I Want To Go Back

I want to go back.

I want to go back and find the little girl I once was, the one who would spend long hours on the swing, going higher and higher, then leaning back to watch the sky, because it felt like she was flying, like she was free. The little girl who loved to roll down the hill, dizzy with sensation, or whirl around and around till she fell over laughing. Who could be transported by the scent of that same grass freshly-cut, and the smell of bacon on Sunday mornings, and the smell of hot tar on a summer’s day when it had just been raining. The little girl who loved ballet, and who would put on a record and throw herself around the room, leaping and pirouetting, even though she wasn’t very good at it. The little girl who devoured adult encyclopaedias, because the kid ones were just too limited, and who first learnt to draw from copying the illustration on a book cover. The little girl who would stand in the wind and feel cold go over her skinny little body, and shiver with a kind of thrilling aliveness, so that she wanted to laugh and laugh, and just move in her body like it belonged to her.

I want to go back and find the teenager who would draw endlessly, read endlessly, but somehow never get around to doing her homework. Who would lie in bed at night and look out the window at the stars, and think about God and life and love and The Universe, and wonder who or what was Out There, and what it might be like to go up in a spaceship, and a thousand and one other things. Who would stim, sometimes, though she had no idea, yet, what she was doing, or even, yet, fully grasp that others didn’t pace or rock or jiggle their bodies like this. Who could make silly jokes and laugh till she just about cried, giving herself over to the laugh completely. And who still sometimes danced, when she could, if no-one looked, if no-one laughed. But mostly, she just dreamed, and drew, and wrote the occasional poem, and felt at odds with the world, without really knowing why. Who didn’t know herself yet, but managed to be that self anyway.

I want to go back.

I want to go back and find the young woman, who, when her child was in school, would wander the streets of Auckland, solitary and content, following an internal flow no-one else could understand. Who would drink in bright colours like they were her lifeblood and feel a thrill throughout her whole body when she found some old, neglected, quaint corner of city architecture. Who would climb Mount Eden and find a quiet spot away from all the tourists, lie down in the grass and watch the clouds go by. Who wrote a lot of fervid poems, because she was trying to grasp something, trying to understand the crazy world she found herself in. Who immersed herself in studying all manner of things, in pursuit of this same objective, following one special interest or another, for as long as it fascinated her. The young woman who would sometimes put on music and draw the curtains so no-one could see, then dance and dance, just because she felt like it, just because it made her feel free.

I want to go back and find the older woman, who, in recovery from an emotionally abusive relationship, immured herself in the countryside and wrote and painted and hardly spoke to anyone for days at a time. Who didn’t even have a TV, let alone a computer or the Internet. I want to feel how she felt, the rhythm of her days, the naturalness of how she moved from one thing to another, learning again how to hear the song within. Because she was freeing herself of a dark shadow that had blighted her life, and re-discovering her true feelings, her true needs, once again. And who still sometimes danced, late at night with the music up loud and the curtains closed, even though she had known for a long time that she was a lousy dancer. 

I want more, even. I want to let her speak out, as she hardly ever allowed herself to, to reject those who would use and abuse her, to not get sucked in by other people’s games or agendas, to not give the manipulators and the time-wasters and the emotional leeches one minute of her time, or one ounce of her essence. I want to let her do and say all the things she once thought of doing and saying, but was too scared to, or didn’t think she had a right to, or was told she mustn’t, or got yelled at for saying or doing, so she stopped. I want her to walk away from anything and anyone that doesn’t nourish her, as she should have done all along, to have the courage to go her own way and choose her own path.

Because in spite of all the angst, anger, confusion, terror, anxiety, and raw aching sadness she felt, and a self-loathing deep as the ocean, in spite of all that she went through, she harboured within her a pearl beyond price.

So I want to go back.

But I don’t need to. Because she’s already here, inside me. 

And I just have to let her dance.

Why We Need Mentors

I've called this "Why We Need Mentors", but it could just have easily been titled "What Happened To My Life?"

I began my adult life with a whole bunch of expectations, most of which involved assuming my life would be like other people's - marriage, motherhood, mortgages, the white-picket-fence-with-2.5-kids life in the 'burbs' thing... I didn't truly know how people got all that. It seemed to 'just happen' for them, and so I presumed it would for me too.

Well, some of it did. I did get married and become a mother, though younger than I'd thought I would. My marriage however was an abject failure - I made a lousy choice of mate, who proved not a good provider or all that stable, and we were never able to buy our own home. And then I started reading feminist stuff, eventually leaving the marriage and coming out.

 Still, all that meant was that I reframed my expectations. Instead of a man, I assumed I would find a long-term female partner, I'd get my degree, get off the benefit, and we'd settle down in happy domesticity, a sort of lesbian version of the white picket fence thing.

It didn't happen. Instead I had a string of short-term failures interspersed with long periods of celibacy, where I tried to figure out "what I did wrong", and how to do it differently next time. Then I'd launch myself out into the mating market again, thinking I'd solved all my problems, only to find - BANG. Another failure, and I'd reel back into celibacy again.

Friendships were another area I consistently failed in. They imploded, or drifted apart, or just never got off the ground properly in the first place. I couldn't understand it. I thought I was being friendly, helpful, nice, etc, why did no-one want to know me? Why was it such a struggle to connect with others?

I was attending university on and off during these years, but at times I struggled there too. Academically, I was doing okay, getting mostly As and Bs, but there was a lot of social stuff that I just didn't 'get'. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself at this time to be 'normal', and eventually, that pressure resulted in my health collapsing under the strain.

It would take another ten years before I would be diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but the pattern was clear from the beginning - any severe stress, and my health took a nosedive. I began to use it as a reason to not do certain things, but only because I couldn't articulate my deeper, more long-standing reasons, which no-one would have accepted or understood at that time anyway. I still kept believing that my life would, at some magic point, straighten out, that everything would fall into place and come right. It never did.

I ended up leaving the city and living in the country for many years, while I tried to heal. During that time I finally managed a long-term relationship - only it wasn't exactly as happy as I'd dreamt it would be... I tried so hard to 'fix' it, draining my health, my vitality, the last of my youth, hope, romanticism and emotional energy in the process. I finally left only when I felt I had nothing more to give. And only then did I come to understand, way too late, that I'd been the victim of sustained emotional abuse.

I took stock - no partner, few if any friends, no job, no money, no possessions worth a damn, my health a wreck - where did I go next? Eventually I moved away to be closer to my family and start anew. Life since then has had a few ups and downs, but I still find myself, in my late fifties, poorer than I've ever been. I have no permanent job and little chance of one, my health is still not the best and in some ways is getting worse with ageing (eg the onset of arthritis), I've never owned my own home and am never likely to, short of a miracle. My family are supportive and help when and as they can, but still, life could be better. A lot better.

As for relationships - well. I picked all the wrong people, it's true, but then I could also say that none of the 'right' ones ever picked me. Suffice to say it's an area I'm not willing to venture into again, for a whole host of complicated reasons, of which being 'burnt' too often is only a part. In terms of connecting to others, the best thing that's happened for me in the last few years is not relationships but the aspie friendships I've made - they're one of the highlights of my life now.

But overall, my life has been, in many ways, a train wreck. Very few of my dreams and expectations have ever been met or realised - I've never owned my own home, never had a relationship that was worth the effort involved, never had a career (except for my writing of course, but I've yet to work out how to make that pay), I didn't even manage to finish my university degree. I rate raising my daughter as my biggest achievement - and don't get me wrong, I would still rate it that way no matter what else I'd done - I just wish I'd been able to achieve a whole bunch of other stuff too.

So what has all this to do with mentors?

It's this - when things have gone right in my life, it's always with the help, guidance and support of others. A typical instance is my getting to uni - for a while, I was friends with a woman who'd done several degrees, and who 'knew the ropes'. I quizzed her endlessly, and she very patiently showed me how to enrol, told me all about degrees, courses, prerequisites etc - we later drifted apart but I'll always be grateful to her for her assistance. It's very likely that I wouldn't have gotten to uni at all without her help. It was typical of a consistent pattern - if people were willing to patiently explain things to me, and guide me through new things, my life went much, much better. Other times, I got through life changes only with the practical help of family and friends. When I was lacking such support, that's when my life would go haywire. The inevitable result was a good deal of anguish and stress.

Maybe some of all this would have happened anyway, aspie or not, mentors or not, - I would still have come out for instance. But there's no doubt in my mind my life would have gone a lot better, if only people had realised just how ignorant and in need of help I really was, and given me a lot more guidance.

Many other aspies seem to be the same, I've heard many lament how they can't make or keep friends or relationships or jobs or stay in education, how their lives are going to ruin, they're homeless or unemployed or whatever, because they just don't know how best to get by in the world, they lack the practical knowledge or skills or social skills to rescue themselves - and no-one is helping them.

                                                                                                                                          
WE ALL NEED MENTORS. Everyone of us on the spectrum needs mentoring, sometimes throughout our lives. It doesn't have to be a big, formal thing - though that can help those who don't have families etc to step in and do this role - but it is a very real need, even when the individual is well into adulthood and seemingly independent.

Now, I understand that most people live busy lives and they can't always spare the time - even if they understand the need - to mentor someone. But whenever anyone, be it a private individual or a member of an agency or organisation, can fulfil this role, I would plead with them to do so, as the lives of the autistics they touch can only be better off for it. Because with the right practical help and patient support, we can achieve great things.

Altogether Autism Conference Speech

I haven't written here for awhile, as I've been busy preparing and practising a short speech I gave as one of a panel of aspies, at the Altogether Autism Conference, last week in Hamilton, New Zealand. I decided to include the full speech here, in case anyone is interested.

"Hello people, my name is Penni Winter, and I’m what’s known as a self-diagnosed, peer-confirmed aspie, or person with Aspergers. What this means, in my case, that it took about two or three years of intensive research and reading before I could accept this new identity, and it took more years and meeting with other autistics before I felt comfortable in it. It certainly wasn’t a step I took lightly, or on some kind of whim.

I always knew that I was ‘different’ ever since I was a young child, and my life certainly hasn’t been an easy one, as I basically stumbled and bumbled my way through a world that I didn’t understand, and which didn’t understand me. I suffered along the way a great deal of personal misery, not to mention chronic depression and low self-esteem. I spent decades trying to either figure out why I’m ‘different’, or to transform myself into something more ‘normal’, or to simply hide the shame of my ‘difference’. I failed badly at all of these tasks, and eventually concluded there was no label that fit me, that I was just an inferior specimen, a sort of lemon off the human production line.

Then several years back, while I was working as a teacher aide, I was assigned one term to working with a young girl with Aspergers. I had heard of Aspergers, but didn’t really know anything about it, so I decided to do some research. Imagine my shock when I recognised not just my student, but myself, in the descriptions. For the first time I saw all my idiosyncrasies listed in stark black and white. It was a revelation, just when I’d decided there was no explanation for my ‘weirdness’. Nonetheless, for a long time, I really struggled with accepting the idea of being autistic. In fact, my initial reaction was along the lines of - “Who, me? Autistic? No *expletive-deleted* way!”

And why? Firstly, because I don’t fit the common stereotypes of someone with autism or Aspergers. I was, and still am, a functional, independent adult, with plenty of verbal ability. I’m also not a child, or male, or any kind of computer geek or trainspotting nerd, I’m perfectly capable of empathy and compassion, I’m not an emotionless semi-robot, and I like to think I have a pretty good sense of humour - I can even do sarcasm, though I do often find it difficult to read other people’s sarcasm.

Secondly, the official criteria for autism seemed extremely negative to me, focussing as they do on rather dry clinical descriptions of autistic ‘deficiencies’. If I had read only those, I probably would have ended up rejecting the whole idea of being autistic, because my self-esteem was quite low enough already. Fortunately, during my forays in the library and on the Internet, I stumbled upon autobiographical books written by other autistics who I could identify with, and then forums and Facebook groups run by and for aspies, as I learnt that they – we – call ourselves.  These played a key role in my coming to accept and even embrace my autism, and, eventually, in finally ridding myself of my sense of low self-worth.

Because in the process of getting to know other autistics, I found that the stereotypes I’d held were demolished and the myths were debunked, as the ‘real’ autistics emerged from the shadows. Friendships – which had always been problematic for me – suddenly became much, much easier, as for the first time in my life, I found people ‘on my wavelength’, who thought, felt, acted and reacted ‘just like me’. A common reaction amongst us, when something was shared, was “you mean you do that or feel that too? I thought I was the only one!” So gradually, I began to think, “hmmm, these people are like me, and yet they’re not terrible people, quite the opposite in fact, maybe I’m not so bad either…” And so that huge burden of self-hatred began to slide off my shoulders.

And eventually, I met other autistics not just online, but in real life as well, most especially through ASK (Autistic Spectrum Kiwis), the group that I’m part of today. And they accepted me, just as I am, no need for shame or pretense or hiding my true self anymore. To someone who spent so long lost in a sort of social wilderness, this still seems like a minor miracle, and one which has greatly enhanced my life. I wouldn’t be where I am today, nor I think would I have a life worth living, if it weren’t for my aspie friends and connections. Because we all need our peer groups, and autistics truly are no exception.

So whether it’s for yourself, your child or student, or perhaps a client or patient, I cannot stress too much the importance for autistic people of the support and friendship of others on the spectrum - no matter what age the autistic person is – autistic children have also benefited from meeting their real peers, and making friends with ‘others like me’. But without such support and companionship, even if it’s only online, we are doomed to being always the ‘weirdo’ or the odd one out wherever we go. And I can say from bitter personal experience, that being that kind of permanent outsider is not the path to a meaningful and happy life.

Thank you for listening."

And Yet Another Bit from my Book

Another excerpt from my book. This is probably the last one I’ll do, as I need to get on with actually writing the rest of it!!

I am twelve years old, drifting around the school playground at lunchtime. Nearby, some kids want to play a game of Four Square, but there are only three of them. They invite me to play. It’s a simple game, and at first all is well. But then, as soon as a queue forms of other kids wanting to play, the original players turn to me, and tell me, “You can go now”. I back off and walk away in slow confusion, suddenly aware of two things – I have been used, and I Am Not Wanted.

I wish I could say this was an isolated incident. Alas not so. At primary school, I had been, if not exactly favoured, at least not totally excluded. But my peers were growing up fast, their interactions becoming more sophisticated and complicated. As a child, I had been drilled in some basic rules of social interaction by my parents –hello and goodbye, please and thank you, wait your turn and don’t stare at people. These were no longer enough, and my ‘difference’ was becoming more obvious. Around me, girls were sprouting breasts and hips, and becoming interested in boys and flirting, pop groups and film stars, makeup and fashion. I was still reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, wishing I could find buried treasure and secret passages, and wanting to be George, the rebellious tomboy (I thought the other girl, Anne, was wet). I was also late physically maturing, which didn’t help much.

It also didn’t help that the intermediate took students from several primary schools, and almost none of the kids I had spent the last six years with, who were used to me, were in my classes. My new classmates didn’t know me, and rapidly made it plain they didn’t like me much either…

… One big challenge at intermediate, and secondary school also, was sports. We’d had to do them at primary, but little prowess is expected of young children. By twelve or fourteen, however, it’s expected you will know at least a few of the rules, and have acquired at least a little skill. Not me, alas! I had never been particularly well co-ordinated. I’d taken forever to learn to tie my shoelaces for instance, my grandmother – she of the lush garden – had finally shown me, step by patient step, how to do it. I’d done ballet for several years, but I would soon give it up, as I was slowly realizing I would never be much good at it. Unfortunately girls then weren’t allowed to play rugby, which I might have enjoyed because of the backyard games with my father; we had such delights as netball, cricket and hockey instead. Netball I found frustrating, cricket I’ve always rated one notch above watching paint dry, but hockey was just a nightmare. One PE class, standing on the field in my usual daydream, I suddenly realized the ball was headed straight for me – and in the wake of it, a pack of girls were thundering down on me, sticks raised, faces murderously grim. SQUAWK! I whacked the ball wildly away from me – one of the few times I actually managed to hit what I was aiming at – of course it was in the wrong direction and my teammates yelled at me, but I didn’t care. I was simply relieved not to be a target anymore. (And they said girls couldn’t play rugby because it was ‘too rough’. Go figure.) But the worst thing was not understanding why so many people got so wound up about sports, yelling out things like get him! Kick it! Run with it!, and generally acting like it was the end of the world if ‘our’ team lost. It’s only a bloody ball! I wanted to yell. Why did they get so excited? Other things were far more important, in my view.

And another excerpt....

Been a bit busy lately to do any writing, but here's another excerpt from my book…

I tried to perceive some pattern or order in what seemed a chaotic world, or failing that to at least create some small order in my own environment. As a little girl, I had played dolls tea parties with other girls – and been very disconcerted when they actually wanted to play with the dishes and cups I had so neatly arranged! I stopped playing dolls tea parties. Something similar happened with the ‘dress-up’ bag of adult cast-offs my sister and I shared, I enjoyed the actual dressing up and ‘arranging’ of costumes more than the playing. In fact, I wasn’t really able to think up these free-flowing, ever-changing dramas as the other kids did, and I tended to simply follow their lead. Once, all dressed up, I pranced out of the bedroom and around the house, wobbling in my too-big high heels, to the adults’ amusement. I remember smiling at their laughter, and anyone looking on would have thought me ‘normal’. But my smile was due to relief, not shared pleasure – for once, I had ‘got it right’.

Outside, I climbed trees, and played chasey and hidey-go-seek and Cowboys and Indians with my siblings, and would have seemed ‘normal’ enough then too. But if others wanted to change the ‘rules’ of these games, I would complain furiously. “You’re supposed to stay dead!” Once I ‘knew’ a rule, I did not want it changed! Changing rules, actually any kind of sudden change, made my stomach go all wobbly. As with dressing up, I was unable to ‘improvise’, or truly meld with others. I could only follow rules, or the lead of others – or be the ‘boss’! And if I was ‘in charge’, I was very bossy, rigidly so.

I also loved to play rugby with my siblings and our father at home. Strangely enough, though I was never any good at school sports, somehow I could ‘do’ rugby. I loved the hard running and tackling. It seemed to meet some need in me for whole-body activity and physical contact. Other times, my father would wrestle with us, all of us piled onto him, trying to hold him down. I loved this game, and was probably the hardest ‘wrestler’. For all of this, and my preference for shorts and trousers over skirts and dresses (to me they were simply more practical), I was labelled ‘a bit of a tomboy’….

…Sometimes I read fairy tales, and there I came across the idea of ‘changeling children’, swapped at birth, and wondered for a while if I was one. But I truly couldn’t imagine other-worldly creatures popping over to New Zealand to grab a child! When I was a little older, I wondered if I was adopted, if that was why I felt so different to everyone around me. But simple logic (something I believed in even at this tender age) told me this couldn’t be true either, and I eventually gave this idea up too. There was no explanation for my ‘difference’. The labels still kept coming though – I was ‘away with the fairies’, ‘lost in her own little world’, a ‘day-dreamer’, a ‘strange child’, and more, as others tried to grasp my ‘otherness’.

Another excerpt from my book...

Another excerpt from my book…

Just how I was ‘different’ only slowly became apparent to me. Too often, I would say things that to me seemed utterly normal and unremarkable - and anger, scolding, ridicule, jeering laughter or a shocked silence would follow. I was saying things formed by my particular ‘logic’ and thought processes, but I had no idea (and nor did others) of just how different these were. Hence, I could never anticipate what would bring this all this down on my head, or understand why it was so wrong. All I knew was it somehow was wrong, and me with it. There was nothing I could do but cringe and wait for it to be over. Over and over again, I would inadvertently break social ‘rules’ I didn’t know existed until I was told off for violating them. There seemed to be so many things that others somehow ‘just knew’, and which I was also expected to ‘just know’, and didn’t – until I made a social blunder. One day my mother was scolding me, “You should have known not to do that!” (whatever it was), and I protested, ”but how could I have known, if you didn’t tell me!?” We were both puzzled, but I was distressed as well, and horribly, horribly confused.

I didn’t have a name for this pain, anymore than I had a name for my other feelings. If someone said to me, ‘why the sad face?’, or ‘you’re happy today!’, I would feel with a shock of surprise, ‘oh! So this is happy, this is sad’, etc. I say I ‘felt’ this, because I didn’t think with words at that age, my thinking was more like a series of flickering images, or surges of wordless feeling like whales surfacing from my personal depths. I wouldn’t think in words till I was a teenager, and even now a lot of my thinking is visual – despite my facility with language, images are my ‘native tongue’.

Part of my social difficulty was, I think, due to being unable to connect and compare, and hence generalise and learn from, my experiences. Occasionally, after I’d messed another situation up, someone – usually my mother – would say to me, “but you should have known how to do (x), from (y) situation!’ I’d always be very surprised – it had never occurred to me that the two were in any way connected. Such skills as I had were, as Charlotte Moore so aptly puts it, “an archipelago of islands scattered across a sea of confusion… [not] even within hailing distance of each other.”[1] And though I was a voracious reader, I couldn’t ‘connect up the dots’ of any of the knowledge about the world I was accumulating either; it was simply a whole bunch of disjointed facts.

---

[1] Moore, Charlotte; George and Sam (Penguin, 2005), p 37.

An Excerpt From My Book

I’ve not been up to writing anything for a while, as I’ve been not in the best of health. I’d like however to share with you some excerpts from the book I’ve been writing about my life with Aspergers (or trying to write, rather!). The first excerpt, from the beginning of the book, is below, I’ll do more later.

I am about seven years old. I am standing in the passage in front of the bedroom I share with my sister. As usual, I see everything in vivid detail, the grains in the wooden boards under my feet, the busy-ness of the wallpaper, the brush strokes in the paint on the door frame, the dead fly on the floor in the middle of the doorway. But today also I suddenly see, become aware of, something else – I am different. How, I don’t know, why, I don’t know, and what the words are for it I don’t know, but I know I am different. And I experience this difference as a lack, something others have but I don’t. And I know I need to hide it.

This is the story of my life.

It is a life that has taken many twists and unexpected turns, seen assorted ups and a large number of downs, but the one thing that has dominated and defined it overall is the quest to understand, to make sense of a world that I frequently found confusing, frightening, overwhelming and chaotic; to make sense of my life and of myself, or, failing that, to simply find some small space in the world I ‘fit’.

This journey of mine began in the depths of 1950s suburban Auckland. It was, and is, New Zealand’s largest city, but this didn’t mean, in those days, that it was forward-thinking, enlightened or even especially cosmopolitan. It still had a lot of the flavour of a provincial small town, like most of New Zealand at that time. Understanding of, let alone tolerance for, neurological differences of any kind was in its infancy elsewhere in the world, and non-existent in this ‘last, loneliest outpost of civilization’. What was valued however - an almost unspoken rule that even I managed somehow to absorb - was conformity, sameness, ‘not sticking your neck out’, not standing out from the crowd, being ‘just the same as everyone else’.

Not that there were many clues, at first, that I was different to other children. I was a quiet, ‘good’ baby and toddler, ‘not much trouble’. My mother says that, as a baby, I did have a tendency to gaze around me with a wide-eyed astonished look, “as if you were wondering whether to stay or not”. And the few times I got into mischief as a toddler, it was usually of the solitary kind, and to do with exploring my world too closely. One of my aunties still laughs over the time when, put down for an afternoon nap at her place, instead of sleeping I apparently took to exploring the blinds. One blind had a frayed edge, which I pulled, and pulled, and pulled…. By the time they came in to get me, there were only a few inches of blind left at the top, and a pile of threads on the bed beside me! Another time, at this same auntie’s place, when a search was made for me, I was discovered quietly up to my little elbows in a large jar of home made jam. I was also a bit slow to talk – though I said my first words at about a year, I didn’t talk in proper sentences until I was about three, and my sister started talking.

But I was my parents’ first-born, and with three more (and less quiet) siblings following in the next six years, my mother had her hands full. If I seemed to give little cause for concern, she was probably relieved. I grew into a ‘quiet’, biddable child, considered ‘shy’, and ‘in her own little world’.

This is how others remember me. My own memories of those early years are somewhat different in focus. I had little awareness of other people or their feelings, and if any non-verbal disapproval was sent my way, I was oblivious to it. My curiosity was directed towards my physical environment, not those around me. My earliest memory is not of any interaction with people, but of a plant in the hallway of the house we moved into when I was three. I have the impression I had left the adults behind in the kitchen and gone off alone to explore – I didn’t yearn for company while I was doing this, nor did it occur to me, ever, to run and share what I found. I was simply absorbed in my own doings, lost in my little ‘bubble’ of a world, aware of others only as and when they impinged on that bubble.

It was a kind of selfishness I suppose, but not a conscious one – I simply didn’t know other peoples’ feelings existed, so sometimes I would trample blindly over them….

A couple of links to other stuff i've written

Here is the link to the (short) version of my story that was published on Alyson Bradley's website, for those who are interested or who have asked me about my earlier years.
It's at http://asplanet.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=138&itemid=184

Also, here's a link to another piece i wrote, also on asplanet, about how the world MIGHT look if aspies/auties were in the majority, and NTs the minority. I would probably write it a little differently now, but the basics still stand.
http://asplanet.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=93&itemid=139
Let me know if you have trouble with the links.

The meaning of my blog name

Just in case you were interested...

The 'Godzone' part has nothing to do with churches, it's a contraction of 'God's Own Country', as we like to think of good ole NZ. We have a (mostly deserved) reputation for being 'clean and green' here, and I love my country deeply. Like more than three-quarters of Kiwis, I'm a North Islander, born and bred, and to me 'forest' is dense semi-tropical bush, damp and lush with ferns, where if you're lucky you might find some magnificent kauri trees still lurking, having survived the 'chop-'em-all-down' colonial clearing phase. Beaches are often golden sand, with pohutakawa trees lining them. Pohutukawas have an interestingly rough bark, glossy dark green leaves, and produce beautiful spiky red flowers around Xmas time, hence it's also called the 'NZ Christmas tree'. Harbours are lined with mangroves, and we call many of our hills 'mountains', much to the amusement of South Islanders (who know what mountains really are). This is my country, and i couldn't imagine living anywhere else.

BUT. Though i love the scenery, for most of my life, i knew i was 'different', the 'stranger', the 'odd' or 'weird' one, the one who just didn't fit in with other people, no matter where i went or who i mixed with - and believe me, though i haven't travelled much, i have mixed with many, many different types of people, from different social movements, groups, countries and income levels. Nowhere did i find anywhere i 'fit'. I always thought that if i ever wrote an autobiography, i would name it 'A Stranger in Godzone'. Though I also swore i never would - i didn't want to 'expose' my difference any more than i could help. And then i found aspergers, and the online AS community, and 'my own (neurological) kind'. A 'stranger' no longer - at least to myself. But for many years, that's how i lived, hence the title.

Some time ago, i wrote a short version of my life, which is (as far as i know) still posted on Alyson Bradley's website, asplanet. When i have the link, i will post it here. I am also expanding it out into a full-length book - slowly!!!

So there you are. Just in case you were wondering.