Welcome back to my blog.
In the first part of my five-part series called "My Aspergers Story" I basically said that I have Aspergers Syndrome which is a form of autism and talked through how I found out I got diagnosed and just coming to terms with it as a young child.
Now, in this part of the blog, I'm going to talk about the next chapter as it were, which is my educational journey. This is basically the part of the story about how I got through two primary schools and my struggle through secondary school. There's a lot to talk about here so prepare yourselves.
I was never a 'popular' child in school. I was never one of the 'cool kids'. I always saw myself as the odd one out, or the special one in the class, the one who always needed extra help with most things, I remember putting my hand up and having to have extra support put forward for me, to make sure I understood the task that our teacher set for us. In nursery, it's a doddle, you just go to a place to play for six hours, it was a total doddle. Then you get to an age where you move up from nursery which is like level zero and you move up to year one and you feel like you're going in to big school, at least that's the way my mum explained it to me. The thought of going into big school scared me, I didn't feel ready, I didn't want to move on from nursery, I was very rebellious and would refuse to go to school everyday to the point where my poor mum had to drag me kicking and screaming to school everyday for the whole of the first term of year one because I would always put up a fight and say "I'm not going" imagining what that must have been for her, I can imagine she must have approached every morning thinking "okay, here we go again". I'd always go in the end, and once I got there and was settled, I was fine, the teacher I had at the time was very good at calming me down each morning, and once I got settled I was fine after that.
My year two teacher who will remain nameless didn't take a liking to me at all. I wasn't her biggest fan. I don't think she understand Asperger's to be quite honest and in all her years of teaching had never come across someone with that condition before. She would often snap at me if I was falling behind or if I didn't understand something, she didn't seem to understand why I was falling behind in class and didn't understand why I wasn't like the other children in the class who according to her were doing well and I was the odd one out. She often had a quick temper with me, if I didn't reply to a question she had asked me straight away she'd assume I was being rude or wasn't paying attention. That in turn made year two a very difficult year for me.
Year Three was better because the teacher I had was so fantastic. She had obviously 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 and that they understood the work and kept up to date, so she was brilliant, I remember she thought I was very bright and she was probably the first person who recognised my creative potential and creative talent, she'd often give positive feedback like that to my mum on something like a parents evening.
Year Four was a bit of a pity and problematic, because our teacher left half-way through the year and the school as hard as they tried, couldn't find someone to replace her, so the support teacher had to step in and she just stayed being our teacher, 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 decided that I needed to be moved on to a different school. It was case of she saw a gap to take me out and she took it.
I did have a lot of problems at my first primary school, I think it was just down to them not understanding me. It had become obvious that their methods of teaching and the way they went about things was not adjusted for children with learning difficulties or with autism so kids like me struggled without getting much help. I was bullied. I dreaded break times because I knew that the same bullies would be waiting for me to beat me up in the playground, I once point blank refused to go outside and my teacher punished me for not going out to play. My mum did pick up that I wasn't happy there and eventually took action when she had all the facts clear to her, when she presented her case to the school, they denied everything, the head teacher there was the worst head teacher you could possibly think of, how she was hired, I don't know. Her attitude to me was "Daniel's horrible, he gets as good as he gets, etc" Anyway, they denied everything my mum said to them, made it out that it was all my problem and if I was struggling then I should have told them. Mum just got so fed up with their crap, she decided "right, that's it!" and she took me out of that school, thank goodness.
I joined a different school which was a little further away, it was just outside of St Albans town centre, and that school was a lot better dealing with my social and emotional difficulties. They provided the best support possible for me and overall it was a lot better. That didn't mean to say that I didn't have problems there, I fell behind on subjects like Maths, Science, Geography and Religious Studies, mainly because I just didn't have any interest in them. If I'm motivated or have an interest in something and I really try, I go far, If I'm not bothered or not that fussed, there's no point trying to get me to be interested in this subject, I just don't care.
So on the whole, my second primary school were a lot better with me. Of course, I did have problems with fitting in with the other kids, and I would make groups of friends and fall out with them very quickly, that made things hard for me. I've never been someone who puts themselves forward, I'm quite held back and anxious about approaching new people from a very young age, I've never felt like I have belonged in a group of friends or fitted in to friendship groups. To me, there were all the other kids who were in their friendship groups and were well established, and then there was me. The odd one out, again.
On the 4th September 2007, I started secondary school. Starting a new school can be a daunting experience for any child, whether they have autism or not. As one of my teacher's described it to me it's like being in year six is like being the biggest fish in a bowl full of little fish and now suddenly you go into a much wider pond and you're now the smallest fish. It's a very scary feeling, because there is so much open to the unknown, and that's what frightened me. I was also very uncomfortable wearing a full on school uniform. I hated my school uniform so much, I would alter it so I'd feel accustomed to wearing it, but deep down, I hated wearing it so much.
Fitting in, yeah I mean, it was definitely a challenge. It's a hard one for anyone going into secondary school for the first time, because you don't know what it's going to be like or what people are going to be like, in short, I thought I had befriended a group of boys that were in my class because I remember telling them some jokes that made them laugh, but just because you tell a group of boys some funny jokes that doesn't make them your friend.
Being in year seven, the smallest fish in the pond as it were, I got picked on by some big year ten boys, and that made the start to my secondary school experience a living hell. I feared for my own safety, I was beaten up, verbally abused, had cruel jokes made about me at my expense, and the school just did nothing about it. There was one time, when three boys came up and attacked me in the playground with cricket bats, a teacher watched this happening and when the boys eventually cleared off I came up to him and said "You saw all of that, you could have stopped it, why didn't you help me?" and he just shrugged his shoulders and said "There's nothing I can do about it if you're not bleeding". The bullying did get worse, and as well as that I was struggling to make productive effort in classes, which put me under unwanted pressure and as a result, I fell behind on a lot of subjects.
If it hadn't have been for my mum and for the pastoral support team at the school, I don't think I would have survived a full term at secondary school. I would make up excuses not to go in, I'd pretend to be ill, I'd hide in the toilet, I would do everything and anything I could think of to avoid going into school. It got so bad, that my mum had to step in and have a word with my head of year to sort everything out. He arranged to have a meeting with me and my mum and I said to her "Alright, I'll go but I'm not wearing my uniform" that was me laying down the line to them, I'll go in specifically for this meeting and I'm not staying. We had a long in depth conversation about the problems I was facing and tried our best between the three of us to come up with the best practical solutions, at the end of the meeting my head of year said to me "Okay Daniel, I was going to suggest could you try and stay for the afternoon but it's after one o'clock now so there's not much point in you staying so I'm going to let you go home with your mum today, only if you promise you'll come in on Monday" to which I agreed. After that the second term of year seven got a lot better, I was getting my head down into my studies which created a nice distraction for me because it meant that I was going to homework club every lunchtime to catch up on any work I had missed so the bullies couldn't get at me, so in a sense things started to get much better, and by that time also, I had just about flourished into the routine of the timetable and settled in, so I knew what I was doing and what work I knew I had to keep up with and I just worked on my weaknesses and it paid off because I ended up becoming better at subjects like Geography and History.
Year Eight, I was starting to mix in with a group of bad boys from my year group, so we'd often bunk off school some days and just have a chill day in the park or something like that, I was turning into a kind of rebel, I questioned things more and I was more rebellious and objective to things and that made some of the girls in my year fancy me because, at that time, girls apparently loved a bit of danger, and then I developed a crush on my English teacher which didn't end well, because a rumour got spread around the school and it got me into a lot of trouble and made the end of the year very miserable for me as a result.
Year Nine was a bit dull, not much happened.
Going into my GCSE's they were the worst two years of my school life, literally if you total up all the crap I got in my first primary school, to all the friend trouble I had and difficulty fitting in at my second primary school, problems with the bullies and starting out in year seven to now, yeah, I would say out of everything GCSE's were the worst time for me.
I didn't do that great overall, I left school with seven GCSE's in total, two of which were BTEC's. Looking back on it now, I often think of a quote from Moss from "The IT Crowd" where he says to Roy, "Roy, do you think if I paid more attention in school I'd be a different person?" and Roy just shakes his head and says "No". So to refer to that quote, It does beg the question, If I had paid more attention in class and made the real effort to revise science and technology theory would I be a different person? I would academically because I'd have extra qualifications. You know, you only get one shot at your GCSE's and you better give it all you've got and by this time, I had already felt that I had had to put up with a lot of shit so far, I got bored and frustrated a lot of the time.
By that time, you feel you're so grown up and know it all, and I felt I had learnt everything that I had needed to learn, I could do Maths, I was excellent at English, I could write well, every time I sat in a chemistry lesson, with stupid bunsen burners and all that stuff, I remember thinking "This is bull shit! I'm not going to be doing this when I'm thirty". I got bored and I got frustrated and I just couldn't wait to leave.
Year Ten and 2010, in general, was a pretty horrible year for me, and this is going to be a very difficult area of this chapter for me to talk about, but I want to do this so there can be absolutely no misinterpretation and I can say exactly what I want to. So everything started to collapse in May 2010, I was starting to drift apart from my group of friends, they were doing what they wanted to do, I wasn't going to stick around any longer waiting for them so I just walked around and got chatting to some rather pleasant and very nice girls from my year group, we weren't in any of the same classes together, we didn't know each other and I befriended them and their group quite quickly, however being in a group of friends is always tricky for me, because I always find it hard to understand where I fit in in the group and I question my place in friendship groups, I never feel like I belong in them. It's probably due to the damaging nature of primary school and falling in and out with who I thought at the time was my besets friend but actually now looking back on it he was a real arsehole.
I was still getting bullied and heavily teased by the other boys in my year, three main bullies were at the heart of it and then the others just tagged along with them, so that made things a struggle. I didn't know how to get the bullies to stop or who to talk to about it to get it to stop, and they just kept laying into me and getting up in my space to get a reaction out of me. I am quite a defensive person, because of my autism, I'm hypersensitive and I overreact to stuff, I get overly upset over things. I can't help but let what they say and did get to me. I have always found through life I'll treat people the way they treat me. If you're nice to me, I'll be nice back because you deserved and warrant my kindness, but if you're nasty to me, I will bite back ten times worse. That's just the kind of person I am. But we've these three bullies, half the time, I was so scared of them that I never said anything back. I would only say something back or fight my corner if I felt I was being extremely intimidated. No one would do anything about it, I'd go to bullying support group to discuss my problems and all they would do was have a word with the bullies, but each time they did that, nothing changed, they still kept on going, in fact I actually gave up going to bullying support because, A) it was fuck all help and B) every time the teacher had had a word with them, they'd always come back a lot worse than they had done before, which in effect made things worse rather than better.
I felt like it was my fault for a time. I pushed all the blame onto myself and thought that it was my fault that they were picking on me, they saw a weakness in me which was my autism and they decided they were going to use that as a means to get at me, like a weapon. I kept remember thinking "what have I done to deserve this?' especially in the early days of year 7, I was nothing but nice to them because I understood out of anyone else there that fitting into a new school was hard, but no, they decided to be pricks about it and turn on me and full on bully me, just because they could. And again, I think this goes back to the whole misunderstanding of me, people just have never really got me, looked at me and gone "Oh yes, he's easily understood", "I get you, Daniel". No. It was all "oh he's weird", "what are you talking to him for?", 'he's a weirdo!", "he talks to himself". People just don't choose to understand. It's frustrating. They just don't care to regard any of my difficulties.
I just got more and more down, and I became depressed. I had been struggling, mentally for a very long time. I've been suffering from anxiety issues since I was thirteen, but at that time, for the past six months of that year, it got really bad. At the end of February 2010, that was when things started to feel different for me, it wasn't something horrifically terrible but something had definitely changed in my brain and I just didn't know what it was, but I could definitely tell that something wasn't right. I started doing things which weren't in my natural behaviour, it just wasn't like me at all, I felt a distance, like a disconnect to everything, but it wasn't anything too major so I didn't think much of it.
I didn't feel connected to stuff that I normally would do, like YouTube projects or anything creative that I found interesting like art or graphic design work that I did in my own time outside of school, I just wasn't feeling like doing any of those things. I just wasn't feeling it. Throughout April, that was a hard period for me and my family, it's very personal so I'm not going to talk about it but, the short version of it was my sister had come home early from Newcastle because she was at Uni there, she had to come home early from Uni because of stuff that was going on in her life and that had a really bad impact on entire family, like I said, I'm going to go into detail, but it wasn't good for any of us, and that took its toll, it's not the entire reason of what happened to me, but I think it definitely had some kind of impact.
June 2010, leading up from the end of spring into the start of the summer, things started to get harder, I could definitely tell and I just kept brushing it off and ignoring it because I thought "it's nothing, it'll sort itself out" but something was defiantly getting harder for me. Then at the beginning of July, something clicked with me and the funny period where I had been feeling really weird and off, it all just suddenly clicked and things just felt very wrong. I felt emotional every day, I felt tired, I felt like I was in a dream, life didn't feel real, it felt like I was just in a dream. I wasn't aware of what was going on, I really confused. I couldn't feel like I could talk to anyone about how I was feeling because given all the stuff in April I didn't want to cause more upset and worry towards my family and I didn't want to cause a burden on anyone.
I became scared that I was going to do physical harm to myself or to somebody else and that I was a danger. But then of course, when it gets round to things like that, I don't think that I would actually do it because I just couldn't do that, but it was just that feeling when you get scared or worried that you might be a danger to yourself and to others, which was what bothered me. It was very sort of up and down, some days I felt ok and had good days and other days I felt really sad and just couldn't explain why I was feeling like that. And then on one Sunday morning, I woke up feeling so; drained. I was so fed up with feeling the way I was feeling. I started screaming, I was crying, I did everything I could think of to just snap myself out of it. And to be fair, it actually did help a bit because for the rest of that particular Sunday I felt a bit better throughout the day but nowhere near feeling the way I wanted to feel. I didn't feel like me, I didn't feel happy, and for the next week after that I felt like I just needed to get through the week, it was so much pressure for me, that sort of stuff isn't normally pressure for me, it's usually easy, I had lots of fun things going on at school that week where we were doing lots of practical arty things in English, Art and Drama class that I really enjoy doing, I just couldn't engage with them they just seemed to me as things which I just had to get through, so I got through it and then before we broke up for Summer break, I cracked.
Enough was enough, and I just couldn't feel I could cope with the world anymore and all of these feelings I was feeling. And it's so hard when two parts of your brain are battling with each other, you got the negative side which says "No! It's completely hopeless, you're worthless, just give up!" and then you got the positive side which says "Come on Dan! You can get through this, you're a fighter and you can deal with anything, things WILL get better". So I have those two different sides in my head and then there's me in the middle of it. And I would listen to both of those sides. When I listen to the negative side I feel really self conscious and worried and agree with it and think "Oh yeah you're right, I'm so useless" and then I listen to the positive side and think "Yeah, you're right, I can do get through this" and it puts me in a more motivated mood. But at that time, I felt that the negative side of me had won the battle. It took complete control of me and just made me feel I didn't want to live anymore. I tried suicide, but a teacher found me in time before I could do anything.
I was taken to little office where I waited for three hours before my head of year spoke to me, she was very nice, she made me a cup of tea and we had a nice long in depth chat over what had happened, my mum then came to pick me up and my head of year explained to her what had happened that she should take care in the way she approaches this as I was still very fragile. I was given two days leave from school and my head of year had a chat to everyone in my year group just to say that when I return to school not to mention what had happened or talk to me about what I had tried to do.
Once that had all happened, It was then time for me to get on the start of trying to get better, Me and my Mum went to see the doctor the next day who referred me to this specialist councillor person who gave me one to one counselling seasons for three months. It lasted three months because I felt it wasn't really working and that she didn't really understand where I was coming from. Not her fault but I felt that she just wasn't on the same wave length as me and I wasn't getting the most of out these sessions, but by the time I wanted to stop going to counselling, I was feeling a lot better by then.
But, that being said, the struggles and the pressure to do well in studies still made themselves present. New assignment exams were starting to come in at the end of October 2010. They were like a controlled assessment where in class time, you would come in and do the exam for the time of the lesson and the teacher would time everyone in the class and I wasn't doing very well because failing them. I was told I needed to do better, that I found hard, I found it hard to concentrate in class because my bullies were in a lot of the same classes as me and I was experiencing problems in my friendship group I was in at that time and so that dealt a blow to my assignment exams and controlled assessments.
Year 11 finally came along where I was nearing the end and by that point, I thought things just can't get any worse and I left secondary school with seven GCSE's under my belt to go forward on to college.
I will say this before I sign off, School is not the be all or end all of life. It's something which is so over rated these days, school, in reality, is not even that important. When I do eventually grow into a full man and I am in my thirties or forties I will not remember any good bits from school. I'll only remember the bad bits, how rubbish the teachers were, how much my class mates were absolute arseholes to me, how much of a joke the lessons were. True, it is by government law, you have to attend school so that you can get GCSE's and that leads on to you getting A Levels or whatever qualifications you go on to get after that if you choose to stay on at sixth form or move on to college or whatever, and it is meant to set you up so you can get a good job, but one thing someone told me which makes everything all go to shit is "The further you climb up the ladder, the more things become irrelevant" so when you join Sixth form, your GCSE's become irrelevant, when you apply to Uni, all your A Levels you've worked so hard for, they just become irrelevant, It's all bullshit! Society and our Gouverment are so obsessed with school and getting a good education so you can get a good job, who gives a monkey's arse about that? answer me that. What is the point of making such a big deal out of something which is not the be all or end all of every thing. There are so many successful people who haven't gone to school. Stephen Fry, for example, he's a highly sophisticated successful celebrity and he got kicked out of school. He didn't leave, he got kicked out of school. School may be important, to some people, but it's not everything.
And that pretty much covers all you need to know about my educational journey, it's not been a smooth journey, it's been a bumpy ride but it's happened, it's all in the past now, it's behind me and I do know from this point on, It's look to the future and I can look to the future.
That concludes this part of the story, tomorrow, in Part Three, I will be talking about Friendships. Friends who have come and gone in my life over the years and how my Aspergers can be in what I would call in some cases a curse in me fitting into the social interaction domain.
Thank you for time, and enjoy the rest of your day.
