by 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.
