The past few months have changed everything: my understanding of the major events of my life, in particular. It all began when my beloved discovered — in her attempt to understand my persistent blues and aching limbs — that I had been neglecting treatment for well over two years. In truth, I’ve been neglecting it …
This is the best way I can describe how my head feels much of the time. It has affected me my entire life, which probably explains my inability to advance my career. It feels like a weight right at the front of my forehead, which grasps my train of thought mid-sentence and throws it to …
These days my inner grumblings have me contemplating why I was always not just passive in the face of harassment, but apologetic too. Last night, my memories had me back in the flat I rented from a church housing association in King’s Cross in the late ’90s — for years the backdrop to my restless …
This is the question I increasingly ask myself, cognizant of negative reactions towards me. Not a reaction to how I look, but rather some kind of behaviour I exhibit, which I’m just not conscious of. Those negative reactions didn’t cease with maturity. I just learnt to largely avoid them by withdrawing from social settings wherever …
There are two aspects of my being which I tend to hide from the outside world for very similar reasons: my faith and the name of the condition I have been bestowed with. In both cases, because they are poorly understood and so badly misrepresented, that misunderstandings and prejudices are commonplace. More to the point, …
These the words that would ring in my ears throughout my youth. At school, the boys on prefect duty, forever blocking my way. At university, the bouncer outside a bar or club. Amongst peers, the young man intent on belittling me, and isolating me completely. In those days, it would leave me distraught. I was …
It’s hard to convey the weight of despair I felt in those days, simmering away for a decade from the age of fourteen, but at its peak between eighteen and twenty. I think that first year at university was amongst the worst of it, because it simply reaffirmed that there was something seriously wrong with …
I can try to put a positive spin on it, but actually I’m not okay. I’m not happy that this is how I was made: I just accept it. I see some goodness in it. Some positive traits. But no, it’s not a condition I would seek. I haven’t come to terms with it; I …
If I could go back… knowing what I now know… making sense of it all… I think I would go back to those days when friends did so much for me, to explain to them why I was the way I was. I had some real gems of friends in those early days along the …
In the research into emotional regulation associated with this condition — extremely limited though it is — studies identify an increased tendency for passive coping amongst men with that extra chromosome. By passive coping, they mean behaviour such as isolating oneself from others, worrying about the past, taking refuge in fantasies, avoiding social interactions and …
Is the real world ever known?Here it feels like I’m an exile who’s coming homeSo certain that something reminds meOf a place and time that were always in my dreams Blanco White, So Certain
Two experiences have impacted me recently. The first of them, watching our kids confidently taking on the high ropes treetop challenge at Go Ape. Actually, it was the crowd of ten year-olds in the slot before them which knocked me back: their bold tenacity, clambering over those obstacles high in the trees, their energetic enthusiasm, …
In many ways, my intense shyness crippled me throughout my life. And yet I must recognise that there were great blessings in it for me. Blessings too many to enumerate.
Why do I write so much? Honestly, because in conversation, I can’t get a word in edgeways. It seems I still have that deficit in spoken language, which has always been a source of immense frustration. I know I speak slowly, my expression quite monotonous. I am slow to formulate what I want to say …
I can’t be what I’m not. I can’t help what I am. Life is learning to reconcile these realities.
