Saving Graces

Huge house, smaller life, but hey, I'm still recovering from quite a few Times of Trauma.

I have so much to sort after times of cognitive dissonances when my own true story was stolen. I thought I did pretty well to put together a memoir dealing with What Really Happened (from an Autistic point of view, somewhat) and now the old computer isn't working.

I never was a very patient person. At least if I'm learning patience now, I have more space with which to work some new solutions.

The Sixties was a time of many changes. Me, by the time I'd got to University I'd missed out on my classical schooling because my family situation had already seriously broken down.

In the old home life, there were saving graces indeed. There was an abundance of books and magazines in our home for example. (Mind you such a phenomenon may offer a slightly skewed perspective in a family who doesn't communicate.)

My own book world was built out of ideals. With a Father who'd gambled away my Private School Fees and a Mother stressed beyond measure, I took to Religion and Bible Studies. Crazy, crazy stuff really.

We still say we're a Christian country in Australia. What does that mean?

Well, for myself, while trying to maintain Spiritual ideals and ideologies, I worked at as many jobs as I could, and my Muma, a well paid teacher also took on jobs and then eventually I was the one to do the cooking and housework and so on, and none of it got us ANYWHERE!!!!

I considered the Lilies Of The Field and envied them. I would willingly have been Mary as a relief from being Martha, but hey.

'The Rich Man and The Kingdom Of Heaven', did that have something to do with the money disappearing faster than it was earned? O Dear.

Now it seems to me, we live in a time when Money is Everything and Nothing Again!

With Asperger's Syndrome, with my own peculiarities of interpretation, I truly believed it to be better to be honourable in one's doings and to serve creativity and understanding than to principally pour oneself after wealth. I believed that if the creativity was attuned, then wealth would be automatic.

Admittedly it was a mistake to marry a Liar in the midst of the Breakdown in my early twenties and it was also a mistake in terms of the dissonances which had caught up with me and manifested themselves by the time the Seventies arrived.

That particular breakdown which caused me to drop out of University was at least diagnosed.

Trouble was that Old Time Asperger's Trap:

'DO YOU HEAR VOICES?'

That's what the shrink said, and I said , 'Well, yes, (I hear your question, for example.)'

Oh yes, there had been a little bit of Acid, not much, (I was underweight & fashion only allowed a small amount of some things). Not much is probably still too much in the light of some downtime dreamtimes.

Marianne Faithfull describes the amazing insights into archetypes which can be gained by such experiences, but the problem with Archetypes is that if they've already been disrupted in one's world, the visions of the same can easily fool one.

If all that wasn't enough, there was also the Sexual, soon to become the Sexist Revolution, not to mention the Vietnam War which I'd originally believed in until I read the History of that business!

For a child who decided to be conservative in order to cope, all that stuff was indeed a breeding ground for serious Cognitive Dissonance (as if the original family crap hadn't been bad enough!)

So it's interesting to read Memoirs of Those Times. Marianne Faithfull, Wow!

Today, I'm pretty much through the latest fluey illness, still overdoing it sometimes. I'm preparing for the Dentist tomorrow etc, and today I've been pretty much absorbed in Lou Reed's Biography.

I heed the fact that Victor Bokris' bio of Andy Warhol was in some ways negated by Andy's Diaries, but the Lou Reed Book is interesting indeed.

I couldn't have guessed that Lou had had serious Electric Shock Therapy as a youngster.

(One friend of mine, John M had that treatment lately. He said he stopped when he realised that he'd become addicted to the preparatory drugs.)

My Dad had ECT too, way back in the mid sixties, soon after Lou Reed went through it, and it was strong and heavy back then.

I think my Dad had Asperger's. Did they ask HIM about Voices perchance?

Well, when they put my Dad in The Bin, he later said to me that he dreamed they cut his brain into four pieces and put them all back the wrong way round. I understand that possibly questions, drugs and treatments are a lot more gentle these days. I understand that if, for example, a person is gay, they wouldn't be likely to have to endure a lobotomy as Alan Ginsberg did way back when in the forties!

All the same, I got very scared of psychiatry after what happened to my Dad and after my own enormous and stupefying dose of Largactyl.

Believing that some things may be saner in these times, a couple of years ago, I decided to see a Shrink because I'd been through Domestic Violence and a particularly nasty violating legal disaster which mucked up all my prospects at the time... (I agree I may have colluded with some problems, but if you are losing your temper on account of Bad Dentistry, that's something else, even, possibly, mitigating circumstances!)

Anyway, I went to The Shrink and I said, "I have Asperger's Syndrome."

She said, "There's No Such Thing"

Please remind me, which Century are we in?

Asperger's & Bullying.

Last night I dreamed that I was back among the bullies, that there was one man who was sneering and denigrating me and taking away my means of working. It was depressing and unbelievable, yet very familiar. Those kinds of things have actually happened to me and as much as I hate it, I'm still trying to work out a pattern of getting beyond other people's rubbish and rubbishings.

Bullying is the sort of thing which can occur in response to a condition like Asperger's Syndrome. For the Aspergian, ordinary communicative signals may be difficult to read. Then, when misinterpretations flourish, inappropriate honesty is no help at all. Neither is any form of curiosity which ranges beyond a group mind.

Flying into Melbourne one evening long ago, I was met by a few friends.

It had been a long flight and someone asked me how I'd passed the time.

'I read the Book Of Daniel from The Old Testament,' said I.

They looked at me with what I realised later, was some horror.

It took me more than a year to realise I'd got myself mixed up with people who, while they were nice enough to meet me at the airport, inexplicably, they had no interest in Biblical Studies.

I suppose if I'd mentioned The Book Of Daniel to Nick Cave or Bob Dylan (had I known them) or to any number of mystically inclined folks, it might have been the start of a most interesting conversation but I hadn't encountered such folk back then.

It was also three years before my first encounter with Dr Norm Habel whose Comparative Religions study course would bring such joy and it was also a good three decades before I learned about Asperger's Syndrome.

Thinking back to those ancient Melbourne days, I'd have been better off lying. If I'd said that I spent the flight absorbed in various trashy magazines , that would have been acceptable, but even if I'd had the wit to think of that, my automatic corrector would have jumped up and stopped me.

I wasn't much bullied at school. Initially I was in a sort of daze, didn't hear or notice anything except my own thoughts which were basically about how I thought children SHOULD be treated.

We were at least read to at home and I remembered those stories better than I remember my first few clouded years of school, where I only ever woke up to find myself in Serious Trouble with some Teacher or other.

I was well into Primary School and considered to be Hopelessly Retarded before I finally learned to read for myself and that only came about because we had a sporty relative who'd got into the newspapers. Thus I learned that the written page wasn't solely fancy and talking toys.

Reading brought momentous change and suddenly my lack of social skills didn't matter so much.

The Library became my refuge, although every so often I'd emerge with an idea for a new Playground Game, teach it to anyone who would listen, and play joyously for a few weeks until my mind would again wander off of it's own accord and then I would follow the said restless mind back to its place in the Library.

Fortunately my Mother was a Teacher and she made sure that other staff members let me read what I liked.

When I was in my early twenties, I visited my Mother who was still teaching at that same School and I was astounded to note that two of my games were still being played by a younger generation of kids.

I felt that even if I hadn't studied what I'd wanted to study, that even if sport and injury took a great deal of my time and created far too much attention, that there were still ways I might one day fit in once I got over my breakdown.

Even without the Doctor's diagnosis and the horrid drugs he gave me, and despite my mind's different kinds of pacings, things had gone seriously wrong in my adolescent years and whether it was called Neurosis or anything else, I knew that things wouldn't work for me until I escaped my family. It's obvious that so strong an impulse will mean a necessity to re-discover the family later and I more or less did and have developed compassion for the kinds of messes which can skew the lives of perfectly nice people. In my teens and early twenties, I was chiefly aware of confusions and broken pathways.

I'd had no particular desire to perform at Sports. It just happened, an inheritance from a very sporty Grandmother I suppose, but suddenly there was all this attention and turmoiled feelings of all kinds abounded. My siblings were furious. Jealousies and rivalries seemed to pour themselves in front of me. I think that the first serious bullying I experienced was from my younger siblings and the more I tried to escape, the more relentless it all became.

And all that time our Daddy was out drinking and gambling all our family money including the money that was supposed to have taken me to Private School to learn Classics and Art and so forth and, as I'd imagined it, to quietly compete only if I felt like it!! A small Country Area School offered no such opportunities. I was the only one in my Intermediate class to pass English after our Teacher taught us the wrong books. I was the only one who had (accidentally) come across the books and poems we were supposed to have studied.

We may all know and begin to understand the extent of our own problems without really comprehending the situations of those close to us. Thinking and writing of those times makes me realise how much our Mother suffered then. It wasn't simply that she'd lost the life of Culture that she craved and was working three jobs to keep food on the table. The worst part of it was that the person she loved was a bit of a Bounder.

It's strange how love may anaesthetise the obvious. It was us kids and especially me, the gawky grump who she blamed for her unhappiness. I've had my spell of work in schools. I came home glazed by Personality Onslaught, she came home with her armour still bitterly intact.

As the psychological tensions increased so my temper shortened and the only way I could make people leave me alone was to think of nasty things to say which, while they were things I didn't mean, were fairly striking on account of my rapidly increasing literary repertoire, so I was branded with the bully brush too and that was odd because any occasional experimental skirmish into bullying ways was always a failure for me. (My timing was always frightful, there'd be an older sister around the corner or my chosen victim would just laugh and jeer back.)

The one or two times I accidentally succeeded at being truly mean I regret utterly.

Yes I was bitterly jealous of some children, but after one or two bouts of name calling, even those feelings faded into my curiosities about behaviour and it was as if my Schoolmates and Teachers were all characters out of someone else's book.

As a small child our brattish next door neighbour beat me up regularly. She was smaller than me but she had me terrorised. I ran to my mother crying one day to say that Little Miss had threatened to bash me again and my Mother said,

'Well, bash her back!' I was astounded. Such an idea never occurred to me.


In the end I didn't bash her. I got myself a coat hanger to help me face her off and tremblingly told her that I would bash her back if she took one more step. Arming myself probably wasn't a good idea because she was aggressive and I wasn't. It could have been very bad but I was unexpectedly lucky.

Just as I got ready to throw down the coat hanger and run for my life she backed off. I was astounded.

A Counsellor I've been seeing recently explained to me that all bullies are in fact cowards, so maybe that's our explanation here. (I think it should be said here though that not all cowards are bullies. For some of us peace-loving souls, bullying is too risky. As an older person though, I do argue back in the face of attack these days.)

(Question, is the early cowardice and basic urge to flee one reason I found I could run at speed in later days?)

Anyway, my life's path was pretty much set then. Retreat back to the Ground of Knowledge at every opportunity. Emerge renewed. Try something else. Talk with people who understand. Try not to explain too much. When people look glazed, it doesn't mean they are interested. If you find a good game, then you might be able to talk others into playing it. In the meantime, keep learning.

I guess the point of going back to the family is important, because by now there have been several occasions when I've got to the point of loving another person very much and suddenly again I'm under attack. There also came particularly strange times during the Nineties and beyond when I was seriously endangered.

That has been a very strange set of experiences especially if I've brought my verbal talents to bear because then the bully will claim it's them that's being bullied and well they are more convincing these so-called 'normals'.

I've learned more than I ever expected to know about Psychology in the meantime because of course there are plenty of books about Domestic Violence and so on.

To consider how a person constructs meaning in their lives one must focus on notions of Good and Evil. I thought that sort of thing to be clear cut and decided for myself that such forces are a sort of continuum relative to circumstance.

But if someone bashes or begins a campaign of slander and if they assume that my only good is to acquiesce, then I must disagree and I must get beyond the situation that those kinds of precepts landed me in. I wish it was as easy as a coat hanger backed up by bluff, but it isn't, so I'm searching through my options.

I've had a phase of reading the Biographies and Memoirs of successful people. That is satisfying. Recently I pulled out some of the more mystical books from the Seventies. My Library is a bit of a shambles after the violent incidents and much of it is lost but I still have some books on the Kabbalah.

Now there are a few interesting pathways there!