Hello Everyone.
I hope you're having a great day and that you're doing very well.
Today is the 2nd April. To some this may just be a normal day, the day after April Fools Day, it's nothing special. But to me, the 2nd April is a very special and important day for me. The 2nd April is Autism Awareness day. April is the autism awareness month in general, but today just marks "The day".
Those of you who know will know this, for those of you who don't, I have Aspergers Syndrome which is a form of Autism. Aspergers Syndrome or as it's more commonly referred to as being just Asperger's is a form of high functioning autism, it's a development disorder characterised by significant difficulties in the social interaction and non-verbal communication domain, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests. I'm not a full blown autistic person who can't speak or walk properly, I just have learning difficulties and find it hard to mix into social environments and be sociable.
To the people who know me and to the people who know me well, this isn't anything new. But to those of you who don't know me, have never met me or just don't know me that well, this could well come across as a bit of a surprise to you as something which was not known to you. But, yes, this much is true, I have Asperger's Syndrome, there's nothing I can do about it, I've got it and it makes me who I am.
I have done a blog before recently explaining what Asperger's is and what the characteristics are, if you haven't read it then please do check it out. http://dan44100.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/aspergers-syndrome-and-peculiar-evening.html
I want to raise so much more awareness for Autism because for me autism is very different from anxiety and depression, anxiety and depression are very common in autism, what I have is basically a chronic permanent condition it's incurable and it's the way that your brain is wired up whereas with just anxiety and depression you can manage it, and it's not really a personality disorder in comparison to autism which is more the personality in the mind.
Blue is the colour for Autism Awareness month, just as pink is the colour for breast cancer awareness in October, Blue is the colour for autism, which works for me because blue is one of my favourite colours and I didn't discover this until fairly recently, I've always liked the colour blue, but after finding out that it's the colour for autism, it's a colour which has now become much more important to me.
So what it is? This is the first in a five-part series where basically I talk about my Aspergers story and tell you how I got diagnosed, how I have grown up with this condition, my educational journey - school, making friends and keeping them, how I have come to terms with Asperger's now that I am a young adult and finishing off with just an all rounder of where I am at the moment.
I think it'll be good for me to do something like this because I like to tell stories, and I want to raise so much more awareness for Autism, not that I think it's something which gets completely ignored by society, I'm not saying that, what I am saying, however, it is something which should get much more attention and should be treated with more tender love and care. You may not know it but in your day to day lives, you come across people with autism every day. You just don't know it. People who are people just like you and me who go about their lives struggling, who think that no one truly understands them, who think that the world is a very terrifying and isolating place, you pass people like that every day. I'm not saying all people with autism are like that, it's just an example of the type of people with autism you are likely to see.
The thing with Autism is it's kind of like a stereotype and everyone who thinks of autism identify that with something like "Rain Man", now as much as I enjoy the film "Rain Man" it is a very good film and Dustin Hoffman did such a good job at portraying that character it is a very stereotypical type of thing. Take also "The A Word" a drama that was on BBC One last year, I've not seen it but the people who I have talked to about it who did watch it said that they liked it but not every single boy or girl who has autism is like that, who has autism, because not one person on the autistic spectrum is the same, it varies so much. I think for that particular programme, I guess it had to be like a stereotype and a generalized character for audiences to come to terms with because you couldn't have lots of other different children on the autistic spectrum because that might confuse the viewers and make it hard to keep up with. The important thing is that you get the general idea of it and you understand better is the prime objective of programmes like that, they are there to raise awareness and make people understand better. Because I think that's the main problem with autistic people like me, they are terribly misunderstood by others and tend to live very unhappy lives because of it.
I for one am very pleased that such programmes like dramas and documentaries are made especially for autism and to raise awareness, over the past five or six years, autism awareness has become so much better, I am very lucky to be living in a generation where it is understood and accepted a lot more than it used to be. It's not perfect. There is still such a long way to go, if more and more people could just look up what Asperger's Syndrome or autism is on google and just read about it, it would become much more clear to you and will help you understand it better, it would only take five or ten minutes of your time, just to look up Autism on Wikipedia or something like, websites which have detailed information on this topic which are available to read for free, just read about it. It will make more sense to you. As you can probably tell it is something which I am passionate about and feel very strongly about, it has taken its toll.
I have not been in a very good place at the minute, given everything which has gone on throughout the past three months. As one problem resolves itself, four new problems occur, this five-part blog series of me telling my story is my way of raising awareness and drawing a level on this subject, I really want to help people, especially if they're are in the same boat as me or have had similar experiences to me, and what better time to do it than now and this is the time to do it, if any time.
So where to start. That's the most difficult part of telling any story is, where on earth do you start, especially in my case because there is just so much to talk about and discuss.
I suppose I could start off by saying that when I was young, like a young boy just going into primary school and advancing up from nursery I always found school to be one of those places which I just did not want to be. Every morning would be basically a scream fest where my poor mum would drag me to school kicking and screaming because I would just point blank refuse to go every day. I don't know exactly why I was like that, but I was. At the age of five, my parents started to see changes in me, such as personality changes and the ways in which I was interacting in class, my teacher had called my parents in for a chat to basically discuss me and how they found that I was doing, the end result of that discussion was that one day, as I recall correctly it was a Monday, my parents took me out of school for that day to take me to this man's cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the most beautiful and exquisite countryside. This man they took me to see was a doctor, a specialist who deals with children with autism and he sat me down and had a one to one talk, it was then he told me that I had something which as called "Asperger's Syndrome" now explaining the principles of Asperger's to a young boy can go so far, and I'm not sure to this day that I fully understood what he said to me in the way that he worded it. But I definitely remember him sitting down with me as saying "Daniel, you have something which is commonly known on the autistic spectrum as Asperger's Syndrome". We then played these strange but yet very fun games where he had all these different shapes and he would say I need to make these shapes into a square or a triangle and he would time me to see how fast I could make them into that shape, or we'd play picture games where I had to make up a picture and the imagination would know no boundaries. He'd do sort of little tests you do to test if someone has got autism or not.
It was a full gone conclusion that I had Asperger's Syndrome and my parents were given some pretty sound advice on where to go from here. This played a dramatic effect on my educational journey from this point on, now that my parents knew, they took more care of me and monitored my progress I was doing in school a bit more closely than they had done before just to help me get through. Of course, not all my teachers were the most understanding of my condition. My year two teacher who will remain nameless I wasn't her biggest fan, she would often lose patience with me or snap at me for no reason when I was struggling in class or if one of the other boys was teasing me and I reacted to it, she would automatically assume that it was my fault. She was a bit harsh on me, it has to be said. When I went into year three, my year three teacher was brilliant, she obviously had had a lot of experience working with young children, she would always take her time with every child she taught and made sure that she understood every single person in the class, so she was brilliant. Year four was a bit of a pity because our teacher left half-way through the year and the school couldn't find someone to replace her, so the support teacher had to step in and sadly even though I thought she was an amazing teacher, she wasn't a proper teacher. By that time, my mum had had enough of putting up with the schools crap so she took me out and moved me on to a different school.
Learning of this condition, I can't remember my immediate reaction to finding out, and to knowing I had been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. To tell you the truth, being a child of five years I didn't understand it and I wasn't even sure what it was. To me it was just something which made me stand out from all the other children in my class. This is going to sound funny, but, to me, it just reminded me of burgers whenever I heard anybody say it because of the way people pronounced the word. Asperger's pronounced with a G sounded like burgers to me. It's a little different to the way I pronounce it, I say it with the G like a J, but you can say it so it sounds with a G there's no right to wrong way in how to pronounce it, it's whatever you feel comfortable in the way of saying it I guess.
Coming to terms with a condition such as this can take it's toll on a child, and it certainly did with me, it affected everything within my home and school life as I was growing up, my family and teachers had to do a lot of adjusting to make sure that I got the best help and support I could possibly get and sometimes the pastoral support wouldn't be all that great.
It's a lot to get your head round, it's not something one can really expect to hear or find out at a young age that he is chronically autistic and will remain so for the rest of his life, it's more of a case of after being given your diagnoses where you go from there.
That concludes the first part of my story, Asperger's Syndrome and coming to terms with it.
Tomorrow, in the second part, I will be talking about my educational journey and my struggle through school.
So thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy the rest of this great day!
