![]() What they can’t do is tell you to your face, we think your kid’s autistic. It’s difficult for those professionals all they can do is drop these hints. ![]() He started nursery at about two, and we were told fairly quickly he’s not behaving like the other kids. At one point they thought there might be a hearing issue, so we had that checked. He was quite late to learn to walk, maybe eighteen months, and his speech didn’t develop quickly, but we had nothing to model it by. I can see now that his behaviour from when he was six months in a little rocking chair was ‘stimmy’ a lot of autistic people do it to calm the nerves, to get feedback off their own body of where it is. So it’s a grieving process and it takes a while to get through and realise that you’ve still got a son, just different.Īs first-time parents we had no idea. And you see other people who have children who are going off and doing this and doing that, and your child isn’t. Obviously that knocks you for six, you don’t know where you are, you’re grieving for the child that you thought you had and in fact don’t have. Luke was three by the time we got the diagnosis. I don’t want to be smug or self-aggrandising. Part of the self-analysis thing is I don’t like saying good things about myself. It was such a relief to know that there was a specific thing. The diagnosis came out that I wasn’t depressed, just deeply unhappy but as a side effect I found out that I was on the spectrum, I had Asperger’s. I was taken to a child psychologist by my mum, who was afraid I was depressed. ![]() How I’m shaped the way I’m shaped is to do with that. That’s something I’ve been dealing with ever since, unfortunately. In crowded areas, it’s hard for me to listen to a specific conversation because the background noise impedes.Īt secondary school I had control over my food budget, so I would overeat to make me feel better. I was hypersensitive to noise and that’s continued on. On my first Christmas and my first birthday, I had to have my presents unwrapped in a different room to me. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s quite late. I’ve got to figure out that there is a behaviour to address, observe how everyone else does it and then try and get the ratios right and apply it into my own behaviour. Everything I go through, everyone else has gone through at some point in their life, but that point is typically early childhood. After a time, that physical effort of trying to adjust into the standard neurotypical behaviours becomes second nature, and then it’s essentially learned. I’ve been able to train myself out of a lot of the behaviours and socially camouflage as more normal. I am sorry you cannot listen to them, hear their voices in your heads. My thanks to Helena Kosti in Athens (mother of two boys) to Peter Lamb in Durban (father of a girl and two boys) to Andrew Buisson in London (father of three boys) and to Ciaran Dachtler in London. There is one thing that I have learned and that is-everyone’s story is different. ![]() I set out to try and depict autism through the senses and to get more of a feel for it. It’s all on a spectrum, a three-dimensional spectrum (although it’s commonly thought of as a line). Asperger’s is a subset but without the delayed speech. If you lack all three, then you get a diagnosis of autism. I tell you this because thoughts of my friend Jenny are what prompted me to find some people to talk to about autism.Īutism is essentially the lack of three things: 1 is to do with speech 2 is theory of mind (the ability to think what other people are thinking) and 3 is social imagination. I have a friend in the Netherlands who has two boys: I know the elder boy has autism I have a feeling that her second is also autistic but we’ve not been in contact for some years, so I’m not sure.
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