Normal. I guess?
I mean, how does it feel being neurotypical? Probably normal, right? Right!
I was lucky (or maybe not so lucky) as a young boy; I was grabbed from a young age and thrust into sports. I can remember being manhandled by my Grandad down to the local park with a golf ball and a stick. It felt weird what he was trying to teach me to do. I was there without my say so and here was one of my father-figure’s pushing a forty year old golf club in my face and shouting at me, “just bloody give it a swing, give it a try”
I didn’t care, I just wanted to go back and play with my bike and my tractor – stupid wooden straight pointy stick-thing. What use is that anyway? I would give it a swing, take a big massive clump of dirt with me and scream at him,
“There?! You happy!”
I’m 42 now, back then I was about five and just starting primary school so you bet I went back home with a red-hot bottom. My first brush with golf wasn’t a good one, my memories are faded but I do remember the very first time we attempted it I was not in the mood and I ended up getting the slipper.
It was the same with football. I can remember my Grandad playing football with me for long hours out in the fields until it got dark. I had a rocket right foot. I can remember kids picking me in school for football purely for the strength in that right foot. If you can compare it to anything it would be Fulton from D1
That of course phased out in High School as I began getting interested in being a goalie. It’s a long story, and perhaps one for another day. Main takeaway from this is that I was brought up to love sports and I really did love sports. Sometimes you would see me on the golf course three times a day in the summer holidays practising. Morning, noon and night before the dark comes in.
I wasn’t your typical Autistic kid. My love for tech, games and sci-fi? Yes, that is actually really strong too — I grew up loving computers and Star Trek but at the time it was my dirty secret; something I didn’t want the world to know — because popular kids didn’t do that. It’s only what the weird stupid kids that try to get A’s in class do.
It was crazy looking back because I could have just not given a crap and enjoyed what I enjoyed but it seemed growing up my love for sports and popularity were in direct conflict with my love for hyper geeky stuff.
A popular autistic kid? Nay? I hear you say? Yeah, truth be told I wasn’t really popular at all. My friends would only hang with me outside of school because being near me IN school was sometimes all a bit too insufferable. I’d often get jibed by one of the big fat girls that I was a, “Norman nae pals” – In Scottish that technically means that I was known for having no friends, and in school that was a big insult. Having no friends in school was sort of like you were unlikeable, a loner, a loser.
It was quite the mishmash of feelings. On one hand I desperately tried to be the cool kid that played sports and hung with all the hyper masculine guys, and on the other hand I desperately wanted to sit and play the computer all day.
Sadly, rather than succumb to my needs and wants I gave into my lust for popularity and power which in the end just resulted in me pissing off most people because in reality I was being false. It really wasn’t who I wanted to be. I wanted to be head deep doing geeky stuff like coding my own program or starting my own tech business.
Trying to understand people was a funny one too. Why did people do what they do? It made no sense. I’ll be honest, it still makes no sense. But I’ve elevated my worldview to live and let live — if people are doing it then it must make sense to them and that’s alright.
Don’t even get me started on relationships. I can remember thinking that women were almost super human as to how they couldn’t be nervous on a date and it was almost inconceivable that I even managed to get on dates. It wasn’t until I met my wife and I could visibly tell that she was nervous too — that I realised most women are ultra good at masking and throwing us off scent.
I used to blame my dad for all this but in reality I’m not so sure now. I mean it hurts that he wasn’t there but a lot of what I went through I see my son go through it all himself. The only saving grace is that I really drummed it into him that he should absolutely do what he likes and he should not pay attention to what anyone else thinks. So right now he’s in the chess club and doing programming as an extra curricular activity — good for him I’d say.
It was my son that made me realise I definitely had autism. I wouldn’t have known beforehand. I mean we suspected but I wouldn’t have known for sure. It is something that’s been suggested to me many times before.
That being said it’s never been a hindrance to me. One lady on hive @traciyork (thank you) suggested that I was an overachiever in that whatever’s put in front of me I try my damndest to make it work.
I used to own a super popular blog at one point which started off as just a few random thoughts but merged into something that attracted over 30,000 visits per month. Few people ever get to that stage. Of course it was suggested that I got there because of my white privilege but in reality it’s because a lot of thought and effort goes into my work — if you want to coast at life then you’ll never be successful with money. Perhaps happy? Maybe, but never successful. The successful route is the ultra hard path. It’s never easy, and it requires lots of sacrifice.
If you catch it early enough (like I did) then you can turn everything that you are into a positive. Autistic people (including me) tend to have ultra focus, repeat things that they enjoy, and tend to overly indulge in their interests. That’s why I would say there are a high percentage of autists in ultra focused skills — like Brain Surgery for example.
That’s not to say that everyone is like this and you’re thinking of wanting to give me my laser and scalpel and send me off to recreate life altering brain surgery, no. It’s all about focus; see where it is and encourage it. My kid wants to be a game designer and a Youtuber. You ever seen the views some of those game youtubers get? Big money. If you didn’t know, views = money.
If you had asked me this perhaps 20 years ago I would say life sucks and the only good thing is the beer, spirits, the drugs, and the ladies. Luckily twenty years later and I’ve found passions I never knew I had and really quite enjoy life. It’s why I’m still writing. I’m financially comfortable now so I’m going back to what I love. I also game lots to the annoyance of my wife. She is to GTA 5 as my friend Ben is to Facebook chat. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not a positive!
But like I say. A lot of people walk around thinking high functioning Autism is a bad thing, it’s not. If you aim your focus right and dial down the thirst for hedonism, because boy do we get a little side-tracked when we discover hedony, the exploration for pleasure is high with us autists — especially when we spend our childhood being made to feel like we aren’t anything special.
When we find that glass of vodka that finally makes us feel special? You bet we’re climbing those highs.
So whatever the case it feels normal being Autistic. It’s always been for me anyway. It perhaps even gives me an edge over life? Because when you are scrolling Facebook endlessly I am indulging my interests, learning new things, and taking pleasure out of what I do, rather than blaming the world for everything that’s not good.
I jest of course but it would be really nice if we began to all take a good cold hard look at ourselves and aim to improve that which we don’t like!
Peace out folks 🙂
Started a new wp blog with the intent of pushing people over to hive. Check it out :) (my own work) https://learnisart.com/what-does-it-feel-like-to-be-autistic/
What a wonderful and positive post about Autism. My wife is a Senior OT specialising in autism in very young children and early intervention and they are a joy. Early intervention is paramount, not to 'fix' them but to develop coping mechanisms and understanding of their situations, social function is very important, and also to aid other related issues such as LD, cognitive and motor functions.
Finally, you can sort of blame your Dad as your son can blame you as autism has been shown anecdotally and clinically to be passed down through the male line, often becoming more pronounced with each generation.
Parents understanding and acceptance is one of the biggest issues we face and the therapies always include helping parents to understand. I'd guess that in your day, it was confusing and you had to adapt and develop your own systems for getting through life. It's hard.
Best post I've read all week. Best wishes to you and your family fella. Looks like you have it all sussed out. Brilliant :-)
Thank you! I get a lot of pleasure out of writing as you can probably tell haha. I will say it's one of my "indulgencies."
Yeah, we worked out that my dad was an undiagnosed autist -- he died of liver failure. His pleasures were vodka and women. That being said for most of his adult life he worked an incredibly hard and high powered six figure job.
I was lucky. My wife is a school teacher and she could spot it right off. We got our son diagnosed when he was 3, and I've learned a lot through watching him.
The relationship I have with my son is a really deep connection - my wife used to dump him on my lap when he was crying and would leave me alone with him to comfort him, she almost forced the connection at an early age. But I can understand through my early thoughts and feelings of how parental acceptance can often be hard!
Great post, love the personal insight into your life! Norman, oh that reminded me of the school days, you really are Scottish! I feel like I had a similar experience growing up, doing sports for the sake of doing sports, really wanting to spend more time learning! I wish the schools were as focused on coding/tech back when I was there, maybe would have learned to code instead of learning to bullshit my way through the day!
Yup. We learned to code on apple macs. But boy was our teacher shit lol
Yeah, I went to a small primary school, we were lucky to have computers. The teachers used to ask me how to fix the, needless to say, we didn't learn much about computers at the time!
High school I pushed towards the Sports "cool kid" side of things, should have stuck my head where it belonged, behind a computer lol
you must be younger than me. We had 1 computer for the whole school haha
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.
Oh hello you
Fellow traveler and kindred. I "see" you!
I came to find you to say thank you 🙏
But, of course, I was dead curious to know who you are so I read your post. Happy to meet you. Well done on your personal journey of success!
And more... to have the courage to share it. It's service you know. People need to hear things like this. Or read them!
I then went to visit your blog. It's down at the moment. Looks like a problem with the DNS - you can let your hosting provider know they may sort it out. Or I'd be more than happy to fix it for you. Pro bono. You're of the humans that could accept the offer, if it helps you in some way... gracefully and with simplicity and ease.
Stay you!
And thank you. Again :)
Hey!! Yes, I realised I had forgotten to give out rewards last week so I went ahead doing that!
Weird that it's down, it works for me. What country are you in? I'll check that my hosting doesn't restrict any countries. I'm actually quite savvy with the web. Or wait, are you talking about therelationshipblogger.com? I had to give up that one. I grew it so big, had columns on big magazines and all sorts.
Sadly, I gave that one up. I had to. My circle started to talk about stuff that I just didn't believe in. My editors would throw stuff back at me telling me that I was, "Speaking from a place of privilege," and whilst privilege is a concept that I understand it automatically assumes and applies motivation to myself without investigation. Like so:
"You can't write about the male experience speaking to females because you are privileged" - which does a few things. It assumes my intention, it also assumes my background, and it assumes my life experience without ever asking me a single question.
They were quite steadfast on this, and being a white male it got me less and less gigs, and even more importantly, gigs that I was willing to take part in. So I gave up, I didn't want any part in a movement that causes way more harm than it does good. Maybe I'll write about that one day. The blog is no longer there. I let the due date slide and fully moved to hive.
Hive has been good to me though. I've built up quite a following, and have been more successful on here than any other place I've been in my life. I love that it's a big melting pot of cultures, skills, and backgrounds. It's quite amazing.
Well thank you for the reward! :D
I relate. Mainstream doesn't want to have a conversation. It's a political game, mostly. And the money. Of course. We wouldn't want to ruffle any feathers and have sales decline. Because what about advertising? And our vacation homes? Not much journalism there, then. Not much truth. Not anymore. (#freejulianassange while we're at it)
I'm interested to hear a male perspective. F*ck knows you guys haven't been allowed to have your say. At all! 🙄
I am a privileged white female. And learning about it at last. We should compare notes. 👍
Yes there is a ton of male privilege. And I blame the mothers, quite frankly. There is some female privilege making the rounds as well.
How do we progress, or even things out, if we don't share our war wounds and have a tolerant conversation. This is exactly what's going horribly wrong in society. Everyone is too scared to say boo.
Okay. Glad I found you. Even more glad I was rewarded 'cause I need that around now. 😁 Thank you again.
Yeah - I spoke a lot about social injustice and many ism on mainstream. And have also found Hive far more open-minded, educated, courageous and cool to engage on. I'm not going back!
See you around. Enjoy the weekend. 🌸