in groups, making the moment of holding onto friendships and providing support to one another as they walked down the guard of honor. I exited the assembly hall alone, and as I looked at each student who walked passed me, they represented each chapter in my life that was finally closing. As I came closer to the end Ms Anderson was standing in the guard of honor holding her hands out in front clapping in support for her students. As I approached her, she looked me straight in the eye and lightly whispered “Keep at it Brendan, the writing will take you somewhere”. Those were the last words whispered in my ear at school. I simply thanked her and quietly walked out of the school grounds.

Whist I quietly walked out of the school grounds, I could see my classmates all in groups taking final photo’s of one another and signing each other’s year books. Nobody asked me to stay around for photo’s that day; I quietly snuck away, exiting through the school gates for the final time, never to look back again. I didn’t even stop to take in a final view of the exterior of the school.

The evil days of school was finally over and I was now standing at an intersection not knowing which way to go. I could either go lock myself in my bedroom for the rest of my adult life to prevent any chance of mental anxiety from reoccurring, or, I could take in a new blood of life and at least try to live a life that I so longed for by making somebody of myself.

I headed into Fortitude Valley a week after school finished. I often enjoyed going into the valley to look around at the market stalls and try and find a bargain. The warm summer night had gotten on and I had to consider about heading to the train station to catch the last train home. As I made my way towards the train station I noticed 2 guys holding hands openly in the street. Their behavior was like nothing I had ever seen before but I suddenly made a snap decision to follow them and see where they were headed. I followed them down the street past a few blocks and they walked into a night club called “The Wickham”. Even tho I was 17 years of age at the time, the security bouncer at the main entrance of the club either didn’t notice me or he knew that I was under age decided to turn a blind eye to my real age. None the less I headed into the club and I walked into a world where I was mentally unprepared.

I was standing in the middle of a dance floor surrounded by men so well defined with their hardcore stomachs. The glowing laser lights reflected off the skin of the men dancing away on the floor. I didn’t feel as if I was in my element but I was very noticeable of the fact that there were so many body types around in the club and they were all socializing with various groups of people. I was now a distant memory away from school and I could begin on laying the foundations for my new life.

The memories of high school slowly faded away over a 2 year period, even to the point where I could hardly remember some of the emotional and physical abuse that I endured. I had comfortably came out as gay, made a few close friends and even began to feel what it was truly like to have a social life and experience close personal supporting relationships with friends. Although I had certainly grown both mentally and physically, I still experienced a high degree of isolation and anxiety however, it didn’t match the same level of anxiety from my school days. By now I had mastered the art of putting into place coping strategies when feeling stressed or social anxiety, even to the point where I didn’t realize anxiety was occurring.

Only one downfall had occurred between the completion of high school and now, I hadn’t continued with my writing. Although I completely missed getting behind my typewriter and writing my scripts, I was too obsessed with going out with my friends and catching up on the life style that I never got a chance to be apart of.

My time at TAFE was one of the most memorable times that I’ve had up until now. I went forth to study a Diploma of Child Protection and a Diploma of Youth Work. Without attempt, my personality and physical presence was respected and appreciated. Everyone in the class came into the course with one simple mission: to learn how to help others. Therefore respect for diversity and different backgrounds were automatically appreciated.

There were many wonderful people that I formed close relationships with. Armenia was a beautiful Muslim woman who displayed the true beauty of the religion of Islam and had great aspirations to work with refugee women; Valarie was hoping to go into work with young women who had become victims of domestic violence and sudden infant death syndrome based on her own personal experiences and Roz had just hoped to help anybody where she could.

The teacher for one of my subjects decided to introduce us to the basic fundamentals of counseling, and required a student to be counseled in front of the class. I was somehow picked out of the crowd to be the test subject.

The aim of the exercise was to detail a very important aspect within our lives where we still felt issues were unresolved, so I decided to mention about being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and the events that led up to my suicide attempt. Little did I know that this would have a highly profound impact on other people.

I sat there in front of the whole class trying desperately to remember particular events and discuss my suicide attempt in such detail. After a number of years I had buried these memories far into the back of my mind that I nearly forgot them all. By using various counseling techniques such as open-ended questioning, clarifying, paraphrasing and summarizing, the teacher and the students captured a snapshot of basic counseling based on real events.

At the end of the session I had been through a slight degree of emotional trauma and wept as the session came to a close. As I turned around to the face class before heading back to my seat, 18 out the 20 students were either in tears or in shock holding their hands over their mouth in a state of shock. I slowly stood up to walk back to my desk and as I did, the entire class rose and gave me a standing ovation for what I had discussed.

Never, in my whole life had I been placed on a podium and acknowledged in such a way. This time my vulnerability was not left open for the world to destroy, I was simply being thanked for being me. I never knew this was possible, I had never seen anybody be appreciated like this before. I always knew that everyone possess some sort of power to change things, but I had learnt that day that I changed people’s perceptions and thoughts about how others can view the world. For once I had used my power for the greater good unknowingly.

2001 had miracousally turned out to be an amazing year. Although there were a few events that taken place that were quite negative, my positive experiences far outweighed the negative. In 2001 September 11 had occurred on the streets of New York City, my grandfather had passed away from a long battle with cancer and I had a few relationships that eventually broke down, however, compared that with graduating from TAFE with a job offer in Sydney as Youth Worker, an offer into Queensland University of Technology to undertake a Bachelor of Social Science and newly formed friendships, I was certainly pressing forward with a life filled with positive change.

I started to realize that no matter who we are as a person and what qualities we possess, weather that be obscure, strange or different, I learnt that there is always somebody out there to appreciate qualities that we have within ourselves that are outside our control.

The week before Christmas of 2001 I was invited by a group of friends to join them for dinner. I started to get quite used to be invited to various social events. A table was booked that evening at the Sportsman’s Hotel, a local inner city gay bar. I walked into the lounge bar of the hotel and walked towards the table where my friends were gathered. Shane, another good mate of mine had introduced me to a dashing 28 year old named Bruce. Myself and Bruce had connected instantaneously. Along with studying my Diploma, I had finished my Certificate IV in Workplace Training & Assessment and Bruce, who was in the middle of studying the same course; we found many topics to discuss.

Bruce ran his own training business running training classes in the areas for surf lifesaving, bronze medallion and senior first aid. Bruce’s motivation to have long exciting career that could grow and prosper was certainly exciting as I couldn’t have seen myself with somebody who didn’t have career goals and expectations from within themselves. During the entire dinner me and Bruce spent much time discussing our personal goals, career expectations and future travel plans. Without notice time had gotten away and we spent 4 hours talking over dinner.

I stepped outside into the hot summer air to catch a taxi home and whilst I was standing alone waiting, Bruce quietly snuck up on me and lightly grabbed me on the arm. He took me by surprise as I didn’t see him standing there. He told me about an upcoming pool party that he was holding a week after New Year and that if I didn’t have any plans it would be great for me to show up. Without any sort of hesitation I agreed to go to the party. Even tho I’m not one for parties, the invite in itself made me ecstatic as I had never been invited to an actual party. I didn’t really mind that Bruce was a little older than me, he seemed to have direction in his life and I found this totally appealing. A lot of the guys I tend to have met who were around my age just seemed so different so I always tried to maintain a big distance with their presence when out and about in clubs and bars.

On the night of the party I caught the train over to Bruce’s house. During the entire journey on the train I kept my iPod in my ears with my music blaring doing whatever it toke to distract me from having to attend a party. Although I was excited about seeing Bruce and going to a real party, the thought of having to attend a social environment made my heart race at an incredible speed. Even tho I knew that a group of people were looking forward to seeing me, the thought actually being in a social environment was rather daunting.

I eventually made it to the party and I slowly walked up to the gates of Bruce’s house. As I stood outside I could hear the laughter of everyone having a good time and the distant smell of sausages cooking on the bbq. Hesitantly I went to press the doorbell on the gate, and then before I could actually hit the button I moved my arm away, reconsidering if I should actually attend. I must have repeated this several times before working up the courage of hitting the doorbell. I never actually got a chance to hit the doorbell, Bruce had seen me standing behind the tall rusty Iron Gate so he came down and let me in.

I was well aware of the fact that I had nothing to be scared of by attending the party, but that certainly didn’t stop some level of anxiety from making my blood rush. I perceived the party to be a group of people all observing my every move and taking notice of my actions. I guess it came down to the fact that what I perceived was not always true.

One of the best decisions I had ever make was to attend the party. I knew all the people that had gone and we spent many hours that night playing water volleyball and a few games of pool.

Everybody had taken on some kind of role at the party. Bruce, who was the host, kept on pouring everyone drinks and getting all the games ready, Shane had been cooking all the meat on the bbq and Tasha seemed to be the life of the party with her wise-cracking jokes. I felt somewhat outcasted but I refused to let that bother me. I didn’t take on any major role at the party, really just an attendee. I sat at the table and listened to jokes, got into some of the games and helped Shane cook on the bbq. I think I had covered my anti-social skills rather well that night. Had it not been for Bruce, I wouldn’t have had such a wonderful time and by attempting to suppress the fear of social anxiety, I had a most memorable time that I would never forget.

Over several weeks I spent much time with Bruce getting to know him. He was even kind enough to fly me down to Sydney for a weekend with him. It was in Sydney that we both decided to form a relationship. Even tho I had relationships in the past, this felt different, probably because of his age and life experience. I knew that I was making a good decision and that I had to follow through with that.

By April of 2002; me, Bruce, Shane, Terry, Tasha and Kelly had formed a weekly tradition. We headed off to the Sportsman’s Hotel every Wednesday night for karaoke. Even tho none of us would actually sing, we just simply enjoyed each other’s company and watching a bunch of people who thought they had real talent get up and sing.

On one of our many nights at karaoke I made another friend named Glen. Meeting new people and forming new relationships began to evolve quite naturally even tho I didn’t think about how to form new friendships. Glen, who was one year older than me was always the life of the party. He always had a blast with his friends by having a few drinks and playing pool, nights in front of the TV pigging out on pizza and trips to the beach. This part of my life was having such a profound positive impact on my life that for such a long period, I had forgotten how I used to see the world in a negative light.

In my social circles; I had Bruce as a loving and dearing partner, Glen had become my close friend who I did everything with and of course there was Shane, Terry, Tasha and Kelly. By this time I had developed enough friendships with people that I didn’t need to look anymore for a new friend. If ever things went wrong in my life or I got incredibly upset I always had somebody that I could turn too. It’s never too late in anybody’s life to develop these sorts of close relationships but my only wish was that I had these people as my friends back in the dark dismal days of high school. None the less I was truly grateful for what I had at this point in my life.

My parents seemed to have had a special place in their hearts for Bruce and Glen. Probably because they filled my life happiness and pure enjoyment. Me, Mum, Glen and Bruce all headed off to the Booval Bowls Club for a game of Bingo one Friday night. How amazing it was to have my mother, partner and close friend all sitting at one table playing bingo, joking and enjoying one another’s company. During my days at high school I never could have imagined that I would have relationships to this level of intensity. My friends and partner knew that I displayed odd and peculiar traits of behavior but they didn’t seem to care.

After the game of Bingo, we dropped my mother off at home and I, Bruce and Glen headed into the sportsman’s hotel to drink and dance. Around the corner from our watering hole was a cute little night club called “Options”. It never really attracted a large crowd but we always headed over there for $2 pots of beer. For us with limited cash it was always a cheap way to party and get drunk. Heading to Options night club became another of our many traditions and eventually we felt that we ended up owning the dance floor. Glen had always been such a heavy drinker; he brought me what was called a “shot”. I trusted Glen so I knew that he wouldn’t have been giving me anything I couldn’t handle so I drank it. After the first shot then came another, then another, and another. There many times when me and Glen sat around to blatantly get drunk. During the entire time I shared valuable friendships with these people, never once did I ever feel out of place or uncomfortable in a bar or club, probably because I had too many people around me to not even notice.

Bruce was always a very good listener. Whenever I came home from uni stressed about assignments or stressed from work I could sit down and tell him everything that had happened. He seemed to be able to connect into my world and understand the issues that caused me grief. Bruce knew in great depth about my fear of vomiting. He was well aware that I was absolutely petrified of being sick and he did whatever it toke to help me stay calm when I came into contact with people who were ill. Because the fear seemed to rule part of my life, Bruce had come up with a secret plan to help me get over my fear.

Without my knowledge, he kept a bottle of expired orange juice in the fridge. During breakfast of one morning I served him a glass, not knowing the juice was several weeks past its use by date. Luckily for me I didn’t drink orange juice, just coffee first thing in the morning. Bruce had drunk the orange juice and made himself violently ill for most of the morning, he had been vomiting for several hours. During this time I’ll never forget the pins and needles that jabbed into my skin from the fear of what was happening. Bruce tried several times to hold me down and make me watch him be sick in order to force me get over my fear. Little did he know that he was just fueling the fire and this was no way for me to get help in getting over my fear

I was so angry with him for what he did to me. In such a high level state of emotion I yelled at him explaining that you just simply couldn’t do that. No matter what I tried Bruce wouldn’t budge and he firmly believed he was doing the right thing.

From that moment on I had to tell Bruce something about myself that he never knew. I informed him about Asperger’s Syndrome, and whilst he had no knowledge on the subject he was willing to learn as much about as he could. We both decided it would be of great benefit for both of us, and our relationship to go and see a professional at the Queensland Autism Society. There he would be able to gain professional advice about my condition and learn how to handle certain situations. I truly believed I was doing the right thing by letting him know what I had. If he acquired an in depth knowledge of my condition then we would be able to work together on issues that affected our relationship.

Whilst Bruce did gain a good understanding of Asperger’s Syndrome, I don’t think he fully knew the extent as to how it affected my life. Either that, our perceptions as to how we both saw the condition was completely different.

Although there were a number of issues in our relationship that needed questioning and discussion, we seemed to have shared something that was rather special and unique, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. 6 months in to our relationship there seemed to be much routine and structure within both of our lives. Bruce’s training business had really taken off and he had been busy 6 days a week delivering training whilst I was studying at University, working 2 jobs plus assisting Bruce where I could in doing the bookkeeping for the business. It was at this point that things became very settled and I turned somewhat complacent into the relationship, as did he.

In mid August of 2002 Bruce delivered a 2 day first aid course within the house we were living in. 6 people were attending the training which was to take place over a Saturday and Sunday. The night before the course was to commence at home I had been feeling extremely unwell. Every joint in my body was aching severely and I came down with a shocking fever. Around 11pm I had jumped into the shower prior to getting into bed. Although I had the warm water running, it wasn’t enough to put a stop to the awful bone chilling cold snap that I could I feel in my body. It even got to the point where I had nothing running in the shower but the hot tap. When the illness first started I couldn’t talk to Bruce that night because he had been getting things ready for the training. I jumped out of the hot steamy shower and went straight to bed.

I woke up on the Saturday morning and as I got out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen, Bruce was on a 10 minute break from delivering his training. He was looking at me bewildered by the terrible purple rash that covered my body from head to toe. I had no appetite that morning and I asked him if he could cancel the training or reschedule it so that he could run me to the doctor. He just simply said no and walked away.

I made myself a cup of coffee and reverted back to the bedroom so that I could just relax and focus on trying to feel better within a few hours. 3 hours had passed and I seemed to have gotten worse. A terrible headache was splitting my head in two and the rash across my body was getting deeper in color. I could feel my body sinking lower by the minute and I think I had to be rushed to the hospital for urgent medical attention.

“Bruce” I whispered from the back corner of the training room. He looked up and saw me standing at the end of the room and knew that I needed his attention for a few short minutes. He came running over and questioned what I was doing by interrupting his training. “I really need to get to the hospital, can you take me please” I muttered whilst I held my arms across my stomach. Instantly he declined and told me to just go and rest, and then he headed back to his training. I couldn’t help but feel that I might have been coming down with meningococcal given the onset of the rash and stiff neck.

I stood in the middle of his living room beginning to cry. I couldn’t call my parents because they lived too far on the other side of town and my sister who lived near by didn’t drive. I was left with no other choice but to call an ambulance. Eventually the ambulance came rushing into the driveway, prepared me with the oxygen machine and drove me to the Royal Brisbane Hospital. Whilst the paramedic’s had been attending to me, Bruce kept on delivering his training even tho he knew his boyfriend was getting urgent medical attention.

I was taken straight through to emergency once I arrived at the hospital and a doctor had quickly seen me. Thankfully I did not have meningococcal, I had been diagnosed with German measles. Once the rash had appeared the worst of the illness had passed and I was advised to go home and rest for at least a week. Once I had finished in the emergency I was free to go and although I wasn’t able to contact Bruce to see if he could come and get me from the hospital, I hailed for a taxi to get me home.

The training had eventually finished up at 5.30pm on that cold winter Saturday afternoon and Bruce had came into the bedroom where I was recovering to check on my progress. I told him I had measles and that I just had to stay in bed. He didn’t seem that fussed when I told him what I had. He went on about his business as usual. I perceived this as if he didn’t care how I really was. I wasn’t so upset about being ill with the measles, I was furious that I needed to be taken to the hospital and that I had to call an ambulance myself and make my way home by taxi. To justify his response was the amount of money that he was making for delivering the 2 days of training. Even tho it was good money I couldn’t understand why that was more important than your partner falling ill needing urgent medical attention. Had that been Bruce who fell ill and I was at work, I would have rushed home immediately and taken him up myself, and if necessary taken a few days off work to care for him. I thought that’s what you do in a relationship, or so that’s what my parents did for each other when they fell sick with something.

When I eventually got better, I had been on Bruce’s case about having to make my own way to the hospital. I just didn’t think it was fair and that his actions were inappropriate. Perhaps it was a mistake to speak my mind on this because he just wasn’t going to apologise for working on the day when I truly needed him. I lost a lot of faith in my partner when that happened, because I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen the next time I fell sick. It didn’t matter how many times I tried to discuss the issue, it began to make his blood boil every time I brought it up so it just wasn’t worth mentioning anymore.

In October of 2002 we had our very first overseas holiday. It had always been a lifelong dream to visit another country, and my dreams were fulfilled on the night of my 20th birthday when we departed for London. The excitement and adrenalin of traveling to another country was more than I could handle. I always had dreams to visit London and I even developed some form of obsession with the city of London by memorizing most of the stations on the tube. Even tho I had only just turned 20 years old, I was about to fulfill a life long dream. I wouldn’t have ran out of dreams after this because there was still plenty more things I wanted to achieve before my time is up.

In a space of 4 weeks we managed to visit Bangkok, London, Paris, Frankfurt and Singapore whilst touring around the countryside of England, Scotland and Wales. Before leaving the UK for Singapore we spent a whole week in London with Bruce’s brother to wind down before heading onto our next destination. Within our last week Bruce’s temper began to rather short and sharp and it didn’t take much for him to blow his top.

I was standing over the stove in his brother’s kitchen cooking dinner for the two of us. He walked in to see what I was doing, and as he looked over the stove he quickly grabbed me by the top of my arm and swung me up against the wall. His face was steaming red and he glared directly at me eye to eye. Every time my eye moved away from his eye he forced my face back with his hand to look directly in his eye. “What the hell do you think you’re doing” he screamed at me. I didn’t know what to think, I’d never seen him act like this and it was totally out of character for him to act in such a way. I had been cooking mince in a fry pan that wasn’t a non-stick. To me that was something minor but Bruce had reacted quite violently over it when he told me to re-cook dinner again, he slammed me onto the floor and quickly said “re do dinner again till it’s edible”, and then he walked away. I just lied there on the cold icy tiles curling myself up into a bowl while I tried to fathom what had just happened. I was amazed that somebody I loved had just thrown me about it.

I wasn’t in a state to stand over the stove and cook dinner so I quickly ran off to Bruce’s aunty who lived around the corner from the house we were staying at. As I stood at her door knocking away she finally answered. Without saying anything I burst into tears and told her what had just happened. What made matters worse was the fact that I was in another country, on the other side of the world, far away from my family and friends and I wasn’t able to run to them for help.

Bruce’s temper was constantly up and down and my head was always bitten off when I went to ask why. I just wanted to have a fun couple of week’s overseas exploring places I had only ever dreamed about. And while I certainly was able to do that, I spent so much time worrying and concerning myself about Bruce’s short fuse.

On the final night of the holiday we spent one night in a hotel in Singapore to catch up on jet lag before flying home. We had been sitting in the wonderful air-conditioning of the hotel room having a few glasses of wine prior to retiring to bed. We sat discussing a few things and one of the topics that came up for discussion was my inability to gain weight.

I’ve always been a very slim person who could probably disappear if I turned sideways, none the less I still maintained a somewhat healthy lifestyle and ate a variety of healthy foods on a continual basis. Due to a very high metabolism, I can’t gain a lot of weight. Although Bruce liked the slim and slender look on another guy, he started having concerns that I was suffering with male anorexia nervosa. I couldn’t quite understand why he thought this, he had seen me eat food from the day we met, and he’s seen me make an absolute pig of myself when it came to all you can eat restaurants, but, he seemed to think that I was anorexic. It didn’t really matter what I said or done to try and persuade him that it wasn’t true, he was convinced I had the disease.

I later found out that whilst we were in England, he had been researching a few counseling clinics to take me to for when we got home because of my “apparent” case of male anorexia nervosa. Whenever I tried to justify my fast metabolism rate, all I ever got from him were a few repeating words “Yes you have it, yes you have it, and yes you have it”. As much as I was unconvinced that I didn’t have the disease, I had to find someway of proving to him that I was healthy.

Although I couldn’t see it at the time, I was suffering deep mental abuse from Bruce. When we finally arrived back in Australia for our holiday, I had to visit the counselor just to be sure that I wasn’t actually sick with anorexia nervosa. What if I actually did have the disease but was in the first stage of actually denying the truth? A few days of arriving back in Australia I started loosing sleep by the persistent thought that I was actually ill. I attempted myself to look at anorexia from any different perspectives. I never once thought that I was fat, this was something I had always known and could always see that every time I looked in the mirror. My eating habits were very routine based; every time I had the chance to cook dinner I would make pork chops with steamed veggies and if this meant I cooked dinner 7 nights a week, well then 7 nights a week we had pork chops with steamed veggies. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to cook anything else, it was more because that’s the food I knew and trusted and it somehow became part of eating routine from when I was a child.

My appointment with the counselor was scheduled for 2 weeks after we got back from Europe. From when we arrived home up until my appointment I didn’t dare say anything to Bruce about not actually having the disease. I tried this multiple times and in the end it was falling on deaf ears.

Dr. Andrew’s seemed to be very approachable and understanding. He was a gay doctor working out of a gay medical practice on the city’s north side so had proper in-depth knowledge of health issues affecting gay men. The greatest risk I ever toke that day was look at the doctor square into the eye and say “I do not have male anorexia nervosa”.

“Well your partner seems to believe quite the opposite Brendan” he explained. Dr. Andrew’s must have sensed there was more going on in our relationship than what he was being told in our first meet. He kept on asking other questions that didn’t really seem to fit into the topic of why I had came to meet him. He started getting rather personal with a few questions and asking questions like “Why do you think Bruce believes your sick or What behaviors do you show that warrant you coming to see me today” I sat there playing with my hands and scratching parts of my body that weren’t even itchy whilst staring at a black dot on the wall trying to think of some sort of answer to respond to his questions. “I don’t know” I whispered, as I bowed my head to look at my knees. Yet I was so desperate to tell him about the number of beatings that had happened while we were overseas. I felt as if I was sitting between two giant crates of bricks that were slowly crushing me to death and yet if I spoke of the real truth it could have slipped and killed me.

Dr. Andrew’s proceeded to all the usual check-up measures. He checked my chest for Asthma, had taken my temperate, weighed me, measured my body mass index and even taken my blood pressure. “Everything’s fine Brendan, you’re a little underweight but nothing to be too concerned with, particularly if you’re doing what you’re telling me and that’s eating 3 meals a day”. Just for proof I asked him if I could have that in writing. Dr. Andrew’s by now would have caught on that there were relationship issues but it wasn’t the time for me to speak and I think he was waiting for me to raise the issue rather than him intruding on private information that was irrelevant today’s session.

I proceeded to pack up my belongings and walk for the door. “Brendan, I’d like you to come and see me again when you’re free. I think there are a few more things that you might actually like to discuss with me”. His voice was soothing and comforting, and as a professional I knew that I could tell him what was actually happening but at this point in time, it wasn’t right. “It’s not the right time” I mumbled. He simply said “I gathered that” and I walked out of his office and closed the door behind me where Bruce was waiting in the foyer for me.

In the car on the drive home Bruce was quick to ask. “Well, what did he say, is it confirmed”? I simply rolled my eyes. “No Bruce its not, it’s true what I’ve been telling you all along, I don’t have male anorexia nervosa” I explained. Bruce was in complete shock “But that can’t be, I know you have anorexia, you know that you have it. We better start looking for a second opinion” he said in a rushed manner. I started to really raise my voice when I said” Look, he’s done all the tests. He examined the body mass index, my weight, discussed about my eating habits and the type of food that I eat and he believes me when I say I don’t think I’m fat. Now will you just believe me for once? I haven’t got male anorexia nervosa” There was a silent pause for a few moments then Bruce turned his head towards the window and muttered “That’s what you think”

Once again, no matter what I did or what I say, Bruce was adamant that I had the disease.

Bruce’s house was a typical Australian bungalow with 4 bedroom’s and 2 bathrooms. The living room was down the front of the house with the kitchen in the middle overlooking the pool area and the 4 bedrooms down the back of the house. Almost every night Bruce was down the back of the house in the study working on his training programs and I was out in the living room watching television. Late on Tuesday night I’d been watching television when I suddenly looked at the clock and realized it was almost midnight. Feeling rather shocked that I didn’t get to bed any sooner, I headed straight for bed. As I walked to the bedroom I passed Bruce sitting in the study catching up on work. He was sitting in front of the computer with the lights off. In my own protective way I softly said “Oh honey don’t sit there in the dark with the lights off, you’ll hurt your eyes” and I turned on the light and continued walking down the hall.

I was just about to open up the bedroom door when his forceful hands surprisingly grabbed me from behind and threw my back up against the cold wall in the hallway. “Don’t ever do that again, you got it? Leave the light where it was, do you understand me” he yelled. His face was so red and so close to mine that I could feel the anger steaming off his breath. He used his hands to hold my arms up against the wall so I was in a powerless position. “Oh god please let me go, let me go, oh god help me” I whimpered. Why was he doing this to me? His violent behavior was becoming too much of a regular occurrence and he knew that I didn’t like conflict or violence so I couldn’t work out why he was doing this to me. This was supposed to be the person who protected me. After a few moments that felt like a few hours, he released my hands and I paced myself as I walked into the bedroom. The next thing I knew I was lying face down on the bed. Bruce had come up behind me and hit me in the back, causing me to fall on my stomach across the bed. He switched the light off and simply walked away as if nothing had happened.

For 3 entire hours I curled myself up into a ball crying like a baby. I knew that sometimes I could be annoying and even a nuisance but I never thought anybody would go this far to either shut me up or make me stop acting the way I did. At least, I thought that’s why he began pushing me around in the first place.

The next day I had called Bruce’s very good friend Gary. Gary and I had known each other for at least 2 years before me and Bruce became partners and when Bruce and I got together I introduced them to each other and they developed a very strong friendship with each other. During my relationship with Bruce, Gary and I grew apart somewhat and he became very close with Bruce as he used to be with me. However, this didn’t stop me from wanting to see Gary at a time when I really needed to see him and get his advice on something.

I arranged to meet up with Gary at our local watering hole. The sportsman’s hotel, an old quaint gay bar on the outskirts of the city that possessed somewhat of a sleezy atmosphere, yet, a nice bar to meet for a casual drink.

Gary could see that I had been in distress with the speed that my hands were going at as I played with them. He noticed that every time I went to sip my beer my entire arm would tremble so he knew first hand that something was not right. I spent at least 2 hours telling Gary every minor detail of what happened to several months ago, whilst we were overseas, right down to what happened last night with me being punched onto the bed.

“He was perfectly within his rights Brendan, you of all people should know that” Gary said to me as if I had heard it all before. I was trying to ask Gary what he meant by the fact that Bruce was perfectly within his rights. Gary readily responded by saying “Well you can be annoying, and you do shit a lot of people off and sometimes you just got no idea when to back off and leave people alone so the only way to make you understand that is to hit you, at least that way you’ve learnt somewhat when your being annoying. Trust me Brendan most of the time it’s the only way people can get through to you”

Immediately I was gob smacked and I sat there with my mouth wide open in shock and disbelief. Gary, who was apparently my friend had basically told me that I deserved what had happened and it was the only way to get through to me. Now I’ve always known I can be a difficult person but never in my mind did I think I was that annoying on people. Was this something new I just learnt about myself or did this come down to my own limited understanding of being able to process social queues and interactions with other people? Either way, it’s not as if I’ve got a permanent guide telling me when the appropriate moment is to crack a joke, speak my mind or leave. It’s a risk I’ve taken every single time I socially interact with somebody, continuously playing the guessing game of “When is the right moment” but somehow never catching on no matter how hard I tried. It’s continual practice and 99% of the time I just never learned those social queues because when it came time to observe the behavior in other environments, social anxiety and panic attacks had always set in and my mind wondered elsewhere.

Although it was a very easy thing to do, Bruce and I had separated shortly after New Year of 2003 and I packed my bags on January 02nd and moved to Sydney. I thought there was nothing left for me in Brisbane anymore.

Towards the end of the break up, our circle of friends that included Tasha, Kelly, Terry and Shane had seemed to have drifted apart and what once a circle of close friends who shared everyone’s deepest secrets, we all seemed to have moved in separate directions. I didn’t really this coming, it more or less happened over time and before I could realize that our circle of friends had disbanded, it was too late.

Now was the time for me to go my separate way. I had a taste of real life, despite its hardships and it was time to start fresh in a new setting. I was now officially on my way to Sydney for a new life.


Chapter 8


A New City – A New Beginning

On the morning of January 21, a new friend named Robbie pulled up out the front of my door at 5.30 in the morning. A beautiful summer’s morning had filled the air and with the start of a new day came the start of a new adventure. Although I wasn’t too fond of the idea of being in a car for the next 15 hours, I knew within myself it was going to be well worth it.

As I stood outside Robbie’s car loading the car boot with only clothes, I hugged my mum to say bye. Living through this morning was one of toughest moments of my life. Being so close to my mother and then suddenly not knowing when I would see her again was emotionally painstaking. But it was something I had to do. In some way, I felt guilty for leaving my family behind. Although we have always been extremely close, my life would have been held back had I not decided to leave for Sydney. I envisaged I was standing at a T intersection. If I went left then I could grow stale in my hometown but would always have the closeness of family nearby, or I could go right and emotionally suffer in the beginning for leaving and discover a whole new me that had been yearning to break-free.

I hugged my mother for the final time and made the selfish decision to leave. I had viewed my decision as selfish given that I had upset my parents by leaving even tho I knew it was the right thing to do. I got in the car and we drove off down the street. I put my head out the window to wave goodbye to my mother and I slowly watched her disappear as we drove into the horizon. I had no idea when I would be back.

The scary thought about moving to Sydney was the fact that I only knew one person there and I wanted to use this move to test my strength of character and self-reliance. During the entire 15 hour journey one question kept on playing over in my head. “Was I venturing in waters way over my head?” I wasn’t too concerned about not finding work or being able to financially survive, I was more worried about being left alone in the ocean where I was still learning to swim. There was only one way to find out.

I hadn’t known Robbie for quite a while. We had met at the Wickham Hotel about 3 years prior to the move, and although we weren’t very close it was just nice to occasionally have someone to have a beer with. Robbie was originally from Brisbane but had moved to Sydney to be with his partner Christian. Robbie had been visiting his family and was now heading back to Sydney.

About an hour and a half into the drive we eventually crossed the border from Queensland into New South Wales. As the car drove over the border I broke into an emotional wreck. Although I would have looked like I was upset, I was crying tears of joy. All the beatings and mental abuse I copped from school and Bruce was now far behind me and I had no reason to look back.

I couldn’t help but think that I was prisoner in my own life. More often than not I was a prisoner of my life as I wasn’t able to escape and leave the past behind me. Sometimes late at night when darkness descended on the world and I laid there crying to sleep, I was in solitary confinement. Simply living in Brisbane was always a constant reminder of the horrors of the torture that I had endured.

After 2 weeks of arriving into Sydney I had gotten settled into my new home. I had moved in with Robbie and Christian in a tiny one bedroom flat in Surry Hills and found a stable job working as a Customer Service Officer for a training college in Broadway. It didn’t take me too long to get somewhat stable in a new life in Sydney. All that had been missing was the circle of friends that I shared in Brisbane. None the less I was sure that would eventually come in good time.

Living with Robbie and Christian appeared to be somewhat interesting. Robbie suffered from Dyslexia and had great difficulty in reading and writing and Christian had been very sick living with HIV. I was always careful when living with them due to Christian’s illness.

(Alec and the ACON circle of friend’s part to go here)

Christian, like me had been a very heavy smoker, yet his reason for smoking was not because of addiction but more because it reduced the pain of his illness, or so he claimed. And to make matters worse, Christian’s addiction to smoking grass I thought was highly disturbing, and offensive. Although this had not been my choice to smoke grass, there was no possible way I could tell him what he was doing was wrong.

Living with Robbie and Christian started out as a place I could call home. Although it was very cramped, the 3 of us shared a one bedroom unit in the middle of Surrey Hills south of Sydney. Due to the high cost of living in Sydney I was forced to sleep on the couch in the living room.

Being flat mates, there were certain things we all did together. We made sure that every Thursday night after work we drove to the Marrickville Metro to do our grocery shopping and every Saturday afternoon we sat out on the balcony enjoying the afternoon summer breeze over a bottle of white wine. As hard as it was to move to Sydney, things were beginning to turn around for the better. I had a stable job with a training company, I had a circle of friends and great flat mates. There really wasn’t anything else that I could ask for in terms of moving to another city. All that was left for me to do was find the right person to live with as I could stay with Robbie and Christian forever. Their place was just way too cramped.

After a month of being settled in their home, Christian began to become very distant with me. The unit was small and he began to treat me as if I didn’t exist. I didn’t quite know what was going on. I figured that we had been living in each other’s pocket for too long and perhaps I was started to wear out my welcome. If that was the case he certainly didn’t tell me and I was no mind reader to be able to pick that up either.

One morning when I was getting ready for work, Robbie was out in the kitchen making coffee and I asked him what had gone wrong with me and Christian and I tried to obtain some sort of reason why he began distancing himself from me. “Christian reckons you’re a freeloader” I was pretty shocked but couldn’t work out why. I was paying my share of the rent on a weekly basis; I was contributing to the weekly food bill and paid part of the electricity bill so I certainly had contributed my share of living with the guys.

Christian’s actions spoke louder than words when his true colors began to shine through. I guess having Asperger’s Syndrome is that when people’s actions do speak louder than words, you tend to miss the real message and you carry on as if nothing is wrong. The Asperger might say “well I’m not a mind reader” but the Non-Asperger in this case is probably thinking your dumb as well as stupid.

One late Friday afternoon when I finished work, I headed straight for home. I had plans to get home, shower, get changed and head to Oxford Street to meet some colleagues of mine for dinner and drinks. As I went to pull my clothes out, several pairs of my jeans had massive burn marks in them and some of clothes had been scattered all across the balcony. At first I wasn’t quite sure what to think, until Robbie walked in the door and told me what happened. Robbie had tried to hold Christian back his temper apparently had flared out of control like wild fire and he went around burning my clothes and throwing some of them off the balcony into the park next to the apartment block.

Standing there like a dumb mullet trying to process “why”, Robbie mentioned that Christian was very angry and upset with me because of being a freeloader. I still couldn’t fathom why or how he got the opinion I was a freeloader. I always made certain I did what I could to contribute to the “so-called” happy living arrangement. Robbie knew where I was coming from and he said to me that he thought Christian was more jealous of the friendship Robbie and I shared, not really being a freeloader.

His sudden change behavior had completely taken me by surprise. I didn’t understand that if Christian had issues with anything, why he didn’t raise them with me rather than damaging my personal property. I knew something had to be done and that I had to get out of the unit sooner or later otherwise there would have been hell to pay.

When I came back from dinner that night, I checked my mobile phone which I put on charge prior to going out. I looked at the phone and found it wasn’t working, so I opened it up to check the sim card, it turned out Christian had gotten a pen and scribbled all over my sim card so that it would damage the phone, now I was without the ability to call home the old panic attacks began to set it. I didn’t know what I could now or where I could go. All of a sudden the outlook of my life in Sydney began to look extremely grim. As usual, sweats and a terrible heart race began to kick in and the only option I could think of to get out of emergency situation was to move back home.

The next day I ran down to the local phone box to call home. I couldn’t in touch with my parents so I called my ex, Bruce. Of all people in the world I have no idea why I called him. He was the first person that came to mind for me to call someone back home and ask for help. After all that had happened between me and Bruce I couldn’t work out why I called him in an emergency and not one of my other friends or even my sister. None the less Bruce was more than happy to help out and he booked me a ticket on the next train back to Brisbane. Once I got confirmation from him that the ticket had been purchased and I was heading home, my new life that I started to make for myself in Sydney had come to an end and I was heading back home to the place where the dark violent memories of high school and endless beatings were once again.

I didn’t tell Robbie and Christian what I had planned to do. When I called Bruce that afternoon they had gone out and weren’t expected to be back for a few days. That was my opportunity to get things ready to leave. I quickly packed up my bags, ran around the unit to make sure I got everything and had one final sleepless night on the couch. The train wasn’t due to depart from Sydney Central until 5pm that Monday afternoon but I wanted to make sure that I got to the station in time before Robbie and Christian had walked in the front door. It was an overnight trip from Sydney back to Brisbane, and although the chairs on the train were extremely uncomfortable for the entire journey, I managed to sleep like a baby the entire way. I guess it was because I knew I was safe and I was going back home.

As sunrise began to break over South East Queensland a new day was setting upon me and this encouraged my brain to do some valuable thinking. I learnt one lesson from packing up and moving interstate. Home isn’t just where you eat and sleep or the character and life that exists within the city, home truly is where the heart is and for me, my home was in Brisbane where my family and friends were. I think in all honesty that if everyone I loved packed up and moved to some rural country town I would have to follow. Not because I’m dependent upon them but because they are apart of my “home” and my heart is with them, therefore I would have to follow.

The train began to travel through the southern suburbs of Brisbane. My grandparents used to own a turf farm at Algester and I would remember as a child hearing the Sydney XPT service go racing through, well I was on the train going past a home where some of my most fondest memories of my childhood were lived. Some of the landmarks began to look familiar as the train headed into the city and once I got accustomed to the feeling of seeing of everything that was so familiar I was finally glad to be home.

The train had pulled into Roma Street station after a grueling and tiresome 16 hours on the train and as I stepped off the train and headed to baggage collection my parents and Bruce seemed to have appeared out of nowhere from the crowd. My life paused and the 3 main people who had an impact on my life were there, my mother, father and Bruce.

Through Bruce’s actions of him just being there, it showed to me that he was worried about what I had gone through and he wanted to make sure that I arrived home safely. With my parents of course, well I just knew they would want to meet me at the station. Even though me and Bruce had gone through some incredibly violent episodes, his actions of just being at the station to meet me was highly uplifting and I felt wanted again.

So many questions kept on going through my head about how my new life Sydney had quickly disintegrated right before my eyes. Perhaps if I was being a freeloader at Robbie and Christians then how come they never sat me down and explained to me the situation. It could have been because they didn’t know how to communicate properly, or it could have been just because of Christian’s violent nature or it simply could have been because he really was jealous of the relationship that I did share with Robbie. I didn’t get why it all happened and so fast yet it was completely out of my control. So much for a test of strength on my character and trying to be self reliant. In a way I felt guilty to myself for having to come home and not battle it out properly and try to fix the situation on my own. At the time when I came home I wasn’t sure if I had made a good decision or a bad decision. So far the only lesson learnt was the true meaning of the word called home. Perhaps I wasn’t so self reliant and independent as first thought or that the experience of living in Sydney was just simply out of my depth. Little did I know this would be a question that I would continue to ask myself for the next couple of years.

So why was my experience so different to everyone else’s? I’ll probably never know but what I was sure of was that some of my friends were able to just pack up and move to another city at a moments notice and spend very little time establishing a home and a life in a different city. I sort of felt that my friends who did in fact did this, didn’t really have to work hard at getting themselves a new life in another place, it was just something that came naturally to them and yet for some reason for me, I had to work at it and my efforts didn’t pay off. As I always told myself in these sort of situations, what I perceived may not always hold true.

In everybody’s life there always seems to be a mixture of both good and bad times, yet mine always appeared to be full of bad times that caused great mental anxiety


Chapter 9


Despite what most people think, personal relationships are very important to people with Asperger’s Syndrome. In that they are probably more crucial to people with Asperger’s Syndrome because it helps them flourish with a set of new social skills rarely taught anywhere else.

By the time I turned 24 I had already had a number of relationships, all being somewhat long-term. I was with Bruce for 12 months and with Scott for 6 months. Now they don’t really seem like long term but at 24, this was certainly the case.

When I came to live back in Brisbane after my series of unfortunate events from living in Sydney, I spent a huge amount of my time living in bedroom and not venturing back out into the real world. Although I made time for my friends and family, I didn’t have any intention on making time for any new friends. When I first came back home I spent many sleepless nights tossing and turning in bed around midnight reliving the horrible memories of Sydney in my head, so as a distraction I decided to get onto the online chat room and just see who I could talk too around the world. My only intention at this point was to simply pass the time until I knew that I could always fall off to sleep.

I spent an entire 2 weeks chatting with a wonderful person who seemed to really care about what had just happened down in Sydney and he could clearly understand the turning point in my life where it was time to close one door and begin to open another. Over that 2 week period we chatted about so many different topics, one in particular – how hard it was to meet other gay people in Brisbane. I’ve always made sure that I had a picture of myself on my profile for others to view and I always expected the same in return. So when somebody sent me a private message without a face picture, I would instantly ignore them, but without thinking about, I never noticed that the person I was chatting too didn’t have a face picture, I had gotten so caught up in our interesting topics of conversation that a picture of what he looked like simply became irrelevant. I guess because Scott was more interested in chatting about topics such as politics, travel, money and life in general, he showed to me he was more of a decent human being by not making some quick attempt to get me into bed. As with 99.9% of my experiences with online chat, that was usually the case.

Scott had asked me several times if I would like to meet up with coffee. And being the usual hesitant person that I am, I eventually gave in but under certain conditions. One of those conditions was that he would come over for coffee but meet me at my friend’s house where she would look out for me incase he attempted to do something drastic. On the night of the meet I paced the hallways of her house, playing with my hands and trying to wipe the sweat from across my head. It had been along time since I met up with anybody off the internet and nerves eventually got the better of me. As I paced the hallway, the wooden floorboards would creak with my every move, I had made to the bathroom door when all of a sudden; a knock at the front door suddenly had me frozen at my feet. Scott had arrived at the front door and was waiting for me to greet him. Eileen had asked him to come inside to get comfortable while she turned the kettle on and made an attempt to come down to the hallway to grab me. Now when I think about this particular night, Scott must have been shaking in his boots, or seriously questioning why he was in some total stranger’s house where a gay man has come to meet another man and a woman answers the door.

I eventually worked up the courage to walk into the living room and say hello. I suddenly saw a tall man with a shaved head and goatee standing in the front door. He’s sparkling green eyes lit the room as he smiled from ear to ear and politely said “pleased to meet you Brendan”. My body had gone to jelly while I absorbed this beautiful man’s looks. We did manage to sit down and chat eventually, after Eileen had been bothered to finish off making the coffee.

The hours had quickly gone by on this blessed night, perhaps the full moon had some part to play in this new found friendship that was soon to unfold. When it came time for us to part ways I was about to head off home when Scott had softly said “I can drop you off home if you like, seen as you only live around the corner”. At that moment I thought that was a wonderful thing to do, and this guy certainly didn’t come across as if he was the axe murderer type either. So, I gracefully accepted.

Over a period of several weeks, and as I began to emerge from the compounds of my bedroom into the real world, I had spent more and more time with Scott, getting to know the real person and allowing him to understand the real me. I never had planned on a friendship going further, but there soon came a point when we both knew that we would end up more than just friends. I hadn’t told Scott at this point about the Asperger’s, it really didn’t seem relevant. If he had observed any sort of peculiar behavior, he certainly didn’t question it and just accepted me for who I was. This was probably what I was most thankful for at this point in my life.

On the afternoon before Good Friday of 2003, Scott had asked if I wanted to join his work colleagues for a drink. He only worked a few blocks over from me in the city and we were both going out for dinner that night so I hesitantly agreed to meet up for drinks before dinner. I found it more daunting knowing there were other strangers there who were wanting to socialize with me. As nervous as I was, I pushed ahead past the anxiety for Scott’s sake. When I eventually arrived there were 5 other people at the table sitting with Scott, they had even reserved a chair for me and were waiting for my company. As I approached the table, I could see Scott and the others sitting around drinking and I had to stop in the doorway of the bar, I wasn’t able to move for a few brief minutes. Like any other situation where it comes time to use my “so-called” social skills, I always froze, this was usually when I would mentally prepare myself to be alert for the social queues.

Scott had seen me standing in the doorway of the bar and he must have thought I was looking out for the group. Excitedly he raced over to me and invited me to join him and the group. Once again, his smile and eyes got to me and I wanted to socialize, for his sake at least. He gently placed his hand on my back and escorted me over to the table. As I walked over with him to the table, everyone had gotten up to introduce themselves. They all appeared a very happy and friendly bunch so I was pretty sure that socially I would be okay. Besides, I had Scott there with me so I knew that things would be fine. I didn’t know it at the time, but that afternoon would have a significant impact on my memory as I grew older and learnt more about relationships. To this day, I miss that afternoon because out of all the people I have dated, nobody has treated me in such a kinder and more comforting way.

Everybody in the group appeared to be so friendly and I got along quite well with them. Prior to my arrival, they had already learnt a lot about me. It turned out that Scott had told them all about me before I arrived and they must have taken an instant shining to what had been described of me. Its funny how when you think so poorly about yourself, that there is always somebody out there to turn your own perception into a positive beacon of hope. If time was on our side, we would have stayed there all night chatting and joking, but we had to leave as Scott was meeting my parents for the first time that night and we didn’t want to be late.

As time progressed, Scott and I had eventually formed a relationship. At the time I first met him I wasn’t hoping to meet anybody special and I certainly thought I wouldn’t meet anybody full stop, but I guess this just proves that you always meet other people when you least expect it.

My last serious relationship prior to Scott was with Bruce a year before. Mum and Dad had gotten along with Bruce with but they were never totally keen on him. They pretty much accepted him for my sake, but with Scott things were totally different. I can recall numerous times when I would be at home reading a book at night and Scott would knock on the door; he hadn’t come over to see me, he actually came over to play computer games with my father, I found this rather entertaining actually. On one rainy Friday afternoon when Dad had picked me up from the train station after work to drive me home and I walked in the front door, Scott was sitting in the living room having a chat with Mum. He was there on a surprise to take me and my parents out for dinner. Compared with Bruce, Scott had made a real effort to get to know my parents. I guess this was because I always reinforced the fact that who ever was important in my life had to be able to accept and get along with my family. Scott had obviously accepted this rule to the fullest extent.

It had been several months since moving back from Sydney and I was just getting back on my feet with finding a decent stable full time job and now it was time to move into own place. I had never lived alone before but it was something that I needed to do. I had to learn to rely on my own independence to survive.

I had found a beautiful, low maintenance, cosy one bedroom flat close to the city. And on moving day my life had turned around for the better. I had full time job where I was performing well, a loving stable relationship and a flat to call my own. It was now time to test the strength of my independence.

Scott and I had a few issues going forward. He began to observe strange behavior patterns that I couldn’t control. I had become quite emotionally and mentally depressed several weeks after moving into my own flat. Each day was turning in to be a severe mental struggle and there were times when I just couldn’t get out of bed. Scott started off being nurturing and caring towards me, but as things unfolded, I ended up just pushing him away emotionally. I wanted nothing more than to be as close to him as possible and there were times when we would call and I would do nothing but cry in an emotional plea to try and get him to come over to my home so I could spend time with him. Then, when he wanted to hang out friends I’d get all depressed and upset because I couldn’t see him. In the beginning he used to give in to my emotional pleas, but eventually that would come to a stop.

I had hit rock bottom by the time September had came around and I couldn’t find any cause for what was wrong. I just assumed that I was nothing but a mental crackpot who had it brick wall and was about to crumble. I couldn’t find any suitable answer as too what was wrong with me, and all the emotional and mental stress had taken its toll on Scott; and by the time I realized what damage I was doing to him, I had pushed him away, it was too late and I had dug a bigger hole for myself – one that I was unable to crawl out of.

Scott did try on numerous occasions to find out what was wrong with me, and at the time he did everything he could, but when he learnt to the full extent of what had happened to me in Sydney and what happened with my ex Bruce, he was unable to deal with my emotional rollercoaster. Because of the issues that I always dwelled on from the past, I drove this beautiful man away from me.

On the last Saturday night in September, I had planned to meet up with a few friends from my work at a bar in Fortitude Valley. I was planning on spending a big night out with my mates and I would catch up with Scott first thing Sunday morning. During the course of the night I had been texting Scott and he seemed upset about something and I was getting quite concerned, so I decided to call it a night with my friends and go and stay at Scott’s and check if he was okay. I sent him a text asking if he wanted to come over tonight and keep him company. His response said “if you want”. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that response, but the only way to find out was to go there and see what was wrong.

I got to Scott’s and we sat on the couch watching television after I tried numerous times to find out what was wrong and I couldn’t get any answer from him. The only response I would get was “nothing’s wrong”. I had tried so many times to get him to open up to me and I felt like I had hit a brick wall and I couldn’t get any further with him. He ended up retreating to the shower and was apparently going to bed after that, so I made a snap decision to leave and never return. I wasn’t going to sit at somebody’s house and get totally ignored. While he was in the shower I had called a taxi and I waited out the front of the house for the taxi to arrive. Scott had slowly walked out of the house to the front yard where I was sitting while I waited for my cab to arrive. Without making any sort of eye contact to me he asked what was wrong. I attempted to explain how I felt like I was being ignored and that I had no need to stick around if he was going to pretend to ignore me. The only word I ever got back from him was “you’re choice”. And he calmly walked back into the house and closed the front door behind him. That was the last time I ever saw Scott after that.

What still leaves me bewildered even to this day is that if I meant so much to somebody; wouldn’t they have tried to stop me from leaving? Or perhaps I had just put too much emotional and mental stress on him that I pushed him away and it was too late to rectify the problem. Within my heart I believe the answer is both. If I was very important in his life he would have to tried to have stopped me from leaving and work it out, but then he probably did try many times before this and I didn’t pick up on it and I had pushed him too far.

By the time I had worked out the answer to my problems I had lost Scott forever. I had hit rock bottom from the events over the previous 12 months. I had been in a violent relationship; I moved interstate, changed many jobs and had no stability or set routine in my life for a whole year. The stress of this had finally caught up with me. If only I had the chance to explain this to Scott then perhaps things might be different today. The one line I heard quoted that helped me mentally and emotionally to get through my break up was “the only person in the world worth more than your tears is the one who wouldn’t make you cry”

I had taken the breakup extremely hard. I had spent my sleepless nights crying my eyes out, even to the point where my bed sheets were completely drenched from the tears that I had cried. The relationship had finished with so many issues unresolved and the hardest part above all was too close the door to that part of my past without tying up those loose ends. I still think of Scott from time to time and wonder what he’s doing with his life, I’d like to be able to sit him and down and explain so many things but after 5 years, I just can’t see that happening anymore.

I eventually managed to move on with my life and meet new people but I’ve always had one question in the back of my mind: Can people with Asperger’s really have long-term relationships and make them work? I often wonder if they can, or if it’s just me that can’t seem to make relationships work. I dread to think that there will come a time when I’m a lonely old man.

Not only do I believe it to be hard for people with Asperger’s Syndrome to make relationships work long-term, but being gay as well appears to make it incredibly difficult. From what I’ve seen in the gay community, relationships tend to be very short-lived and end up in nothing but disaster. However, I’ve come across a few couples in my life that have been together for 10, 15, 20 and even 30 years, but there are very few that have reached that milestone.

Everybody appears to be looking for love, or at least for their sole mate. But in the gay community, I just keep meeting people who want quick sexual encounters first, and then look for love. Whenever I go to the local pub in town, I grab my beer and go off to sit in the corner and observe the different crowds of people, I keep coming across people with the one intention: Sex. And it always seems to be that people are hunting out sexual encounters first, and then hoping to start dating or seeing that person. I know for a fact that would probably never work so why bother chasing something that won’t happen. Could that be my Asperger’s talking or could that just be my own weird perception?

Whenever people have made an attempt to pick me up in the pub, I’ve always ended up having to turn them down because their intentions are different to mine. If somebody was to have sex with me, its because they appreciate my mind, as well as my body, but I always feel like that I’m never given the chance to show somebody my mentality because in order for somebody to listen and understand you when you talk, in the gay community you need to be body beautiful. Without those good looks, most people wouldn’t give you a chance to shine mentally. I feel sad when that happens because I know my mind is beautiful and yet it always feels like most people don’t want any part in that. However I have no doubt in my mind that if my body was muscled, bronzed and not even a spot on my body, my beautiful mind would disappear and there would be nothing left in my head but a super ego. I’d pass on that any day.

Most of the gay community has one known fear: The fear of being alone. Yet in the community, there are so many sub groups who try to fit into the gay community and will always face that fear of being alone when they get older because of who they are. I’m talking about other personal challenges such as being deaf; mentally challenging behaviors, physically challenging behaviors and so forth. So not only do these people struggle to find other people to have relationships with; they also struggle being accepted into a community of their own, especially in the gay world. Now I don’t know if what I have just said is right or wrong, it is merely how I perceive the community through my own thoughts and feelings.

As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt more about what I don’t like as opposed to what I do like, but I’ve also learnt some very harsh lessons in making a stable relationship work. I know from past experiences where my Asperger’s has had a very negative impact on my relationships, only now when I look back them I am able to identify and pin point when and were the Asperger’s played a role in my relationship breakdowns and the only thing I can do when moving forward in the future is constantly think about the past issues and do all that is in my power to stop the Asperger’s from breaking any chance of happiness that I have. In some ways it’s like a mini war; no matter how hard you try and stop the Asperger’s, usually it always has the upper hand.

However I firmly believe that with a person who has a good grasp of Asperger’s and where it affects the individual and how certain issues can be dealt with; there is absolutely no reason why a person with Asperger’s can have a happy and loving long-term relationship.


Chapter 10


On that fateful Christmas morning when I was just 14 years of age and I was given a typewriter to start working on my first feature film script, I knew instantly that when I hit adulthood, creative writing would be my inspiration for a career. I guess this is where being an Aspergerian works in my favor: my obsession with writing for film and television would hopefully one day make my dream into a reality. On days when it was raining outside, or school and work had gotten to hard to bare, the only excitement and enjoyment in my life was to sit at my desk with a cup of tea and begin writing.

On the day that I was given my typewriter, I started writing my first feature film script at 10pm and through sheer determination, I had it finished by sunrise the next day. There were so many other reasons why I enjoyed writing; it wasn’t just a chance to get away from the mental stress of school but I also had the opportunity to let the creative side of my life go anywhere in the world that I wanted it too. I guess because I lived in such a harsh realistic world, my ideas and perceptions of a world where anything could happen could take place at my desk and typewriter and it was only ever then that I knew that the world could be my oyster.

Over many years I had written a number of feature film scripts, plays, short stories and first draught novels, but I never had any of my work assessed, until now. I recently submitted my first feature film script to a producer on the Gold Coast, and I guess I will just have to sit back and wait and see what happens. I guess after trying a number of career paths I know which the best is for me, and that’s writing but on a realistic side, I’ve had to try working in a range of different jobs in order to see if I could succeed elsewhere. Although I have always questioned my potential and abilities, I know deep within myself that writing is what I was put on this earth to do. Writing is my chance to make people laugh, cry, question the world and attempt to change people’s thoughts and perceptions about various issues we are all faced with in this world. I guess because I’ve always had trouble doing this verbally and in a social setting, writing has been the only way I can do this.

When I first began to make that daunting move from my teenage years into adult hood, I contemplated various careers on a realistic level and thought long and hard about where I wanted my career to prosper. Although I had dreamed of nothing but writing books and film and television scripts, it certainly wasn’t a stable career nor was it one that could take off quickly; whilst at the same time I was faced with the challenge of where somebody would see my skills as highly valuable and sought after.

I thought about a number of career prospects towards the end of high school. In particular, studying to become a registered nurse was my ultimate aim. The thought of providing a high level of care and nurturing support to those in need was at the top of my list, however there had to be a way to overcome my crippling fear of vomiting. I examined other areas including how to become a commercial aviation pilot and an accountant, but I needed to have passed complex math’s and given the way my brain worked those career paths weren’t going to happen anytime after school. So I ended up going for Nursing and applying through the state’s tertiary admission centre.

In order to get accepted into your chosen fields of study at university back in the late 1990’s, you had to put down 6 possible course options with number 1 being your most sought after field of study. At number 1 I had enlisted for a Bachelor of Registered Nursing, number 2 was a Bachelor of Public Health, number 3 a Bachelor of Political Science and then 4, 5 and 6 were Diploma’s in Community Services with the prospect of obtaining credits for future university study. By the time the offers from the university had rolled out the only program I was accepted into was my 6th preference: Diploma of Community Services – Child Protection, Juvenile Justice and Statutory Supervision. Although the only option available to me was not directly into a nursing, I had seen this as a stepping point to obtain the valuable credits there were required to enter the Bachelor of Registered Nursing at Queensland University of Technology.

In the first year of my studies at Yeronga TAFE, I gained valuable knowledge about sociology, psychology, case management and child protection reform; little did I know that my only option available to me after high school would open many doors that I thought were never possible. After getting off to flying colors at TAFE I enlisted to take on more core subjects that would also give me a Diploma of Youth Work. I am still very proud to this day that I had completed both Diplomas’. Although I initially had taken this area of studying as a bridging course into Nursing, I began to learn and develop a very keen interest into the areas of autism and how other people, just like me were living with the condition on all different levels of their life stages. My chosen areas of study at TAFE opened up a whole new world where I discovered unknown interests and quickly learnt where in this world I could make a difference.

In July of 2002 I had successfully gained entry into the Bachelor of Social Science majoring in Child and Youth Development. Some of the core subjects at university were psychology/communication based subjects, and although at this stage of my life I didn’t possess the same level of interpersonal communication that someone should possess at the age of 20, I decided to study these subjects first only to learn to communicate better with others.

For the whole year I spent studying psychology and behavior therapy, there were many aspects of communication that I learnt where I could implement these techniques into my personal day to day life. The art of active listening always allows for people to open up and give answers with great depth rather than just a simple yes or no answer. So in my personal social life I began applying these active listening skills and my friends had certainly noticed a change in my communication patterns. Usually when I spoke about a particular subject it was always a one sided story but then all of a sudden I began listen to other people’s contributions and talking problems through rather than displaying emotions in the way a typical Aspergian would. I had discovered two possibilities by going to university and studying communication; I had either found a way to surpress the control of Asperger’s Syndrome or I’ve just learnt how to control it better to make interpersonal relationships work.

To this day I still don’t quite know why I never completed my Bachelor of Social Science, but I left full time study to commence full time work. I worked various temp jobs going from company to the next doing basic administration work with a combination of executive support, finance and human resources. Towards the end of that year I was offered a fantastic opportunity to work as the PA to the Managing Director for a major insurance company based in Brisbane. I was clearly told that I possessed great skills that would be required by the person to complete the job, and if everything went according to plan, the Managing Director would eventually train me up to take over his role at his retirement.

I worked very hard for Glenn every day. I managed every single appointment, taken care of all his mail, answered and screened all the telephone calls and had taken care of some light budget management for the office. I thought I was off to a flying start in the job by trying to use my initiative for everything and really thinking things through. I might have thought that I was on a roll however this was not the case. Glenn had pulled me into his office late Friday afternoon and asked “So, how do you think your going? It’s been a week since you’ve been here, do you think your doing okay” That was a pretty full on question and it was one that I wasn’t expecting to be thrown at me but I knew the answer immediately “Doing great and absolutely loving the job” I said to Glenn with a very confident smile. “Is that right” he replied while keeping his eyes on his desk twiddling with a pen on his desk. I knew something was about to happen but wasn’t quite sure.

Glenn had suddenly pulled off a long list of points he had written down on paper about my work performance. At the top of the paper I could see the word in big bold capitals “PERFORMANCE ISSUES”. From that moment on I knew what he was about to say wasn’t going to sound good. He started running through the list of things that were on the list. Everything you could possibly imagine was on that list from the radio being up too loud, taking phone messages incorrectly, and passing on the wrong information to clients, scheduling incorrect meetings, preparing the wrong meeting files and even leaving at 4.57pm instead of 5.00pm. On my first day I clearly don’t remember Glenn telling me these things. He could have but I certainly don’t remember. If an employer expects their staff to work productively, how can they terminate their employment based on week’s performance? I was still getting settled into the job and still learning all there was to know with the role. To this day I still don’t believe my contract was terminated for the right reasons, I believe it would have been because my communication methods might have come across somewhat different and strange yet I suffered the penalty for it.

I can still see Glenn sitting there in his expensive leather chair that reflected off the afternoon sun while he exercised his power in the company and dragged my confidence and self esteem straight out from underneath me.

That was only full time job I ever had in private enterprise. I made a snap decision that afternoon when walking to the pub that I would try and get into government the very next working day. The state government had an outstanding reputation for never sacking employees. They currently have, in conjunction with the Anti Discrimination laws the Public Sector Ethics Act that tries to encourage people with disabilities and minority groups to apply for employment into the Public Service. For me, there was no other alternative and that’s what I had to do.

I worked with a number of government departments in a temporary capacity. I stared off with the Department for Veteran’s Affairs processing the daily mail, filing and completion of the records management process. From there I was lucky enough to obtain a temporary contract as a public service employee on the government payroll for a 12 month administrative officer position. I started off performing the job at very exceptional level, having regular contact with my direct line manager I was always in a position to tell my boss any issues that I was having and she always had ways to suggest how I could do better in my job. In January of 2004 Jenny was successful in obtaining a different position and it was time for her to leave the Transport Department. Although it was somewhat disheartening to see her leave, I was looking forward to getting to know my new boss and develop a wonderful working rapport with the new Business Manager.

The following Monday morning Jette had shown up for work. She was in her mid 50’s and was sitting comfortably at reception until staff had arrived. I was the first arrive that morning for work and I introduced myself and had taken her through to her office. We sat and chatted for about 15 minutes until our director had arrived and I went off to commence the working week. Jette had seemed rather approachable and I was looking forward to working with her.

We started off working extremely well together. She knew that I was confident in my job and that I was extremely punctual and reliable. However after 2 weeks of working in complete bliss, Jette displayed another side and it was one that I didn’t enjoy working with.

The way she delegated tasks went from a polite way to a demand, and I began to pose a problem with this. I’ve never had a problem taking a task from a Manager, but it always common courtesy to ask your staff to do something for them, never polite to make demands on them. I raised this with Jette and told her that I didn’t appreciate having demands made on me, I would prefer her to politely ask. Maybe this was the worse thing that I could have done. From then on, she always demanded that I certain tasks and never asked. One late Friday afternoon as I was leaving for home, she told me to get some filing that was done on her desk. She had known that I was walking out the door at 4.30 and when I was waiting for the lift at 4.45 she walked out and said “get that filing done Brendan, before you go home thanks”. With a stunned look on my face I said “excuse me” and she simply said “you heard me; it has to be done before you go home”. Having the attitude that I have, I thought there was no chance of me doing it; for a number of reasons. One, I was on my way home and I had packed everything up for the day, and two, she demanded that I do a task and did not ask. As the lift doors opened, I said to her as I entered “Ask please, and then I’ll do it when I come in on Monday, you know that I’m heading off home”. I know I had said this in a polite manner but the consequences that were to follow were disastrous.

As soon as I showed up for work on the Monday morning there was an email from Jette asking her to see me in her office to discuss my behavior. I toke a gulp of air and proceeded to walk into her office. She was sitting there focused on the branch’s budget. It had taken a few moments before she realized that I was standing at the office door waiting to be acknowledged. When she did see me she said “close the door and have a seat”. When she started talking, immediately she criticized my actions explaining how unethical and slack it was that I walk away when a manager asks for something to be done from one of their staff. When I attempted to explain that she knew the time that I was leaving and that I do not accept demands, she blew her top over another issue; my timesheets.

Jette had pulled out my timesheets from the day that I started working for the department and put a big red line through each one of them and said they were all done incorrectly and I ended up apparently owing the department 65 hours in working time. Then to make matters worse she told me how slack and disgusting it was that I never listen to instructions properly and she now she had enough of having to repeat herself.

I could understand some of the points that she was making, but she was addressing them in the wrong way. Jette was addressing the issues in a form of bullying and harassment, and if she truly cared about the performance of her staff, she would have to change the way she address’ performance issues. When she had finished going through all the issues her final words were “you’re work ethic is absolutely slack and poor, I refuse to work with people like that, it’s disgusting”. I kept a cool head, toke a breath of air, and calmly said “You have no right to talk to me like that” and then I got up and walked out the office and went home. I had quit and was to never return. Under no circumstances would I work with an employer in such conditions. If they wanted the most out of me; respect and a proper approach to performance issues would have made me stay.

After swapping and changing from job to job, and going through the same issues over and over again; I was lucky to land a 5 month contract in Accounts Payable for another government department.

The work was very routine based, structured, and the people I worked with appeared to be fantastic. They enjoyed having a radio in the workplace where everybody could sing along if they felt like it, people sent joke emails back n forth which I never missed out on and there didn’t appear to be anybody who was out to get someone else. The pay was not the greatest but I was willing to stay for the peace of mind knowing that I got along with everyone and that I was happy with what I did.

I worked in a small team with only a few others, but we were all around the same age. My Manager, who was Rachel, was the oldest of the group but she was only 29. On my second day after getting to meet everyone and learn more about my new job, I toke Rachel aside and sat her down in one of the small meeting rooms. I toke the risk of telling Rachel I had Asperger’s Syndrome and that sometimes I would have difficulty in performing certain tasks so the chance might come where I would need to ask the same questions perhaps a number of times before I could understand the answer.

I must admit I had lost sleep the night before because I was stressing what would happen if I didn’t tell Rachel that I had Asperger’s Syndrome. I truly felt like I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t tell her.

That’s the way it works I guess with some employers. If I make them aware and tell them how they can deal with an employee with Asperger’s then it should be a good thing, but I’ve also found that following that rule, also limits your potential for future career growth.

Several months ago I made the courageous step of informing my employer about my condition. In a few simple sentences I said “This is what I have, this is how it works, these are the mistakes I can sometimes make and this is how you need to deal with it so that I can improve myself”. That was probably one of the worst things I ever told an employer.

The following week I was ordered to get a letter from my doctor about the condition where my doctor was to psychologically assess my suitability for the job I had been doing for nearly 2 years, and then I was placed on a workers rehabilitation program which also involved a number of my tasks in my job to be taken away from me. Not only did this cause a major embarrassment for myself; but given that this was a high profile government department that thrived on outstanding human resource practices; they were dealing with this matter completely incorrect. As someone with Asperger’s I know what’s best for me and what’s the best way for me to learn a job. I couldn’t fathom why they would make decisions about a person’s condition they knew nothing about

My teenage years might have seemed like a life changing event in terms of going through one’s journey of self discovery but only now, in my mid 20’s have I learnt; what I went through is only the beginning of a never ending array of joy, panic, social anxiety, and excitement.

There was always that part in my mind that so desperately wanted to change how my brain processes information and how I present it. Nothing would make me feel happier about myself than to be able to walk into a party and just begin chatting socially with strangers or step into a new job and just automatically take a simple instruction by listening only once.

Although I can’t speak for other aspies, I think at some point we all begin to take a step back and say a few clear words “Can’t change it”

The very first day my Psychologist told me what I had, I never really knew how it would have affected my life and how much it had control over me, I think a lot of my teenage years were subconsciously trying to fight the Asperger’s within me by not allowing it rule my life, rather me attempting to override the Asperger’s. Now that I am 26, I’m beginning to learn that it’s just not possible.

Throughout my career I encounted many issues with Manager’s and supervisors and one job that comes to mind where I was told for the first time I wasn’t needed in my job simply because of what I had. As you would have probably read I faced great difficulty in building a professional rapport with supervisor’s and attempting to take clear direction, which always resulted in myself being placed on performance reviews, but working in the bar for the first few weeks really began to change my life around. My then boss was more than just supervisor, he often look at me directly in the eye and show deep concern as to how I was getting a handle on the job. At the end of one shift I was even taken out for breakfast. To have this kind of relationship with a supporting supervisor went far beyond any of my expectations and for once I felt what job security was really like.

My boss had empowered me to speak my mind to a degree if I felt uncomfortable with something, or if any issues ever needed to be raised – both personal and of a work nature – I could always go to him. Eventually that courage toke full control and I felt if I told him that I had Asperger’s Syndrome I would be presenting a new level of honesty and integrity to my workplace. So this is exactly what I did.

We sat down and had a drink together and I thoroughly explained what I had and how it affected me, I clearly pointed out that on this very rare occasion, the Asperger’s never came into play when it came to my work performance.

Although I certainly didn’t receive the response that I thought I would get, Paul didn’t seem to be bothered and we continued chatting over various topics.

Later into the shift whilst I was gathering ice from the freezer the owner of the bar gently tapped me on the shoulder and said “so what’s this thing you got”, kind of bewildered that he knew given that I told this to my boss in confidence, I proceeded to tell him and how I enjoyed working in a job where Asperger’s didn’t have an impact on my work.

The owner replied “Okay, then I don’t think this job is for you then” My stomach sank immediately and I had to ask the owner to repeat what he just said. His response was exactly the same and he politely told me to finish up at the end of my shift which was at 1am. From that moment it was if something had walked up to me and kicked me fair in the teeth or slapped me across the face. I kindly asked him “where does my condition pose a problem at work? The only response I got from him was “We just don’t think this is the right job for you” Although he said it with a smile, to this day I still can’t work out if he was being sarcastic or compassionate. That’s something I’m always going to be left wondering about.

I didn’t bother working through till 1am that night, I walked out the bar immediately and didn’t return for 6 months out of fear and shame from other co workers. Today when I go drinking there, the same bar manager will avoid serving me if he can and refuses to acknowledge my presence, now I can only hope this is out of guilt and shame but I highly doubt it.

So many questions have gone unanswered from this event, and to this day I’m yet to find a Manager who can understand who I am and how I work. All employers always say they are always on the lookout for enthusiastic people, yet, me, who I am to a high degree; I show this in my work but haven’t gone very far in my career. I think the biggest killer in this situation was I either divulged too much personal information, or I was just honest and people got intimidated by that but this really made me think twice about opening up to future manager’s. From when I got sacked, they left me standing there alone; out in the open and so vulnerable, to this day I want to ask “why?” I was simply looking for a job that I can do and get along with co-workers. I never knew it would be such a mentally straining task.

Although this was going back 6 years ago, in some ways I’m so glad they sacked me when they did. Firstly, they pointed out their true colors through discrimination and secondly, pushing me away from that kind of life that my manager has. Being discriminated against and sacked was certainly emotionally and mentally challenging to deal with, but here’s what came up in brain to get me through this: It’s so sad the kind of lifestyle Paul leads. He run’s a gay bar where 90% of the clientele are very false and plastic, constantly serving to their every need and living within the gay bar itself and not exploring the rest of what “real life” has to offer.

Now I am truly thankful that I’m not apart of that. Although I’m perfectly at peace to be gay plus have Asperger’s, I’m glad my life doesn’t focus on a bar where I’m persistently at everyone’s request never venturing outside of the narrow-minded lifestyle that this Manager lives in. To that I am truly thankful as it forced me to look into new places and search for new open doors. Although many questions I want to ask my former boss have gone unanswered, the truth will eventually be answered and until such time, I’ll be ready.

It’s so peculiar that when I act in a strange manner, or present words of eccentric nature, that I can pinpoint when it’s the Asperger’s talking or when it’s just me. To most people who know me this wouldn’t be a very clear difference but to me it is.

Regardless of whatever job I hold in the future, and however odd my behaviors may appear to be to an employer, I would never feel ashamed to be who I am in the workplace. No matter how much an employer tries to bring me down.


Chapter 11


With each passing day there is always something new that I discover about myself.

In the last six months a new life has developed for me. In particular a life that has become very social where I share very important and valued friendships with a range of different people from many different backgrounds. I am able to laugh and make others laugh, I am able to smile and make others smile, and I am able to be myself and with each passing new day I realize why I am important to this circle of friends.

Just recently I spent a Saturday afternoon at a friends house enjoying the company of six others, wonderful wine, great food and music and above all – fantastic company. At the time it didn’t occur to me but I realized the next day that during that social event – not once did I think of Asperger’s or how it would affect me in a social environment.

Because Aspies take comments rather literally and appear to be gullible, this somewhat worked in my favor. My friends would make jokes, and me being me would believe every single word and take their comments literally. When that happens I appear to be “blonde” or “extremely gullible” but this is a quality my friends like and one friend even mentioned to me that night, that it was something that made me beautiful

To hear a comment from a friend such as those kind words has been stuck in my mind and I now realize that I am important to somebody, that I am a special person and that I can actually make a person laugh. To know that I make somebody feel special gives me the greatest sense of accomplishment and pride, and I am now beginning to wonder if the two words of “Asperger’s Syndrome” is just a label or is something real.

I believe I’ve reached the point in my life where I simply don’t care now that I have it. Someone once asked me “If I wave a magic wand over your head and made the Asperger’s disappear forever would you be happy?” To answer that question honestly now I would have to say no, I wouldn’t want the Asperger’s to go away. It’s given me too many wonderful qualities that have made me unique, special and intriguing – it’s made who I am so I wouldn’t want that to go away.

Having Asperger’s doesn’t always make life difficult for the individual. It’s certainly made me a strong person both mentally and emotionally. At one stage I was ashamed to have it, but now I am proud. I can safely look at myself in the mirror and stare deep into my own eyes and tell myself “you are beautiful”. Yet it has taken many years of self development and self discovery to be able to do that.

People often ask what made me write this book and I have to say that explaining to people what Asperger’s is all about can often be a challenge and many people make the assumption that Asperger’s people are usually depressed because of their lack of ability to socialize and communicate, but I hope this book has opened your heart and your mind to what Asperger’s people are all about.

If you’re reading this book and you have been diagnosed with Asperger’s I can only prey that I have made you feel important and embraced in this world, or if your person wanting to know a little more about the condition I hope I have been able to open your heart and your mind about Asperger’s.

To feel proud and content on having Asperger’s has taken a many great years of learning to self-love and discover self respect but as soon as we reach that point in our lives, we know we can venture into this earth with our heads held high against the people who first put us down, and always sleep at night with a smile on our faces knowing we will change the world for the better.

Yes its true we can never make the Asperger’s Syndrome go away, but while it’s apart of us we have to embrace it, nurture it and be supportive.

Us Aspies might be seen as different, but we are “The Opposite of Normal”

“At the height of any struggle I can fight because I made someone smile”

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 21.07.2009

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