Autism

Autism - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

Real millennials

June 23, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just had a lesson with a 22-year-old university student who, when she ties her hair back, looks like Martina Hingis. She also has a part-time job in IT testing; she has ambitious plans for a career in that field. At the end of the session, she said she wanted to drop from two meetings a week with me to just one. I wonder how long before she plumps for zero. How ever hard I try, I find it hard to connect with her. I get a lot of people of around her age – the real millennials, those born around 2000 – and they’re the hardest to build a rapport with. Older adults are easier, as are kids, but with these real millennials we’re often transmitting on different wavebands. It doesn’t help that this particular student is very normal for someone of her age, and I’ve always found very normal people hard to relate to. (I’ve always thought that Normal People Scare Me, a 2006 documentary about autism, is one of the best titles of anything ever.)

My cousin had her eight-hour cancer removal operation on Wednesday. Apart from the extraordinary length of the procedure, I haven’t had any news about how it went.

Tomorrow my brother, his wife and their son are going on a one-week cruise. When I spoke to him on Tuesday he clearly didn’t want to go. (He wife wasn’t there.) When I asked him where he was going, he said he didn’t know. “How do you know it isn’t Somalia?” I asked. He had been to Somalia, or at least past it, on one of his army excursions or missions or whatever the right word is. I do know that at some point he’ll need to attend a black tie dinner. Not his thing at all, nor mine. His wife would dress the little one up in a black tie too, given the chance.

This week I’ve sent two letters to Barclays, first to the CEO, and then (changing the wording slightly) to their complaints team. Each letter ran to 2500 words, so it was a big effort. I’m glad to get that out of the way.

The biggest news story of the week has probably been the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible near the wreck of the Titanic, killing its five occupants. They were all super-wealthy men, aged from 19 – tragically, a boy really – to 77. Because it operated in international waters, the Titan could bypass all safety regulations. (It was controlled using a modified game console.) If you ponied up US$250,000 and signed a long waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page, you were good to go. This incident reminds me of conversations we had when I worked in life insurance. As well as administrative cost savings for larger policies, people who insured themselves for larger sums were wealthier and, on average, in a better state of health. We priced our policies accordingly: $1 million of life insurance did not cost five times what $200,000 did. However, when you got to really large amounts – say, $10 million – you were into the realms of Learjets and adventure tourism. Also, rich people often get into that position by taking risks that pay off. They’re risk seekers by nature.

It’s hot. A top temperature of 35 is forecast for today. I went to the market before my lesson with the real millennial, and that will be my only venture outside.

Autism - Language learning - Life :)

On shaky ground

February 15, 2023 plutomanby 0 Comments

A 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck yesterday at 3:15, during a face-to-face lesson. My 16-year-old student, the girl whom I also teach maths, felt it before I did. Its epicentre was in roughly the same place as the day before; in the vicinity it cracked the odd wall and removed a few roof tiles. The whole thing only lasted a few seconds, but enough to give me pretty severe feelings of déjà vu.

Last night there was a documentary about autism on the BBC. I couldn’t watch it here, unfortunately. Before it aired there was a comments section open where people talked about their experiences of autism and tried to second-guess the angle that the programme might take. A frustrated parent said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I bet it’ll be slightly awkward kids who wear funny hats, unlike my son who drinks the water in the toilet bowl and throws faeces around. They never focus on the people who are really disabled, because that isn’t sexy.” It’s heartbreaking to hear a parent describe his or her experiences in those terms, but life is often an immense struggle for so-called high-functioning autistic people too. As another commenter said, it’s actually harder for them, because of their profound awareness that they don’t conform to societal norms. If you’re high-functioning, you know why you don’t have many friends, why you don’t have kids, why you can’t hold down a job. None of that is sexy in the slightest.

Yesterday I called Barclays again. If there’s anything that’ll send me into a steep nosedive, it’s calling Barclays. I feel I need to take a whole damn box of my antidepressants before I call them. My god. A company that makes billions each year in profit has no customer-facing team to deal with people like me whose accounts have been closed. I’m left with no option but to guess what documents I need to send, and who if anybody should stamp them, so that I can confirm my identity. The whole situation is appalling.

Last night I had an English lesson with someone at a beginner level. This meant I ended up speaking a lot of Romanian, but what we worked on had pronouns popping up all over the place, and I still struggle badly with them. Part of the problem is that I live and work by myself, so my life doesn’t involve the sort of interdependency that means I use lots of pronouns in my everyday life. I rarely have a need to say “She told me to give this to him before I talk to them”. I wouldn’t even know where to start with that. Hmmm, let me think. Mi-a spus ea să-i dau lui asta înainte să vorbesc cu ei. That might be close, but it took me a couple of minutes of thinking time, and in speaking I’ve got no chance.

Autism - Life :)

The elephant in the room

April 13, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Now for a monster post (sorry it’s so long) about something I haven’t written about before. I’m probably autistic.

I’ve never had a diagnosis. I’ve been label-free my whole life. When I started school on 4th September 1984, at the ridiculously young and typically British age of 4 years and 4½ months, I had little interest in what the other kids were doing – I just sat in the corner on my own – and changing in and out of clothes for PE lessons was a problem. I could do it, but it took me ages. My teacher – who was very pleasant, I thought – called my parents to ask what was wrong with me. Mum didn’t take kindly to this, so she asked her to get me to read something. I could read quite a lot. Um, yes, your son has a reading age of nine.

This was still pre-Rain Man, so autism wasn’t really “a thing” yet, and anyway my parents didn’t want me branded for life, as they saw it. My early childhood was a happy one, but in my teenage years and beyond I became an expert in tamely going through the motions. I did the remainder of school, then I did university (my first year was a nightmare because I couldn’t hide, but things improved after that), then in 2003 I moved from the UK to New Zealand where I did a job in the financial sector. I rarely knew why I was doing what I was doing, and my level of emotional attachment hovered close to zero. The only exception was a spell of about a year when I calculated insurance quotes; I almost enjoyed that. It was a process that made sense to me. Then it was back to the other stuff. In 2007 I rented a flat on my own, and with a couple of short exceptions (taking on flatmates to help pay a mortgage – not a great idea for me) I’ve lived by myself ever since.

I stuck with my job because I wasn’t badly paid. Sometimes I wondered how I got paid at all given how little I achieved. But all the time I was building some monstrous edifice without any foundation (friends, a home, a semblance of identity) to underpin it. By 2008 it occurred to me that I was supposed to have moved on by now. My similar-aged colleagues were discussing house prices and stag dos and non-rust-bucket cars. Some of them were even having kids. I fitted in less and less at work, and before long I’d mentally checked out of there. I suffered regular bouts of depression. In early ’09 I started a blog called Fixed and Floating (named after the types of mortgages that my colleagues spent hours yapping about, but also because that described my situation rather well), and later that year I started attending meet-ups for autistic adults, initially because it was a field I could see myself working in. I remember the first session, and what an uplifting experience that was.

Moving on is something people almost take for granted. A car, a house, a job, a better car, a bigger house, promotion, and of course children who you’ll help to get bigger and better cars, jobs and houses. The route is all nicely mapped and sat-navved, even if it may be bumpy and potholey. At school I learnt about the seven (or was it eight) stages of man, as if they were a given. I don’t remember there being Ts & Cs. One thing I noticed about the (often wonderful) people I met at the autism group, even the most high-functioning of them, is that they didn’t move on. How could they? Imagine a traditional wedding for an autistic person. How are a hundred-odd guests going to magically materialise? A minority of those who attended the group, like me, could drive a car (an extremely useful skill to have if you want to avoid people), some had jobs, a few were in relationships, but the sense of progression was universally absent. Bad stuff, on the other hand, happened just as easily to them as to anyone else, if not more so. If you’re autistic, it seems the road isn’t bumpy so much as you’re driving an 1100 cc Austin Allegro – you struggle to climb the gentlest of hills, but you’re very capable of dropping off a cliff. (I’ve had literal nightmares about school reunions, which are all about moving on and making comparisons. Luckily, I don’t expect I’ll ever have to attend one.)

Mercifully I got out of my job at the end of 2009, and I spent the next few months either at the beach or playing online poker or creating word puzzles. In the middle of 2010 I visited the UK and Europe, seeing my grandmother for the last time. That’s all still on my old blog. I worked for a while on insurance claims from the major earthquakes that had hit New Zealand – a temp job, which was great, because it meant I cut out all the stressful social crap – but then for some inexplicable reason (my mother?) I relocated to another city to take a permanent job that I didn’t even want, and that was an utterly predictable disaster. I was useless at the job, and when I was depressed, which was most of the time, I became worse than useless. I couldn’t keep my job, so I took on a different role at the same company that paid barely half as much, just after taking out a mortgage on an apartment. The flat itself was condemned because it was an earthquake risk. Barrels of fun all round, I must say. I escaped the financial world in 2014 to enter the realm of pipes and manholes instead, and that was a useful stopgap while I figured out what I actually wanted to do.

In 2015 I managed to visit the US – my first overseas trip since 2010 – and I came back from there on a major high. That’s when I started this blog. Then I figured it out. I wanted to teach English in Romania. That’s mostly because I became besotted with the beautiful Romanian language, but also because I felt the country itself would make me happy. Britain was a member of the EU at the time, so it was feasible. I was able to rent out my crappy apartment. So towards the end of 2016, after more bouts of depression and a certain high-profile referendum, I made the move. I flew from New Zealand to the UK, then took the train to Timișoara, which is where I’ve lived for the last 5½ years.

I tried knocking on the door of just about every language school in Timișoara but had no luck getting work, so I put up posters all over the city and started getting phone calls. Although I’d spent some time studying Romanian it wasn’t easy to understand what my prospective students were saying on the phone. Slowly but surely, though, I got snippets of work here and there, and when I wasn’t working I could explore my beautiful new city. The parks, the markets, the squares, the clattering old trams. A few of my ads showed a picture of the newly elected Donald Trump. One young woman who replied to the Trump ad and started lessons with me worked for an estate agency. At this point I was in need of somewhere permanent to live. She found me a flat slap-bang in the middle of town with wonderful views, and at Christmas time I moved in. It was in an ugly communist-style concrete block, but it felt like heaven. I enjoyed my work a lot – I had my own systems and processes – but it wasn’t until the autumn of 2017, when the kids went back to school, that I really got my hours up. Suddenly I was pretty busy. I wasn’t making tons of money, but I could certainly get by, and my job suited me down to the ground. An open-plan office and everything that entails was hell for me, but a one-on-one lesson was actually quite enjoyable. Plus I was helping somebody. Amazingly, I was depression-free.

That’s been me ever since. In the last two years we’ve had Covid to deal with. It has taken a heavy toll here in Romania where about half the population are unvaccinated. Covid caused a few problems for me workwise initially, but they were solved once people got used to the idea of online lessons. In fact I quite liked the initial lockdown because it was so peaceful and quiet and people’s expectations went way down. The way to dodge the virus was to avoid people as much as possible! Coming out of the pandemic is proving more of a challenge for me, however. Every time another piece of melamine or MDF falls off the inside of this messy tired-looking flat, it reminds me that I need to move on, somehow, but I’m seriously lacking in motivation. My plan is to buy a place where I can run a proper teaching business, and then get a car so I can travel around the country more easily, but it’s hard to know where to start. I’m on my own, in Romania, flying blind. Donald Rumsfeld-style question marks hang over every apartment I look at. Things I don’t know about, and more that I don’t know I don’t know about. There’s also my parents and my brother whom I haven’t seen in absolutely bloody ages. Should I sort out a flat before seeing them?

I’ll be 42 next week. I remember on my 21st birthday that my mother said I’d get a girlfriend soon. I replied, “You’ll be saying that on my 42nd birthday too.” And here I am. I’ve missed out on so much – relationships, careers, a sense of home and belonging, being part of something bigger – because of who I am. My undiagnosed condition. All I can do is keep battling away.