Nobody, Nowhere
by
Donna Williams

Avon Books (Pap Trd);

ISBN: 0380722178

Copyright 1994

This is truly a remarkable book.  Donna Williams, against incredible
odds, has written a masterpiece-a haunting, insightful, and
electrifying, account of her journey from a childhood as a severely
withdrawn and bewildered autistic toddler to a university-educated
successful writer.

Nobody Nowhere is exceptional in many ways.  Most remarkable, in my
view, is the journey itself.  Very few have made The almost superhuman
transition from autism to near-normalcy.  Also remarkable is the
author's superlative skill as a writer.  Her inventive use of words and
images verges on uncanny.

Her candor, her incredible graciousness and naivete in uncritically and
uncompla@gly recounting her mistreatment by other people (some of whom
were quite villainous), qualifies Donna Wflhams for near-sainthood.

Nobody Nowhere will be devoured by many readers.  None will read it
more avidly than those, like myself, with a consuming passion for
learning about autism.  As a research psychologist'and the father of an
autistic son, now thirty-six, I have read everything I could find on
autism for well over three decades.  There is nothing quite like Donna
Williams's story for gaining so dear a picture of life as seen through
the eyes of an autistic child.  Donna Williams was not the typical
autistic child-there is no typical autistic child, just as there is no
typical reader of her book.  But Donna Williams's account of the world
as she experienced it provides us with as good a description of "autism
from the inside" as we are ever likely to get.  I have not yet
recovered from my astonishment at being so close, after all these
years, to understanding-almost experiencing-parts of the life of an
autistic person, albeit a very high-functioning, highly gifted autistic
person.

Much of what Donna Williams has written about the experience of autism
was already familiar to me-at an intellectual level.  But Nobody
Nowhere provides a heretofore unavailable-and alamiing-highly
subjective appreciation of what it is like to be autistic.

What causes autism?  Donna has been studying it for a decade; I have
been seeking answers for several decades.  We have been looking in
different places, in different ways, but we have arrived at some
similar answers.  Donna reports that many,(not all) of her symptoms
were traceable to certain food allergies, and that her brwn reacted
badly when its vitamin supply was insufficient.  I encountered my first
case of milk-allergy-caused autism in 1967, and have since become aware
of hundreds of children whose behavior greatly improves when cow's
milk, wheat, eggs, or other common foods are removed from their diet.

As for vitamins: There are now sixteen studies in the world literature
(two of them by me) showing that almost half of all autistic children
and adults need larger amounts of vitamin B. and the mineral magnesium
than do nonautistic persons.

(Donna's editor tells me Donna was astonished to come upon my writings
on these topics.) Part of the problem of autism, in many autistic
persons, is thus obviously biochemical.

Researchers in neuroanatomy are also discovering subtle structural
anomalies in the brains of some autistic persons, especially in the
cerebellar circuits that permit the normal brain to select, prioritize,
and process information effectively.  When these circuits malfunction,
the automatic shifts of attention that make LIFE flow smoothly for
normal infants and children are grossly impaired in the autistic child,
so x Foreword that he or she becomes oblivious to many of the social
cues and to the constant stream of cause-and-effect sequences that give
coherence and meaning to normal experience.

The agonizing difficulties in the autistic person's ability to sort and
process information, in my opinion, not only underlie many of the
deficits of autism, but may also account for the islets of brilliance,
or savant abilities, manifested by so many autistic persons, including
Donna Williams.

The nature of the autistic person's attentional mechanisms strongly
predispose him or her to "tune out" the multitude of ongoing events
that serve to distract the nonautistic mind.  Thus the autistic person
is enabled (perhaps even compelled) to remain concentrated on such
tasks as multiplying large numbers mentally or memorizing phone
books.

Nobody Nowhere sheds long-needed light on one of the great mysteries of
autism: the process of recovery.  Judging from the clear example of
Donna Williams, the autistic person must first improve enough and be
perceptive enough to recognize him- or herself as non-normal in some
detail.  Beyond this, the person must be intensely motivated to strive
hard to overcome the difficulty.  (My own autistic son, Mark, while now
relatively high-functioning, does not have such motivation.  He seems
quite content with his life.) One of the most interesting parts of
Nobody Nowhere is the author's account of why she wrote the book.  We
have known for decades that autistic persons experience life as an
incoherent series of unconnected events.  By putting her chaotic life
experiences on paper, in chronological order, Donna hoped to construct
a coherent picture in her own mind of who she was.  After that, the
book was to have been burned!  What a tragedy that would have been!

Ikecovery, when it takes place, is not an automatic process.  One of
the techniques currently used by skilled teachers is behavior
modification, the reward-and-punishment process that worked so well
with Helen Keller, to teach autistic children many of the simple
things, such as the colors and the alphabet, that normal children learn
by osmosis.  But this straightforward teaching procedure often brings
about surprisingly great improvement in the child's overall behavior,
especially if the teaching is started before about age five.  In my
view, the reason for the unexpected progress in these autistic children
is that the process teaches them, in addition to the letters A B C,
that they can and must pay attention'when, despite their best efforts,
the child cannot grasp why he or she must.  Sometimes, even if the
world seems chaotic, if you pay close attention to the fragments, and
you strive hard to piece them together, you have a good chance for real
improvement.  This has worked for many autistic children (the lucky
gnes) and, quite possibly, it was one of the factors that helped Donna
Williams.  Perhaps under these conditions, autism, the experiential
jigsaw puzzle, may have a solution.

Nobody Nowhere helps beauty to fill an important gap in our knowledge
of autism.  A multitude of gaps remain.  There is much to learn.

Bernard Rin-dand, Ph.D. Director, Autism Research Institute San Diego,
California June 1992

Introduction.

This book is a fascinating, courageous story about a young woman's
early life.

Donna Williams has autism and yet has managed to develop into a
perceptive and thoughtful adult who has the ability to look at her own
reactions and write about them in a manner that is accurate and
detached and at the same time intensely personal and full of feeling.

Nobody Nowhere is an exceptional achievement for many reasons.  As a
result of her autism, and in spite of her insights and her skill in
writing about them, Donna has considerable difficulty understanding her
own and other people's behavior in everyday situations.  Life is still
an enormous struggle for her, and she continues to be handicapped in
many ways.

At one level, Donna's story is simply a heartwarming and heartrending
account of a girl's development in difficult circumstances that will
grip the ordinary reader's attention.  Most of us will be able to
identify with the uncertainties of childhood and adolescence she
describes.  At another level, the book has many insights for the
professional who is involved with child development and the treatment
of its distortions.  Finally, the book is unique in that it provides an
exceptional resource for the professional who works with people with
autism.  Autistic people cannot usually describe how they feel, and
others are nearly always limited to an interpretation of their
behavior.  Professionals are not superhuman and are just as prone to
making incorrect, if not downright silly, interpretations of what they
observe as anybody else.  Many of the things we notice in people with
autism remain puzzling, even after some forty to fifty years of
research in this field.  Donna's skill, humor, and good sense, which
shine through in this book, therefore provide an abundance of useful
insights for the professional who is trying to help people with autism
cope more adequately with their environment.

I have worked with autistic people for twenty-five years and have often
discovered autism in both children and adults where it had not been
previously suspected.  I have also had the happier experience of
concluding that somebody did not have autism after they had been sent
to me for advice and assistance on the assumption that they were
affficted with it.  When Donna first contacted me and told me she had
been said to be autistic and would like my help, I agreed to meet her,
even though I thought it quite possible that she did not have autism
but was emotionally disturbed in some way.  It is quite clear, however,
that she does have autism, and all the evidence clearly indicates that
she has been autistic since an early age.

Autism is a rare but troubling disorder.  About four children out of
every ten thousand develop it, and most of these are boys.

Approximately one child in five with autism is female, so that in a
population of sixty million-roughly one quarter the size of the United
States-there would be about five thousand females of al4 ages with
autism.  In contrast, two or three hundred thousand females in the same
population would have some degree of mental handicap.

While there are many things we do not know about autism, there are a
few things we do know with reasonable certainty.  It is not caused by
bad patenting, but rather is the result of some abnormality of brain
development occurring for a variety of reasons either before birth or
early in childhood.

People with autism are not necessarily mentally handicapped and,
generally speaking, are relatively able to do certain kinds of tasks,
although they have severe difficulty in a few characteristic areas.  On
the whole, they get through LIFE by rote, learning rules for dealing
with situations but often having very little understanding of the
meaning and significance of what they are dealing with.  They also find
it hard to process information about people and their relationships.

This can vary from an inability to recognize facial expressions or even
to know which parts of the face tell us what someone is feeling, to a
general difficulty in understanding what is going on in common social
situations and in recognizing what someone is feeling from their tone
of voice, choice of words, and other cues in normal conversation.

A third major area of difficulty is the comprehension of any
information expressed through spoken language.  Autistic children are
commonly thought to be deaf because they are unresponsive to other
people's speech.  However, aural tests show that they can hear, and
other tests indicate that the problem lies in a severe delay in the
development of their ability to understand speech.  In spite of these
problems, which make the world seem an extremely perplexing and
frightening place, such children are often very interested in their
surrqundin and may display surprising skill in mags nipula@ objects-for
instance, completing jigsaw puzzles on the basis of the shapes of the
pieces and --with no help from the picture, which they are generally
unable to interpret.

The problems described here lead people with autism to display three
major kinds of behavior.  In the first place, they are emofionafly
unresponsive and sometimes actively avoid relating to people.  In
babies, this is often shown by failure to maintain eye contact with a
parent or to display feeling through facial expressions.  In older
children, it may be indicated by the child's failure to make friends or
to be able to play in the company of other children.

Second, they are relatively unresponsive to other people's speech and
may have impaired, abnormal, or little or no speech of their own.

Children with autism often speak with a monotonous or oddly pitched
tone of voice and frequently echo things said to them.  Third, they
display rigid, stereotyped behavior in which they may insist on a very
unchanging envirorunent or carry out repetitive, purposeless activities
such as linin oh,9 jects up repeatedly or counting things over and over
again.  Attempts by others to interrupt such children's routines or to
change their environment make them quite distressed.  This distress may
result in intense displays of temper, with children biting themselves,
repeatedly striking their heads against walls, or punching themselves
to a degree sufficient to produce severe injury.

While Donna has displayed all these principal features of autism, she
is nevertheless very unusual.  She is exceptionally intelligent, which
means that although she is relatively unpaired in her grasp of
language, she is able to converse simply with other people for short
periods in favorable circumstances.

She is fortunate in that her language impairment is least marked in the
area of written expression.  This means that, although she still has
some difficulty in speaking, understanding other people's speech, and
understanding written material, she can express herself clearly in her
own writing.  Her difficulties in understanding other people's behavior
are characteristically autistic, but she does comprehend that other
people interact in some mysterious way, and she is motivated to try and
learn to be like them.  Thus, she has been able to write this book in
spite of her continuing autism.

Even though it sometimes seems overwhelming to parents and
professionals trying to deal with it, autism is not the sole
characteristic of a person afflicted with it.  People with autism vary
as enormously as any other group of people; they may be bright or dull,
cheerful or difficult, mischievous or compliant, and so on.  Much of
the behavior shown by people with autism consists of normal reactions
to an environment that seems decidedly odd to them and that indeed may
be odd in reality.  Apart from their autism, autistic people may be
emotionally disturbed or relatively well adjusted, just like any other
people.  It is very clear, both from this book and from my personal
acquaintance with Donna, that she isn a surprisingly strong person with
much compassion.  She is certainly not emotionally disturbed, despite
the opinions expressed about her over many years.  She is not mad and
never has been, and she has an unexpected ability to maintain a
realistic and commonsense view about so many things.

Among Donna's many surprising qualities are her tenacity and
perseverance in trying to improve her lot in whatever circumstances she
finds herself, and her uncanny ability to reflect upon her own behavior
and that of others.  That she is able to reason in this way and yet
continue to have considerable difficulty in relating to people is
extremely unusual.  It is perhaps just another reflection of the
exceptional intelligence that has enabled her to cope in situations
where her emotions have not been sufficiently developed to allow her to
rely on them in the unthinking and spontaneous way that other people
do.

This is a story of relevance to everybody, especially those who have
had to contend with difficulties in growing up.  Donna is a very nomial
person who has autism and has learned to cope with it, for the most
part.  She still does not understand why other people do many of the
things they do with each other and why they would want to.  She does,
however, know that she is determined to learn more about these things
and hopes she will come to enjoy them as other people seem to.  In
pursuit of her aims, Donna writes regularly to a number of other people
with autism around the world.  Understandably, in view of her
experiences and disability, there are a number of activities that she
finds extremely difficult, such as touching others physically and being
with people in unfamiliar rooms.  Nevertheless, recognizing that she
need not fear things that she can see others enjoy with little
difficulty, she has actively subjected herself to such frightening
experiences.  It is in such recent efforts of hers, as well as in the
many examples throughout this book, that we can see how brave a person
Donna is.

Nobody Nowhere does us all a great service.  It reminds us all what it
means to be human.  It is a moving and fascinating story of a life
still beginning.  It brings a wealth of insights about being disabled
and about being courageous.  It offers an abundance of help for
professionals working with children and young adults, and wiD
illuminate many of their puzzling experiences in working with autistic
children.  It gives graphic insights into the stress experienced by
families of autistic children and shows dearly that it is possible for
the family of someone with autism to be disturbed in various ways and
yet for this disturbance to have no relevance to the causes of autism
in the child.  Parents of autistic children may be less or more
disturbed than any other parents and should be free to be so without
any unjustified accusations that they have caused their child's autism
because of their own difficulties.  Although it is possible that with a
more favorable background she might have developed to her present level
earlier, it is clear that Donna eventually would have been as well
adjusted as she is whatever her family circumstances had been.

Speculation apart, this book provides a clear account of a disabled
child living with a disturbed family situation without the two sets of
unfortunate circumstances being necessarily connected.  Donna is clear
about this, far more so than many professionals in the field, much to
their discredit and the misfortune of their clients.

Nobody Nowhere is a triumph.  Read it and share in Donna Williams's
battle, the immensely successful way she has been able to allow her
humanity to outweigh her problems, and the lucid and absorbing story
she presents.

Lawrence Bartak, M.A Ph.D C. Psychol F.A.Ps.S A.F.B.Ps.S.

Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Special Education, Monash University,
Australia xviii Author Note This is a story of two battles, a battle to
keep out "the world" and a battle to join it.  It tens of the battles
within my own world and the battle lines, tactics used, and casualties
of my private war against others.

This is MY attempt at a truce, the conditions of which are on my
terms.

I have, throughout my private war, been a she, a you, a Donna, a me,
and finally, an I. Ail of us win tell it like it was and like it is.

If you sense distance, you're not mistaken; it's real.  Welcome to my
world. remember my first dream-or, at least, the first that I can
recall.  I was moving fl=ugh white, with no objects, just white.

Bright spots of fluffy color surrounded me everywhere.  I passed
through them, and they passed through me.

It was the sort of thing that made me laugh.

This dream came before any others with shit or people or monsters m
them, and certainly before I noticed the difference between the
three.

I must.  have been less than three years old.  This dream depicted the
nature of my world at that time.  Awake, I pursued the dream
relentlessly.  I would face the light shining through the window next
to my cot and rub my eyes furiously.  There they were.  The bright
fluffy colors moving through the white.  "Stop that!"  came the
intrusive gobble.  I'd continue rubbing merrily.  Slap.

I discovered the air was fun of spots.  if you looked into nothingness,
there were spots.  People would walk by, obstructing my magical view of
nothingness.  I'd move past them.  They'd gobble.  My attention would
be firmly set on my desire to lose myself in the spots, and I'd ignore
the gobble, looking straight through this obstruction with a calm
expression, soothed by being lost in the spots.  Slap.  I was learning
about "the world."

I learned eventually to lose myself in anything I desiredthe patterns
on the wallpaper or the carpet, the sound of something over and over
again, like the hollow thud I'd get from tapping my chin.  Even people
became no problem.  Their words became a mumbling jumble, their voices
a pattern of sounds.  I could look through them until I wasn't there,
and then, later, I learned to lose myself in them.

Words were no problem, but other people's expectations for me to
respond to them were.  This would have required my understanding what
was said, but I was too happy losing myself to want to be dragged back
by something as two-dimensional as understanding.

"What do you think you're doing?"  came the voice.

Knowing I must respond in order to get rid of this annoyance, I would
compromise, repeating "What do you think you're doing?"  addressed to
no one in particular.

"Don't repeat everything I say," scolded the voice.

Sensing a need to respond, I'd reply: "Don't repeat everything I
say."

Slap.  I had no idea what was expected of me.

For the first @ and a half years of my life this was my language,
complete with the intonation and inflection of those I came to think of
as "the world."

The world seemed to be impatient, annoying, callous, and unrelenting.

I learned to respond to it as such, crying, squealing, ignoring it, and
running away.

Once, instead of simply "hearing" a particular sentence, I truly
understood it because it had significance for me.  I was three and a
half.  My parents were visiting some friends, and I was standing in the
hall outside the riving room.  I was giving myself whizzies-arms
outstretched, spinning around and around.  I have a vague recollection
that there were other children there, for the topic of discussion in
the living room had disturbed and embarrassed me.  A question was asked
about my toilet training.  My mother replied that I was still wetting
myself.

I don't know whether this had done the trick, but I became more aware
of needing to go to the toilet.  I certainly had a great fear of going
to the toilet at this time.  I would hold on for what seemed like
forever, and then go just before I did it on the spot.

Sometimes I would hold on for several days until I was so constipated
that I would vomit up bile.  Then I became afraid of eating food,
too.

I would eat only custard, jelly, baby-food, fruit, lettuce leaves,
honey, and white pieces of bread with multicolored "hundreds and
thousands" sprinkled on top, like the spots of color in my dream.  In
fact I ate the things that I liked to look at and feel or that had nice
associations for me more than anything else.  Rabbits ate lettuce.  I
loved fluffy rabbits.  I ate lettuce.  I loved colored glass.

Jelly was like that.  I loved jelly.  Like other children, I ate dirt
and flowers and grass and bits of plastic.  Unlike other children, I
still ate flowers, grass, bark, and plastic when I was thirteen years
old.  As a teenager, the old rules still applied.  If I liked
something, I would try to lose myself in my fascination for it.

Things, unlike people, were wekome to become a part of me.

When I was about three, I had signs of malnutrition.  Though not
skeletal, I had bluish skin and would bruise at the slightest touch.

My eyelashes would come out in large clumps, and my gums bled.  My
parents thought I had leukemia and took me for a blood test.  The
doctor took some blood from my earlobe.  I cooperated.  I was intrigued
by a multicolored cardboard wheel the doctor had given me.  I also had
hearing tests because, although I mimicked everything, it appeared that
I was deaf.  My parents would stand behind me and make sudden loud
noises without my so much as blinking in response.  "The world" simple
wasn't getting in.

I thought I felt a whisper through my soul, Emqthing is nothing, and
nothing is everything.

Death in life and life in death of falsity.

The more I became aware of the world around me, the more I became
afraid.

Other people were my enemies, and reaching out to me was their weapon,
with only a few exceptions -my grandparents, my father, and my Aunty
Linda.

I still remember the smell of my grandmother.  She wore chains around
her neck.  She was soft and wrinkly, wore knitted things that I could
put my fingers through, had a husky, laughing voice, and smelled of
camphor.  I would take camphor off the shelves at the supermarket, and
twenty years later bought bottle upon bottle of eucalyptus oil and
spread it around my room, corner to corner, to keep out everything else
except for the comforting feeling that association gave me.  I
collected scraps of colored wool and crocheted bits and would put my
fingers through the holes so that I could faIJ asleep securely.

For me, the people I liked well their dungs, and those things (or
things like them) were my protection from the things I didn't
like-other people.

The habits I adopted of keeping and manipulating these symbols were my
equivalent of magic spells cast again.-,t the nasties who could invade
me if I lost my cherished objects or had them taken away.  My
strategies were not the result of insanity or hallucination, but simply
harmless imagination made potent by my overwhelming fear of
vulnerability.

MY GRANDFATHER FED me raisins and biscuits, piece by piece.  He made up
special names for everything; he sure knew his audience.  He understood
my world and so was able to fascinate me with his.  He had some liquid
mercury bails that he would splatter into tinier balls and make chase
one another.  He had two minute magnehmd Scottie dogs, which he would
make chase one another as well.  This sort of chasing was safe.

Communication via objects was safe.  Special names for everything, so
that it was "our little world"-that was safe.  Every morning while it
was still semidark I would go out to the shack in which he lived.

One day I went out to my grandfather's shack.  He didn't notice me.

His face was purple and blotchy.  He was lying on his side.  Pop never
woke up again.  I never forgave him for doing this until I was
twenty-one, when it suddenly dawned on me that people don't
intentionally mean to die.

Then I cried, and I cried, and I cried some more; it had taken me
sixteen years to grieve for him.

MY FATHER STOPPED existing when I was about three.  Up till then,
he-like my grandfather-intrigued me by calling things by special
names.

There was a man he called Cyril the fox, all cats became Brookenstein,
Charhe Warmton was the bed, and I was Polly the Possum or Miss Polly.

He had actually called me this because I was echolalic till I was four,
repeating meaninglessly everything I heard, just like a parrot.

My father catered to my fascination for small fancy things and shiny
objects.  He would bring me something different every week and would
always build me up by asking me if I knew how special and magical these
various bits and bobs were.  I would sit on his knee, my eyes fastened
to the object, listening to the story as though he were one of my
storytelling records.  In my head I would do the introduction: "This is
an original little long-playing record, and I am your storyteller.  We
are going to begin now to read the story of .  . still have those
treasures, twenty-three years later.  Then he -who he was-deserted me,
at least figuratively.  When I found another he whom I liked, many
years later, it took me several years to make the connection that these
two people were in fact the same person.

MY MOTHER WAs as hard as I was gentle, though strangely we shared the
same distant and unreachable nature.

She had wanted to put me in a children's home, and I recall being
terrified and hysterical, kicking my feet against the car as she tried
many rimes to force me in.  I knew the terror of what else she could
dish out, and if being sent to a home was the last resort, then I
thought that surely must be an insufferable torture comparable to hell
on earth.  When my mother spoke, the room shook.  You listened, even if
you did not hear.

I had an older brother.  I think he became her "only" child.  Perhaps
she wanted a daughter, for she would dress my brother up as a girl and
a boy on attemate days and take him out for walks in the pram.  We were
both pretty children, but he could "act normal" and was not so
embarrassing.

I am sure my father thwarted her efforts by giving my grandparents the
responsibility for me.  Perhaps, too, they had tried to reach me and
persisted beyond the point where her hope had run out.  Nevertheless,
my father paid the price for this, as did their relationship.  He was
ordered not to speak to me and to have nothing to do with me.

ADmiyaDLy my FATHER was as insensitive and indifferent to my mother and
my older brother as she was to me.  The family was split straight down
the middle, spiraling into a downward decline before crashing headlong
into the pits of hell.

It became a chain reaction.  The tension would explode, he would
degrade and abuse her, and she would degrade and abuse me.  Both of
them had found forms of escape that persisted on and off over many
years, leaving in their wake more destructiveness than I could ever
have conjured up in the magic of my insular little world.

I never hugged either of them; neither was I hugged.  I didn't like
anyone coming too close to me, let alone touching me.  I felt that all
touching was pain, and I was frightened.

MY MMHER WAs a person who, although she had no friends to impress, took
pride in how her children looked.  So she would brush my hair.  I had
long, curly blond hair, and she would tear through it and its many
knots with a vengeance.

My Aunty Linda also loved to brush my hair, though she would do it so
lightly that I would find it annoying.  "Am I hurting you?"  she would
say, as though I were some breakable china doll.  "Harder," I would
order.  And, though careful not to tear through the knots, she would
sit there brushing my hair for ages, and I would sit there enjoying
feeling it.  "You have fairy hair," she would say, "so silky, and look
at the way it fluffs out."

I liked the words that she used and thought about the feel of such
things.  For many years I played with, touched, and chewed on my own
hair.  Touching other children's hair was the only friendly physical
contact I would make.

The wisps surround me in my bed, They hover there for to protect me;
For the wisps, they are my friends.

People were forever saying that I had no friends.  In fact my world was
full of them.  They were far more magical, reliable, predictable, and
real than other children, and they came with guarantees.  It was a
world of my own creation where I didn't need to control myself or the
objects, animals, and nature, which were simply being in my presence.

I had two OtheT friends who did not belong to this physical world: the
wisps, and a pair of green eyes named Willie that hid under my bed.

I was afraid to sleep, always had been.  I would sleep with my eyes
open and I did this for years.  I guess I did not appear to be terribly
normal.

"Haunting" or "haunted" would have been better adjectives.  I was
afraid of the dark, though I loved the early dusk and dawn.

My earliest memory of the wisps was when I began to sleep in a bed.  It
must have been in the new house we lived in, though the old one had, in
my mind, blended into this one.  It was as though it was now a series
of rooms that I could no longer find within the new house.  This
disturbed me.  I liked to know where everything was-including my
parents.  I had to know where everyone was and that they were all
sleeping before I could go to sleep.  I would lie in bed, stiff and
silent, listening for an end to the muffled household sounds around me,
as I watched the transparent wisps hovering over me.

The wisps were tin creatures, almost transparent.  They .  y hung in
the air directly above me, and looked something like wisps of hair,
which is probably where my mind had found the idea.

My bed was also surrounded and totally encased by tiny spots that I
caged stars, so that it seemed to me I lay in some kind of mystical
glass coffin.  (I have since learned that they are actually air
particles, yet my vision was so hypersensitive that they often became a
hypnotic foreground with the rest of "the world" fading away.) By
looking through the stars and not at them, I could see them, and the
rule was that I could not close my eyes or they would depart, leaving
me unprotected against intruders coming into the room.  Feeling safe
was a tiring business.

And the intruders came.  They were responsible for taking away my
protection, for in the change of focus the tiny spots would disappear,
leaving me feeling angry and betrayed, alone, exposed, and
vulnerable.

I knew that people were disturbed at me sleeping with my eyes open.  I
soon learned to close them when I heard others coming, to play dead and
never look at them or let anything register when they lifted my eyelids
or even poked me in the eye.  I was breathing, so they knew I wasn't
dead.

The wisps left me by the time I had started "proper" school, though the
stars around me as I slept (probably a later version of the spots)
persisted on and off, and sometimes still appear.

WILLIE WAS ANOTHER story.  Willie had begun at the same time as the
wisps.  I was probably about two years old.  Unlike the wisps, he gave
me no comfort, but he was a form of protection against intruders in the
night.  He was no more than a pair of piercing green eyes that could
only be seen in the darkness.  I was frightened of him, but so, I
thought, were they; and so, come hell or high water, I sided with this
character.  As with anything I became close to, I would try to lose
myself within it.  I took to sleeping under the bed and I became
Willie.

By this time I was three years old.  Wflhe became the self I directed
at the outside world, complete with hateful glaring eyes, a pinched-up
mouth, a rigid corpsefike stance, and clenched fists.  Willie stamped
his foot, Wflhe spat when he didn't like things, but the look of
complete hatred was the worst weapon and Donna paid the price.  This
name was probably derived from my own surname, and some of Wflhe's
behavior was certainly modeled upon and in response to my violator: my
mother.

Willie learned to Turn other people's phrases back at them in some sort
of meaningful yet attacking way, though silence still seemed a far
deadlier weapon.  My mother began to think I was evil and possessed.

It would have been easier to forgive her if she had suffered from some
kind of mental illness.

She didn't.  Her lack of education and upbringing, her isolation and
her g, accounted for these beliefs more in terms of explanation than of
delusion.

MY MOTHER HAD retreated into a world of her own; but, unlike mine, it
held no safety for her.  Her only salvation and her only friend was my
brother.  It was a war in which I was to fight alone.  They sided
together, and together they would gang up on me.

To them, I was a nut, a retard, a spastic.  I threw "mentals" and
couldn't act nominal.  "Look at her, look at her," they would say about
a child who, to them, was either "a retard" when I was in my own world
or "a nut" when I was in theirs.  I couldn't win.

Looking at it from their point of view, I guess they couldn't win,
either.

My brother had probably woken up to the fact that I hardly
acknowledged, let alone accepted, him, and my mother had long since
been robbed of a life and the pride she so badly needed, which had been
lacking long before I ever came along.  She cast herself as the
tormented single mother.  My brother became the too-important only
child.  And, as their accusations flew at me, so, too, did the
accusations fly at them from everyone else.

People were saying that she had caused me to be so withdrawn by her
coldness and her violence.  She probably believed this, and I let
her.

Had I ever wanted to reach out as myself to the intrusive outside
world, I am sure she would have inhibited me.  Some battered children
form attachments with such a parent.  I never did.

If I wanted a war, I guess I won.  Though she was probably a social
cripple before I was born, I accept my share of the responsibility for
making her one, and for robbing both her and my brother of a free, more
independent relationship with each other, which has resulted in his
rejection of her an these years later.

When my mother had fought to put me in an institution and my father:had
fought to keep me at home, each must have had his or her own conception
of the future.  Each was right.  I became a rewarding experience for my
father.  I became my mother's hell.  She called me Doily, the doll she
never had.  In her own words I learned who I was: "You were my doll,
and I was allowed to smash it," she told me over and over again.  My
mother had but one reward,.  I was also to be her little dancing
doll.

WHEN I WAS three, my mother took me to my first dancing lesson.  I
walked on tiptoe, loved classical music, and would make up dances by
myself for myself, and this was taken as an indication that I would do
well at ballet.  I loved pretty things and accepted the ribbons and
netting and sequins.  Wearing them made them part of me; I had no
objections.  Other people wanting to take a part of this from me to
share it was another matter altogether.

I remember the low cyclone fencing outside the weatherboard hag in
which I was to give one of my first and last public performances for a
long time.  I remember the dirt path that had worn down in the middle
of the grass strip we were walking along.  It was probably a driveway,
but this was how I saw things: bit by bit, a string of pieces strung
together.

We went up a few steps and through the double wooden doors.  I was
captured by the room, by the wood and by the smoothness of the floor.

My mother was probably fantasizing about how much she had longed to be
in my shoes when she was a child.

MY MOTHER WAS the second of nine children, and the second daughter.

Her family was poor, and instead of distributing what little extras
they got among all of the children, the eldest daughter seemed to get
it all.

The Salvation Army entertained the others while the eldest daughter got
dolls, pretty clothes, and dancing lessons.  My mother had watched her
older sister in hate and awe.  She gave up competing and tried for the
role of the eldest boy and won it.  It was not as glorious, not as
glamorous, and built little sense of self-worth, but it gave her
position and the satisfaction of violently thumping her older sister
and the friends she never made.

My mother's sister thrived on the attention she got, becoming
charismatic and a charmer.  Ulfimtely she paid in guilt and shame,
reaching out for forgiveness from her younger sister, who greeted this
with the same amount of mercy she got from me: none.

INSIDE THE PERFORMANCE hall it seemed that there were children
everywhere.  Pink arms and legs protruded from torsos clad in
Willoughby Dancing School black leotards.  The rowdy rabble began to
subside as the sharpness of the instructor's voice broke through.

The children lined up to form a big square.  "Eyes to the front."

"No, you move over to the left."

"No, not right, left."

"Look, you stand here."  Helpful invasive arms, instructing,
interfering.  Me looking at my feet.  The wafts were going up.

The music was a blur.  There was too much turmoil going on around me,
invading my space and invading my mind.  With clenched fists, I stamped
my foot and spat several times upon the floor.  "Take her out of here,
Mrs. Williams," said Mr. Willoughby, the teacher.  "I am afraid she
is not ready yet.  Bring her back in a couple of years."

Ashamed, my mother's dreams and hopes exploded in her own face.  I was
looking at the floor.  My arm was being tugged violently.  I was
looking up.

Words poured out of her mouth, the tone was deadly.  "That's it.

You're going to a home."

The hysterics went on in my head and probably spewed forth into the
car, though I was not aware.  Willie never made it as a ballerina.

My mother began to see me, not as herself anymore, but as her spoiled
sister.  I became "Marion," and as if to stress her hatred, this came
to be "Maggots."

I see that girl in the mirror, looking bac4k at me.

I see her thinking I am crazy for believing I am free.

Yet I can see it in her eyes that as I am staring, She is trying to
understand that I am not lying, I am just trying to find my uvy back
home to ?the.

There was a park at the end of our street, and there were roses on the
way.

There were houses, and every one of them had a special name.  The house
on the end was the "Rose House."

I'd leave the house in the early dawn and go exploring.  I'd watch the
fish in Mr. Smith's fish pond, peer though the glass doors at the back
of the rose lady's house, dance in their gardens singing songs or
reciting poems I'd picked up.  I'd throw the rose lady's rose petals
high into the air and walk through them as though they were the stars
around my bed.  Perhaps I was an angel to watch, but I was a devil to
try to be with.  The rose lady never told me off for the roses.

Someone once commented on my singing.  I then stopped singing in front
of people, although I didn't realize for many years that they could
sill hear me even if I couldn't see them.

THE Park WAs a magical place.  I would lie in the middle of the seesaw,
making it tip up and down.  On the swing I could make my neighbor
Lina's backyard appear and disappear, which made me laugh.  Sometimes
Lina would come outside and see me.  She would come to the park or ask
me to come over.  I would laugh and keep swinging higher and higher.

Look, no one can touch me.

Lina and her mother spoke only Italian to each other, and I loved to
hear her and her mother talk.  They had gentle voices; even when
authoritative they didn't sound hard.

I loved the smell of their house, and there were so many things to see
and to see through.  Crystal glasses lined polished streaky teak
cabinets and stood upon mirrored shelves as though, deservedly, they
were on stage.  The floor was smooth and shiny like silk.  It looked
good enough to eat.  Everything seemed nice to touch.  I'd rub my cheek
against the curtains, the cabinets, the seat covers, and the glass
door.

Lina's mother thought I was beautiful and fed me pieces of squid.  I
liked pieces of squid because I liked Lina's mother.  And when she
would laugh her eyes would dance and her whole body seemed to roll with
the laugh.

I liked Lina.  She had an older brother who was a bully.  I understood
that.

Lina's mother asked what had happened to her potted plants; they had
bites taken out of them.  I turned my head away and tried not to
laugh.

"Did you do that?"  gestured Lina.  I looked into her eyes, and my eyes
didn't he.

My FAvoRm TnE lived in the park.  I would dimb it and hang upside down
by my knees and swing, usually from the highest branch I could find.

Sometimes I would sing, sometimes I would hum.  As long as everything
moved to the rhythm, I was happy.

Sometimes I would suddenly flip myself out of the tree in some dramatic
final swing.  I would let my legs go from the tree and go flying before
landing with a thud upon the ground.  Sometimes I would knock the wind
out of myself.

I'd often be scratched.  It made no difference.  I'd get to my feet and
continue on to the next adventure.  Mine was a rich world, but like
many rich people I was very alone.

One particular day, I was swinging from my tree.  A girl approached me
and began to talk to me as I swung.  Her name was Carol.  I guess I
looked quite strange to her, as I was wearing only my white smockhke
nightie, which was falling down over my head, leaving the rest of me
exposed.  My face must have shocked her even more, as I had painted it
with patterns using my mother's makeup.  I thought I was beautiful.  I
must have looked a mess.

I went with this giant of a girl.  I was fascinated by her animation,
though I hardly understood a word she said.  I heard words.  I probably
copied them.  But only her actions and their ability to capture me had
any significance, and as long as things were new to me I was
captured.

WE WENT TO Carol's house.  Her mother was shocked about the state of my
colorful face.  I was surp@ by her shock, I thought the colors were
delightful.  Carol and her mother were laughing at me.  People often
did in my presence.

Later people would say they were laughing with me, not at me, but I
wasn't laughing.  So I copied them, and made what they said correct.

Then they would laugh at my strange laugh, and I would laugh with them,
and they would think I was amused and amusing.  This proved useful when
I was older.  I'd get invited back again.  I was learning to perform.

Carol's mother got a washcloth and washed my face and hands.and legs.

There I was.  All brand-new, She placed a drink in front of me.  I
looked at it, waiting to be told what to do.  "You can drink it," said
a voice.  It was a sentence of words, a statement.  I looked at the
glass and at the mother and at the girl.  The girl, sitting across the
table, lifted her glass and drank.  I was her mirror.  I copied her.

"Where does she live?"  said a voice.

"I don't know.  I found her in the park," said another voice.

"I think you'd better take her back there," said the mother.

Fear came and took me away.  I stopped being there.

Carol took me by the hand.  She led me back to the park.  My eyes, like
a camera, captured the moment.  She lived in another world within that
house of hers.  I wanted so much to be a part of it.  I glared at
her-betrayed.  The world was throwing me out.

I had discovered choice.  I wanted to live in Carol's world, in Carol's
house.  "Where do you live?"  came her voice, as she slipped away from
my reality.  I screamed at her, I screamed inside with frustration.  No
sound came out.

I watched the person who had been Carol wave goodbye and say words.

For many years, I wondered if she was real, for nobody had, till then,
so totally held me within "the world."  This stranger, who I only ever
met once, was to change my life.  She became "the girl in the
mirror."

Later I became Carol.

As I got older, I would compulsively bring home kitten after kitten,
reenacting the way Carol had taken me home, and I would wait and wonder
when my mother would become Carol's mother.  She never did.

I FINALLY GAVE up waiting for Carol to come back to the park.  I didn't
want to swing from my tree anymore.  It hurt too much.  I began to
spend almost all of my time looking in the mirror.

here was a long mirror in my bedroom.  In its reflection I could see my
brother's bedroom door.  My brother never came through this door.  I
assume that he either didn't sleep in there or that he made his way out
through the other door, leading out onto the back porch.  Had he come
in there, I'm sure I would have screamed.  My room was my world; my
mother, though unwanted and uninvited, was the only intruder whose
presence was tolerated.

In the day I wanted the door shut.  In the night I wanted it open, to
keep an eye on anything that might enter.  Carol came in through the
mirror.

Carol looked just like me, but the look in her eyes betrayed her
identity.

It was Carol an right.  I began to talk to her, and she copied me.  I
was angry.  I didn't expect her to do that.  My expression asked her
why, and hers asked me.  I figured that the answer was a secret.

I decided that Carol understood that no one else was allowed to see me
communicating with her and that this was her way of protecting me.  I
began to whisper to her, putting my face very close to hers and
wondering why she didn't Turn to hear.

When I was not in front of the mirror, Carol would disappear.  I would
feel deserted.  When I walked in front of it, she would come back, and
I'd try to look behind the mirror to find if she had gone through the
door that I could see in the background.  It wasn't the door to my
brother's room after all.  It was Carol's house!  The room I saw her
in, in the mirror, was only a room between her world and mine.

Now I understood the secret.  If I could get through that room, I could
leave with her, into her world.  The only problem was how to get into
the mirror.

I had realized that I had to walk straight into the mirror if I was
ever to get into that room.  For the next four years I tried.  I would
walk straight into it and wonder why I couldn't get through.

The anxiety of my inner battle was becoming unbearable.  I could say
words but I wanted to communicate.  I wanted to express something.  I
wanted to let something out.  The anxiety would have been so easy to
give in to; whereby I would again lose all awareness of self and my
surroundings.

I would cry and look desperately into Carol's eyes in the mirror,
wanting to know the way out of my mental prison.  I began to hit myself
in frustrationslapping my own face, biting myself, and pulling out my
hair.  If my mother had not been so good at it, the abuse that I poured
out on myself would have put her efforts to shame.

I had problems with people coming near me.  I would flinch and move
away.

My father blamed my mother.  My mother blamed her treatment of me on my
behavior.  My older brother, becoming more and more fed up with me,
called me a spastic.  I mirrored his obscene impersonations.  Slap.  I
learned not to respond at all.

I eventually believed that it was the resistance I felt just before
hitting the mirror that had stopped me from getting into Carol's
world.

I realize in retrospect how true this was.  It was certainly some
uncontrollable inner resistance that was stopping me from getting into
the world in general.

I n to sit in a u a insi e tie cu would close my eyes and try hard to
lose all sensation of my own existence so that I could get into Carol's
world in my mind.  I became angry at any need to go to the toilet or
eat, or any call to participate in the family (by fetching things,
which was my main household role).  In short my humanness, my mere
physical existence, was my fading.

IN THE DA s of that cupboard I found Carol within myself.

Carol was everything that people liked.  Carol laughed a lot.  Carol
made friends.  Carol brought things home.  Carol had a mother.

To my mother's delight, Carol could act relatively normal.  Smiling,
sociable, giggly, she made the perfect dancing dolly, just in time to
make Mr. Wflloughby's prediction true: "Bring her back in a couple of
years.  She'll be ready then."

In the meantime, unable to accept that "the world" had won a round,
Donna had disappeared.  I was by that time five years old.

I hated calling anyone else by name, including myself.  I never told
them that I believed my name was Carol and that they were playing
characters she met.  Fear of betraying the secret was fear of losing
the grip on Carol's world.  It was that grip that was my only way out
of my inner prison.  I had created an ego detached from the self, which
was still shackled by crippled emotions.  It became more than an act.

It became my life, and as I had to reject all acknowledgment of an
emotional self, I had to reject all acknowledgment of Donna.  I
eventually lost Donna and became trapped in a new way.  Carol strove
for the unacceptable: social acceptance.  In doing so, Carol took the
stage.  WiRie, my other face to the world and the embodiment of total
self-control, sat immobilized in the audience.  Donna was still in the
cupboard.  When I was twenty-two, in search of myself, I again got into
that cupboard and closed the door.

Staring into nothingness since time began, There and yet not there she
stood.

In a uvrld of dreams, shadows, and fantasy, Nothing more complex than
color and indistinguishible sound.

With the look of an angel no doubt, But also without the ability to or
Feel anything more complex than the sensation of cat's fur Against her
face.

Before Carol came along, I was sent to a special school.

I was three years old, in my prim and proper school uniform-blue
checkered dress, navy blazer, always buttoned up to keep me in.

I loved the heavy oak doors of the school church, the polished floors,
the colored glass up so high.  I loved the way it all smelled and the
trees that hung over into the playground.  I loved cream buns at
recess.  I loved my metal school badge, which was sewn on to my
blazer.

Twentythree years later, I still have it.  I take it out from one of my
many tins of treasures and bring back this school as though it were
yesterday.  Such treasures were the keys to myself, and God help anyone
who touched them.

This was a private school with a reputation for good oneto-one
attention and a policy of taking "special needs" children.  Most of the
children were older than I was.  They were generally quieter and less
invasive than other children.

It was thought that I was clever, yet I often didn't understand what
was said to me.  Although I was intelligent, I seemed to lack sense.

Instead of talking with people, I would merely mimic them and talk
endlessly over the top of their voices as though t -us su @ I or
conversation.

I learned to enjoy doing things at the special school.  The teacher
would take us into the school church.  A huge sheet of paper would be
placed oia the:floor.  Though I ignored them, there would be one child
on either side of me, -all working on the paper.

We each had a pencil and would draw until finally I would look up at
the face that was joined to the hand that had drawn something into my
picture.  The teacher would try to make out figures from the huge
half@bbled masterpiece we had produced.

Sometimes, if I was interested in what the children in the classroom
were making, I would be given some scraps so I could make my own
artwork.  Such things frustrated me.  I didn't mind drawing but I hated
trying to put things together to produce people and the like.  I would
spend my time making miniature worlds, full of bits of colored things
and fluff and things that I might get under or climb over if I could
somehow get myself into that tiny place.  I'd put my face down at the
level of my masterpiece, looking into it rather than at it, like a cat
peering into a mouse-hole.

I never liked to sit on chairs.  I had restless legs I couldn't keep
still.  I liked to feel the ground underneath me.  The more of me that
was on it, the better.  But one day I got up onto the seat next to a
big girl who was making a person out of a cardboard cone and paper.  I
was intrigued by her hair, which was pulled back into a long plait.  I
ran my hand down her plait.  She looked around at me, and I was
frightened by the way that her face was joined to her hair.  I had
wanted to touch her hair, not her.  She told me that her name was
E@beth.  It was the first time that I could remember reaching out to
touch someone gently, even if it was only her hair.

My mother would pick me up from the special school.  I would always
wave goodbye to the building.  One day I waved goodbye to it for
good.

I'm told that a girl with cerebral palsy had hit me on the head with a
rock.  Perhaps she did.  I was so oblivious to anything that didn't
intrigue or disturb me that I didn't notice.  It certainly didn't hurt
my feelings, physical or otherwise.

By the time I had left this special school, I had begun to become
Carol.

Carol spoke to people.  I learned to W& at people.  People probably
thought that the special school had done me some good.  It probably
had.  It certainly did me no harm.

I STARTED AT a regular primary school and took ballet classes at the
same time.  I had become very good at being told what to do, as this
was what people liked, and people liked Carol.  Being double-jointed, I
could tie myself up into knots, which made people laugh, impressed
them, and made my mother proud.

My mother had at last outdone her older sister.  She had a dancing
doli; her sister had only boys.  My mother would twist and pull and
damn near break my legs off, getting me to do the splits or bend over
backward.  My brother would enthusiastically hold one of my legs, and
as I lay on the floor they would make my limbs into the hands of a
human clock.  just like Carol, if they laughed, I laughed.  They must
have thought I was having a great time.  Not only did they have a
dancing doll; they now had a contortionist.  What talent, what ability,
what competition!  I became the prized showpiece.  Dance, little
dancing don.  By the age of eleven, I was on painkillers for
rheumatism, which I had developed in every joint of my body.  I would
grind my teeth and punch myself to kill the pain.  It felt like my
bones were scraping together.  I stayed on painkillers for years.  I
only danced until I was seven, and I never did learn left from right.

AT THIS PRIMARY school I learned to call myself mad.  In my search for
myself, when I was twenty-two, I returned to the house I had grown up
in.  The woman there showed me something she had discovered written on
the wall of my grandfather's shack.  I remembered when I had written
it.  It was after my grandfather died.

I was about six.  It read: "Donna is a nut."  Strangely, it took me
four more years to realize that normal children refer to themselves as
"I."

Whether other children considered themselves my friends was
irrelevant.

My first chosen school friend was Sandra.  I liked her smiling face,
and she had dark, shining hair.  She was a big girl and she was
jolly.

Other children teased her.  She became, in her words, my "best buddy,
old chum."

Other children played school, mothers and fathers, doctors and
nurses.

Other children skipped ropes and played with balls or swap-cards.  I
had swapcards.  I gave them away in order to make friends, before
learning that I was supposed to swap them, not give them away.

Sandra and I would play the same game every day.  She'd laugh, I'd
laugh, we'd laugh We'd sit side by side and scream in each other's
ear.

It made me laugh because it tickled, and I really didn't care what it
was that she was screaming.  She was the first person to play my
games.

Through playtime and lunchtime Sandra and I would drink as much water
as we could ' until we felt we would burst.  We'd choke ourselves until
we turned blue, coughing and struggling to breathe.  We would try to
push our eyes in, in order to see colors, and we would scream and
scream until our throats were red raw.

I thought this was great fun.  I had discovered that I could share
physical sensation.  In the company of others my senses would cut off,
and I would become so numb that, in order to experience something, I
had to push myself to extreme limits.

Then Sandra found another friend.  I called her fat; she called me
mad.

Together, she and her new friend tried to indude me.  I did not know
how to cope with having two friends at once.  I resolved the situation
by rejecting them both.

I often played alone, swinging on the monkey bars, looking at my cards,
climbing trees, pulling flowers apart, spinning around and around as I
stared up into the sun.  I would fall to the ground and watch the world
spin.  I was in love with life but I was terribly alone.

Other children were attracted to me.  They would watch me in
fascination, walking across the top of the monkey bars, swinging from a
tree branch thirty feet up; in short, doing "mad" things.

Though we went to the same school, my brother had nothing to do with
me.

Where he had once been protective towards me, I was now a nut, a
spastic, an embarrassment.  I really do not blame him.  Just as I lived
in my own world, he was doing fine in "the real world."

Classes seemed to be an extension of the playground, and the playground
seemed to be an extension of the classes.  The teacher soon learned not
to let me go to the toilet by myself, as I often wandered off and did
not come back.

I'd be out in the playground enjoying myself.  It seemed quite natural
to me that if I did not like something I could find a way to avoid
it.

Looking back, I can imagine how strange it was for my teacher to be
called out to the playground as one of her pupils was swinging and
singing "On Top of the World" as I hung by my knees from the top of one
of the school's highest trees.

On one occasion everyone had gathered down below me.

They shouted.  I sang louder and louder and swung higher and higher.

Finally I sensed their urgency and I got scared.  Fearfully I dimbed
down.  I still do not know if it was my actions that frightened me or
the fear that someone might come up and get me.  The teacher reassured
me that I was not in trouble.

Finally I came down.  In dreams I replayed that day of defeat many
times.

AFMR ONE WEEY.  at primary school I was taken out of my dass and, with
four other children, placed in a special class called the "Country
Infant Room."  We had been selected from various classes, and while
other classes changed rooms, pupils, and teachers each year, we were
stuck with one another for the next three years.  My teacher was a hard
woman, perhaps for the same reason as my mother.  She, too, was the
mother of an unusual child.

The children in this class had special treatment, of sorts.  Every so
often some of us would go to Psych and Guidance.  I remember very
little of this.  I remember the room, but the happenings obviously did
not interest me.

MY PROGREss AT school was not too bad.  I loved letters and learned
them quickly.

Fascinated by the way they fitted together into words, I learned those,
too.

My reading was very good, but I had merely found a more socially
acceptable way of listening to the sound of my 4own voice.  Though I
could read a story without difficulty, it was always the pictures from
which I understood the'chntentReading aloud, I would confidently
continue' despite mispronouncing or inverting some of the letters or
wards.  I would use different types of intonation to make the story
sound interesting, though I was merely experimenting with my own voice,
and my tone probably did not match the content of the story half the
time.

My spelling was quite good.  I had grasped phonetics well and had
memorized the difficult words, so I appeared to be quite clever.  My
handwriting was poor and, despite practice, always remained behind the
progress of the others year after year.

s for math, I would have done a lot better had my teacher given me
numbers instead of colored rods.  Each rod was a different color and
length, and represented a different number.  To me, they represented
building blocks, and I would stubbornly insist on building towers with
them, spiraling upward till only one of the smallest pieces would fit
on top.  Then I'd knock it down and start again.

Though I could add and subtract, I found fractions impossible.  The
concept of halves and quarters was lost on me.  I finally found a way
to understand them by some sort of translation via my understanding of
subtraction.  I may have found it hard to grasp complexities, but my
attempts were nothing if not complex.

As for participation, I participated too much but never in the right
ways.

I chattered incessantly to myself, annoying everyone else.  People said
that I simply loved the sound of my own voice.  They were probably
light.  I could sing, yet I would not sing with the others.  I would
mouth the words.  Ten years later I would sing in the back row of my
math class, but I never sang during music lessons.

SHELLY WAS IN my class.  Every year she'd have a birthday party, and
every year her mother would charitably invite me.

Kathleen was in one of the other classes.  Every year she'd tell me
that I was either tenth or fourth on the replacement list for her
birthday party.

Every year I would get my hopes up.  Every year Kathleen's friends
would show up and she'd need no replacements.

Kay was from my neighborhood.  She was probably the most popular girl
in our class.  She'd line up her friends and say: "You're my first best
friend; you're my second best.  . . ."  I was twenty-second.  A quiet
Yugoslavian girl was last.  I was pretty, I was cheerful and sometimes
I was entertaining, but I did not know how to play ufith children.  At
most, I knew how to create very simple games or adventures and
sometimes allowed others to participate, as long as it was totally on
my terms.

WHEN I WAS six my little brother was born Tom was unexpected,
especially in view of the fact that it was thoug that my mother could
have no more children.  Although I avoided looking at other people, I
would look into Tom's baby eyes with no hesitation.  I talked at him,
did magic tricks to entertain him, and tried to teach him how to
walk.

I felt he was on my side and, given his behavior, perhaps I sensed
something.

Tom was a headbanger.  His only solace seemed to be banging his head
against the wall.  When he wasn't doing this, he was tearing around the
house like a miniature tornado.

By the time Tom was two he could dismantle and demolish anything he
laid his hands on at a speed that would put some adults to shame.

Tom liked the games we played, spinning around and around, then falling
to the ground and watching the world spin.  He loved jumping on every
bed in the house with me.  Sometimes we would lie down headfirst and
come thumping down the stairs, the backs of our heads hitting every
step until we crashed to the bottom.  We would play with his blocks,
separating all the letters into categories.  And Tom loved jigsaw
puzzles.  He progressed so quickly through these that he was able to do
adult ones by the time he was four.

Tom spoke freely from an early age, though he spoke with a strange
pronunciation and accent and everyone was someone-or-other "boy."  I
was "Da boy"; even my father was "Arkie boy."  Though we were
Australian, my little broiler always sounded like a Scotsman who had
just gotten off the boat.

When Tom was two, he was seen by a psychiatrist, who said Tom was the
worst case of hyperactivity he had ever seen.  I thought he was quite
normal.

Later, he was found to be sensitive to the colorings and flavorings in
foods; allergic to yeast, and deficient in zinc.  Tom and I were both
given zinc.  The child care center refused to keep him, as he was too
much to handle.

Like me, Tom took to music like a maestro and, almost compulsively,
could teach himself anything to perfection, though he could not be
taught.  I thank God for Tom; though he escaped a lot of the abuse and
name-camng, he moved in my world.

I WAS SEVEN when we moved to the big house.  It was like a haunted
house when we first moved in.  (The previous occupant had died.) At the
new house Tom became haunted by two friends, which terrified him.

There was "Mr. Leg" and the "Big Ans," which was later "The Big
Hands."  It seems I'd told him they lived up the stairs to my room.

Although my little brother was my best friend, not even he had the
right to trespass or touch anything in or near my room.  Tom had to
pass the stairs to go to the bathroom.

His fear made this near impossible.

My mother turned this, her new prison, into a doll's house.  I lived in
the attic.  After the first few weeks in that house, they put bars on
the window.

It seemed I was to become the loony who lived in the attic.  I
certainly acted like one.  As I struggled year after year trying to
join "the world" and finding myself compelled to withdraw into my own,
I'd stand at the window, pushing my face into the bars and dropping
objects "to freedom," distraught if they landed in the gutter, yet glad
because no one would see them and know what I felt.  That summed up my
dilemma really; everything was a double bind.

AROUND THIS TimE I was again tested for partial deaffless, for although
I could speak I often didn't use language in the same way as others and
often got no meaning out of what was said to me.  Although words are
symbols, it would be misleading to say that I did not understand
symbols.  I had a whole system of relating that I considered "my
language."  It was other people who did not understand the symbolism I
used, and there was no way I could or was going to tell them what I
meant.  I developed a language of my own.  Everything I did, from
holding two fingers together to scrunching up my toes, had a meaning,
usually to do with ring myself that I was in control and no one could
reach me, wherever the hell I was.  Sometimes it had to do with telling
people how I felt, but it was so subtle it was often unnoticed or
simply taken to be some new quirk that "mad Donna" had thought up.

WHEN I mET Trish she was behind bars, too.  I had tried walking home
from school down Martin Street, but the trees frightened me.  They were
the type that dropped all of their leaves and stuck out of the ground
like huge knobbly hands with long, forbidding crooked fingers.  Even
without leaves, their character seemed to dominate the whole street so
that it always seemed to be full of shadows.  The footpath had
strangely laid-out paving stones, so that it took a lot of
concentration to make sure you did not step on any of the lines.  I
hated Martin Street.

I began to walk up Trish's street instead, and ended up doing so for
years.  There were houses with roses in Trish's street.  There was
always a trail of rose petals along the footpath after I'd walked
home.

One day I stopped and looked at some children behind bars.  They called
me over.  I asked why they were locked in.  I did not seem to realize
that they were simply in their grandmother's backyard, which just
happened to be dosed off by a tall, black cast-iron gate.

Trish had just moved to our school.  She was a quiet, shy, and gentle
girl with a very simple nature.  She was also the eldest of three
children.

Although I was always either indifferent or controlling, I felt secure
in the belief that Trish was my older sister.  We hung about together
at school.

I showed her how to rub her eyes and look into the sunlight to see
colors.  She shared her grandmother's marvelous homemade cakes and
found someone she could talk to.  Though I listened, I often did not
hear, but I liked Trish, so I'd look straight at her and she did not
seem to notice.  I was her best friend, and she became my proof that I
was capable of having one.

Mostly, we would ride bicycles, play in the park, play word games, and
talk about the things we would like to have.  I would sing and dance
and play with my shadow.  She would sit and watch me and laugh.  I
didn't mind.  I liked Trish.

I went to stay at Trish's place for a couple of weeks.  I had my little
suitcase, and Trish had loaned me one of her teddy bears.

The first night there we laughed and giggled and made up funny names
for things.  Trish's mother told us to go to sleep.  Trish -cuddled her
teddy, and I lay next to the one she had given me.

"I'm scared, Trish," I told her.  "I don't want to go home but I don't
want to stay here."  She offered to let me sleep in her bed.

People had long since given up trying to cuddle me, but I wanted to be
like Trish.  I got into Trish's bed as though I were her.  She cuddled
me like her teddy bear.  I was terrified.  It seemed tears were welling
up from a part of me long buried and forgotten.

We were two seven-year-old girls, one taking the comfort of hugging for
granted, the other rigidly tolerating it, finding it terrifying and
excluding.

Trish's mother came into the room to check on the sleeping girls.

"What are you two both doing in the same bed?  Come on Donna, back to
your own bed," she said.

"Good night," said a sleepy Trish.

"Good night," I echoed shakily.

For many years after that I had the habit of lifting the blankets and
inviting in any strangers my sleeping ears had heard enter my room.  I
had become Trish.

I lay back in my own bed in Trish's room on that occasion, trying to be
as neat as possible.  I had begun by neatly rearranging the bed around
my body, which I'd placed as perfectly in the middle as I could
esfimte.  I had my arms over the covers, rigidly by my sides; a perfect
picture of "neat."

I decided that I was taking up too much space in the bed.  I moved
myself over to the side of the bed and eventually got down into the
tucked-in blankets, as though I were a piece of clothing that needed
hanging up.

I was making too much mess.  I got out of bed and sat on the side of
it.

I was taking up too much space.  I sat on the tiniest edge of the end
corner.  I looked untidy in my nightie; I had to get dressed.  I
dressed myself for the next day, looking at the venetian blinds in the
darkness, hoping the light would come soon.

The clothes I'd brought were not neat enough.  I folded them all,
trying to be as silent as possible, and repacked my case, placing it
next to my legs, which dangled to the floor at the corner of the bed.

I looked at Trish and wished that she was like me, and then I wished so
much that I was like her.

Tears rolled silently down my face as I watched her sleep.  The room
was silent.  Inside I was screaming loud enough to wake the dead.

Trish's mother entered the room.

"Donna, is that you?  What on earth are you doing?  You silly girl.

What's wrong?  Come on, hop back into bed.  Why were you sitting
there?"  she said.

"I don't want to go home," I said in a whisper.

"You don't have to," said Trish's mother.

"I don't want to stay here," I whispered.

"Where do you want to go?"  said Trish's mother.

"I want to go," I repeated.

"You can't go, Donna; there is nowhere to go," she explained.

"Nowhere to go, nowhere to go, nowhere to go," I said over and over in
my head, trying to understand the words, which my feelings obviously
did not acknowledge Trish's mother helped me to get back into my
nightie.  I complied like a robot, hypnotized by my mind's repetition
of the words "nowhere to go."  if anything I'd ever heard summed up the
nature of the trap I was in, those words captured it like
Shakespeare.

Trish slowly disappeared from my awareness, but she became the cause of
a dream that was to be repeated over and over for the next fifteen
years.  When I was twenty-two, I still woke up terrified and frozen,
staring at the venetian blinds in my friend's room.  Such simple things
left such a long-term impact.

I had stayed away from home on many occasions by the time.1 was seven,
but never had it affected me so emotionally.  I'd been brutally exposed
to my own vulnerability in a world I found foreign and unreachable.  I
became angry at my innocence and nalvetls.  Willie took the stage as
the curtain went down on the first compromise I'd found between Donna
and Carol: the dancing doll.

TERRY LIVED AROUND the corner.  She was older than I was and she was
Italian.  I was eight.  She was ten.  I used to watc,h her.  She used
to watch me watching her.

I did not know how to make friends, so I would stand there calling this
girl every four-letter word I knew.  As my mother had a huge vocabulary
of swearwords, I did this pretty well.  Eventually this girl would take
to her feet and chase me for several blocks.  I'd always go away, and
I'd be back the next day to do it again.

One day she caught me.  She was about to "smash my face in" when she
decided at least to ask me why I had tormented her so persistently for
so long.

"I wanted to be your friend," I blurted out furiously.

"You're mad," she said with disgust.  "Why didn't you just try to talk,
like normal people?"  I was silent.

Knowing what I know now, I would have answered: "Because I'm not
'normal people."' We became best friends.

Terry was into smoking, learning new swearwords, and talking about
boys, and was interested in my brother.  I wanted somewhere to go,
something to do, and to be free of the painful accusation that I had no
friends.

She would take me to the Hogans'backyard.  They owned a wood-yard, and
we'd sit among the wood.  I was eight years old.  I coughed and choked
and learned to smoke cigarettes as I learned to be Terry.  Terry found
me amusing; I was probably the cheekiest and rudest child she'd ever
met.

My little brother and I went about swearing at, questioning, and
defying anything and everything.

Terry would go inside for lunch.  I'd sit, legs dangling into the
gutter, glaring defiantly at her house from across the road.  I never
felt as though I was missing out on lunch, because I rarely felt
hunger.  The only thing I was missing was inclusion, and when I wanted
this I wanted it on my terms, so I could throw it away at some later
date, as though friendship was an apple gone bad.

I was as obsessive about my friendship with Terry as I was about any
friendship.  They were always exclusive and exeluding.  If other
children were included, I either took the stage or, most often, bowed
out.  Terry had become my entire world.  We spent almost every
available moment together, playing with her cats, collecting bits and
pieces from garbage collections, taking trams and buses out to explore
different suburbs.

Terry's mother liked me, and I was her daughter's excuse for getting
out of doing housework or looking after the younger children.  As I had
echoed English, so I echoed Italian.  Standing in the front yard of
their house I'd cheekily parrot the commands this mother gave her
children, with the mother's inflection and pronunciation.

AT HOME THERE was a constant war raging around me.  My father was
living in the fast lane, and every step he took in independence was
another footprint upon my mother's face.  It got worse when my father's
version of compromise was to set this fast lane on a collision course
with the front door Of our house, and the house became a hum of
constant drunken parties and the ensuing brawls.

I had alwa s accepted my mother's violence toward me.

y Somehow it did not seem to matter too much.  After all, it was only
my body.

Perhaps,in some ' perverse way these extremes were the only physical
ness, kindness, and affection terrified me or, at the very least, made
me very uncomfortable, My mother used to say: "If you really want to
hurt someone, be nice to them."  Perhaps she had learned that lesson
from watching the way it often affected me.  if this came from her own
experience, God help her.

I DECIDED TO go and live at Terry's house.  I would wait until about
one o'clock in the morning and then sneak out leaving the door unlocked
so that I could sneak back in by,about, six, before anyone woke up.

Around the corner at Terry's, I would creep quietly around the back,
where I would throw stones at her bedroom window as she'd shown me, and
she would let me in.  I'd climb up into the top bunk with her and,
secure with my chosen ten-year-old mother, I'd fall asleep.  Waking up
at dawn was no problem.  Quite the contrary, I always woke up at that
hour, and often still do.

One night Terry's mother was waiting to greet me at the back door.  I
was petrified.  :She looked terribly stern, and I thought she was going
to send me home.  Her daughter stood beside her looking guilty.  From
the Italian, her daughter translated: "My mother says that if you want
to come around here to sleep you must come at a decent hour so that you
will not wake the other children up."  I was over the moon.  I was so
excited that I could not sleep.

Heading out the door of my own place, I simply told my mother I would
be going around the corner to sleep.  Every few nights, however, I'd go
back to my parents' house and lay rigidly in bed in my pretty prison in
the attic and stare at the ceiling until my mind went to sleep.

Shattered dreams, broken glass, Echoes of a shattered past, Too many
names strewn about, The kind that one can live without.

They're the shadows here, within, That tear apart personality.

It is hard to say whether the violence of my family made me the way I
was.

What I do know is that I never replayed their violence over and over in
my mind until I was much older.

Though I was very much a part of it, it is hard to tell whether I
helped shape my family's situation or they helped to shape mine.  As a
child, the things that disturbed me, the events that shattered the
security of my little world and caused me to play them over and over
again in my mind, were events to do with the disturbing nature of that
which others take for granted: kindness, understanding, and love.

I could comprehend the actions of another person, particularly if they
were extreme, but I had trouble coping with "whole people"-their
motivations and expectations, particularly to do with giving and
receiving.

With violence, I knew where I stood.  To call it the result of "baser"
emotions must be true, for I certainly found it easier to grasp.

Niceness is far more subtle and confusing.  Most children learn to
welcome it and accept it.  By the time I realized it was there, it came
as a disruption that I was never quite prepared for.  Possibly such
preparation closes love out, but without it I'd panic and be in a state
of shock.  People would try to comfort me.  Comforting either annoyed
me or hurt me.  I guess I was not "most children."

WHEN I WAs aware enough of the world around me to notice my father's
violence, I found that it did hurt.  My father hardly ever laid a hand
on me, but I was very disturbed by the person I saw he could be.

The house seemed full of colors, and everything seemed to move too fast
to make out, but I would always make all the right moves.  I suppose
it's like a person in a state of shock who does not remember how, but
functions with great ability.  Perhaps this is comparable to where I
was most of the time.

MoTe than anything, I was torn apart by the terror and hysterics of the
person who could most get through to me: my little brother.  Regardless
of what else he'd do, the most disturbing thing was the noise and the
sound of smashing glass.

Colors and things and people would fly, doors would get kicked in, and
sometimes faces would, too.  But it was never "whole people," only
their pieces.  The pretty things that got smashed seemed to be a
greater tragedy than what was happening to the people.

Tom would scream.  His face my mirror, I'd scream.  No sound would come
out.  I'd pick up my little brother and get into the cupboard, my hands
over his mouth, my arms closing out the sound from his ears.  I'd feel
his tears and his runny nose on my hands.  My eyes were dry.  He made
me feel emotions and still had the decency to express them for me.

More than anything else, my little brother frightened me by making me
feel real.

Although there were similarities between us, Tom had only some of the
difficulties I had.  He had no trouble looking at people as long as he
could maintain his attention span long enough.  He had no aversion to
touch, and although very interested in bright color and music, he
wasn't obsessive about the surfaces of things, bright light, and
tinkling sounds like I was.  He didn't do the sort of things my older
brother called "spastic," and although his language was poorly
developed and unique, he addressed people directly for the few minutes
or so he stayed attentive.  At about three, he went from alternating
between a permanent smile and a grimace to having a range of
expressions.  With this came his ability to form attachment.

I began to reject Tom.  I had become his whole world.  Whenever I left
him, he would cling to my leg, crying: "No, Da.  No, Da.  Please don't
go."  I would keep walking, dragging him along like a sobbing
deadweight.

No matter what I said, he'd take it to heart.  Perhaps it was the first
time anyone had taken me seriously.

Tom began to sleep with the dog, a three-year-old boy curled up with
his bottle on a flea-ridden rug, with a male Great Dane for a mother.

It was as though I'd died.  Two years later the dog went.  It was as
though Tom died at the same time.

I DECIDED THAT I wanted to go to Terry's school.  I had no friends at
my own school and I felt Terry would always look after me.  I refused
to go to my usual school, and my mother had no choice but to send me
along with Taffy and the others if I was going to attend school at
all.

The classroom atmosphere at Terry's school was chillingly cold.  My
teacher was a knobbly, snapping old goblin who got very angry with me
and kept shouting that I was giving him ulcers.  He would make me stand
in the rubbish bin, and I would swear and he would throw pieces of
chalk at me.  The children in the class would laugh.  This time I
didn't.

Terry had her own group of friends and, being two years older than I
was, she had no intention of giving them up to hang around with "a
child."  I went around the school for weeks asking everyone I came
across if they were my friend.

"But I don't know you," most replied.

"But if you did," I would persist, "would you be my friend?"

Eventually I gave up and sat in a corner of the school ground, against
the back fence.  After a few months two girls decided they would let me
hang around with them.  The things they talked about bored me.  I
drifted away from them mentally, and soon they, too, drifted away from
me.  I fell into a deep depression that lasted about a year.

I returned TO my old school but hung about on the outside of any groups
that tried to involve me.  I stopped talking and laughing, and the
efforts to involve me only hurt me more, till I'd stand there with
tears silently rolling down my face.

At home I'd go up to my room and cry, saying over and over again: "I
want to die."

Terry came around to the house sporadically, and sometimes I'd go
around there, but I was becoming more and more distant and finding it
harder and harder to relate.

I had begun to walk about the house like something returned from the
deadshoulders hunched, head bent, eyes fixed at my feet wherever I
went.  People would ask me what was wrong.  I'd paint a smile across my
face and by to impersonate my version of happy.  "Nothing's wrong," I'd
tell them in as short an answer as possible.

At this point I was as fragile as I'd ever been.  If I had received a
lot of love and attention at that point, I would probably have felt
that it would kill me.

My mother tried, in the only way she knew.  She bought me things.  She
began to bring me home potted plants.  I would look at them and look at
them and wonder: Why?

She brought me home a budgerigar she had got at the market pet shop.

She told me that it was "spastic" and that it would not live long but
she thought I might like to have it until it died.

It certainly was deformed.  Its wings seemed somehow back to front.  It
could not fly, but could only hop; and, like she said, it died after a
few weeks.

Appropriately I cried.

She brought me home the prettiest thing I thought I had ever had.  It
was a mother-of-pearl china dish with a matching lid, upon which sat an
angel gazing into space.

She bought me a doll's pram.  I ventured outside my room with it,
dragging it repetitively up and down the stairs without much interest
in what I was doing.  I was acting normal, wasn't I?

My mother did not think so.  Furious, she came storming up the
stairs.

I stood watching her, terrified.  She picked up the lid to the colored
china dish and smashed it on the floor.  The angel lay scattered in
pieces.  My mother spat out words.  I was to be locked in my room
without anything but bread and water until she decided when I could
come out.  She left, slamming the door nearly off its hinges.

As if to prove the point, she returned with a jug of water and a
glass.

I lay facedown on my purple-colored bed in the violently purple-colored
room and screamed into my pillow, drowning out all the noise around
me.

My mother left without closing the door.

m I KNEW THAT My father had come home.  I had been listening to the
noises downstairs.  I figured that they were talking about me.

I knew my father would feel sorry for me.  I picked up a piece of
broken china from the floor and, through a misty wall of tears, cut
lines into my face in anger at the injustice of what had happened.  I
slashed my cheeks, my forehead, and my chin.  With nothing to lose, I
calmly walked downstairs to make my silent statement.  "Oh my God,"
said my mother, as though speaking some slow, deliberate line from a
horror film, "she's tucking mad."  The look on her face was one of
complete shock rather than concern.  I was, by this time, nine years
old and very close to being sent to a mental hospital.

Inside my head, what I was doing was completely sane.  I didn't know
how to cry out for understanding.  I Was lost and trapped, and I was
making a statement.  I think my mother at least understood the severity
of the situation; she gave up on the bread-and-water idea.

My father's eyes seemed to be crying out to reach me.  It seemed he
understood but, like me, either could not put it into words, was not
"allowed" to, or realized that some things are better expressed without
them.

I HAD A 10t Of COUSins, and we often stayed at each other's house.  I
liked a few of them, but I hated Michelle.  Nevertheless, Nhchelle
wanted to stay over, and I made no objections.

Michelle and Terry got along like a house on fire.  Not knowing how to
cope with more than one person at a time, I told them I wanted to be on
my own.

They went off to play.

I never spoke to Terry again.  She had been my only friend for over two
years, and as she stood there, asking me "Why?"  I stared back at her
blankly as though she was playing some curious scene from a silent
movie, the content of which was beyond my grasp.  "I don't understand
you," she said.  "What did I do wrong?"

A few years later Terry ended up working in the shop down the road.

When she spoke to me I still ignored her; when she looked at me I still
looked away.

"You're mad, you know that, Donna," she once said, trying to get a
reaction.  I looked up and glared viciously at her.

About a year later Terry's best friend was killed by a truck while
crossing the road with her.  Terry had watched her die.  She came
around to the house and told my mother as I stood nearby listening.

She was reaching out for a desperately needed friend.  I hadn't yet
found out how to give second chances or try again.

I ignored her.

Ten years after I'd first met Terry, as I was trying to piece my life
together, I arrived on her doorstep.  She greeted me and offered me her
friendship as though my ten years of silence had made no difference,
though she said: "You're the strangest person.  I've never met anyone
who ever did that.

One day you were talking to me; the next day it was as though we'd
never been friends.", She never knew how much I sometimes needed her,
or how important it was for me to close her out, and I never told
her.

I HAD BEGUN, long ago, to plan leaving home for good.  I thought that I
would live in the lane behind our house, where I would sleep in the
long grass and live on the plums that hung over the fences.  I still
felt responsible for my little brother and I began to prepare him for
when I left for good.

I began to tuck Tom into bed and tell him stories.  The stories I told
him, however, were not the fantasy stories children are usually told.

I presented him with situations he might face and how he could close
them out and avoid being affected by them.

I taught Tom about singing a tune over and over in his head, if what he
was hearing hurt.  I taught him about looking straight through people,
even if you had to look into their eyes to convince them you were
listening.  I taught him about jumping up and down as he recited things
in order to learn them, and I taught him about losing himself in the
spots.  We began with a dot on the wall and worked our way up.

Tom was probably relearning tactics he had already used.  He certainly
didn't find much of what I was teaching him very new.  Still, he was
learning how to cope.  In the meantime, through teaching him, I was
becoming more and more aware of my own type of behavior-why I did
things and what I got out of them.  I also told Tom that I'd be leaving
home one day.  He told my mother.

FOR THE LAST few years my mother ha not )een as systematically violent
as she had been before I started school.  However, the more she
realized that I intended to leave home, the more she tried to convince
me, not of her understanding, but of her power over me.

My mother was also becoming aware that I was approaching puberty, which
posed major problems for her ability to cope.

Every day she would either give me the graphic details about some
horrible experience she had had with men, tell me how she had been so o
a ving c , or tell me there was no way I was going anywhere; she would
keep me at home as long as she liked.  Any defiance on my part, from
the way I stood to the look in my eyes, was met with violence, intended
to crush my will.  What had happened to her little dancing doll?

By THE TIME I'd returned to my old school, I was so withdrawn that I
had little idea of what was going on around me.  As I gradually
emerged, it was once again into a world of things.  I became fascinated
with words and books, and making outside order out of inner chaos.

There was only one thing that my mother and I would do together: play
Scrabble.  It was, I suppose, good for adding to my trivial collection
of words; words that sounded nice, words that I loved to say over and
over, words that belonged to brands of things.  The brand names became
their real names, not just the noun for what they were.

My mother used her understanding of words to read horrific murder
novels, which she would get through like lightning.  I used to read,
too.

I loved to read telephone books and street directories.

I eventually realized that I wasn't getting anything out of the novels
I was being made to read at school.  I could read them all fluently,
but I was unable to pick up what the book was about.  It was as though
the meaning got lost in the jumble of trivial words.  Like a person
learns to speed-read, I would read only the main words in any sentence,
and tried to let the feel of the book somehow wash over me.  It worked
to an extent.  Instead of reading a book thoroughly and gaining nothing
in terms of content, I was now able to scan one and be aware of the
names of some of the characters and some of the things that happened to
them.

It was as though, if I concentrated too hard, nothing would really sink
in.  Unless the task was something I had chosen, I would drift off, no
matter how hard I tried to be alert.  Anything I tried to learn, unless
it was something I sought and taught myself, closed me out and became
hard to comprehend, just like any other intrusion from "the world."

I LOVED TO COPY, create, and order things.  I loved our set of
encyclopedias.  They had letters and numbers on the side, and I was
always checking, to make sure they were in order or putting them that
way.  I was making order out of chaos.

I loved collections of things and would bring home library books on the
many different types of cats, birds, flowers, houses, works of art-in
fact anything that belonged to one My projects at school were like
this, too.  If we were, group.

for example, asked to write about cows, I'd produce a chart, complete
with detailed drawings, specifying every type of cow.  My interest may
have been repetitive and lacking in ativity, but I was taking a renewed
interest in my surroundings.  This was a phrase I always compared with
"waking from the dead."

Such tiny steps were always great achievements.

I HAD LEARNED how to make free telephone calls from the phone booth
around the corner and would systematically go through the telephone
book, phoning the first and last name listed under each letter.  I
would explain that I was phoning them because they were the first A,
last B, and so on.  Usually they would hang up; sometimes they would
tell me off; but, like anything, once I started I had to finish.  The
important thing was that I had moved from focusing on things to
communication with people.  The telephone booth was my conveniently
impersonal classroom.

Occasionally I would get some talkative old person on the phone and I
would chatter away like a firecracker gone off and they could hardly
get a word in edgewise.

I would also count the number of Browns listed in the hone book, or the
number of variations on a particular name, or the rarity of others.  I
was exploring the concept of consistency.

I would walk about the house proudly spouting my latest discovery in
the phone book.  I could not understand why such things bored people
stupid.  I guess they had already grasped the concept.

My fascination for street directories took on a new dimension.  I began
to bring home stray cats and kittens, just as Carol had brought me to
her house all those years ago.  I began to name them after the street
names I had liked in the index of the directory-Beckett after Beckett
Street, Dandy after Dandy Street.  It was important that I did this in
alphabetical order, as though mirroring my own systematic
self-development.  I was moving forward from things to communication to
attachment.

Though I could neither apply myself at school nor be told what to do, I
was motivated, persistent, orderly, and systematic about that which
might have held the attention of someone else for a few minutes at the
most.  It might have seemed that my world was upside down, but I needed
consistency.  The constant change of most things never seemed to give
me any chance to prepare myself for them.  Because of this I found
pleasure and comfort in doing the same things over and over again.

I ALWAYS LOVED the saying, "Stop the world, I want to get off."

Perhaps I'd been caught up in the spots and the stars at a time when
other children kept developing, and so, I had been left behind.  The
stress of trying to catch up and keep up often became too much, and I
found myself trying to slow everything down and take some time out.

Something would always call me back.

Perhaps it wasn't that I lacked the feeling of hunger, or needing to go
to the toilet, or needing to sleep.  Perhaps my preoccupation with
remaining a step away from full consciousness made it necessary for my
mind to deny the awareness of these needs; certainly I would ignore the
signs -feeling faint, anxious, or grumpy-always too busy to stop for
such things.

Though the feeling that precipitated my "losing myself" was most often
beyond my control, I found I could either e in to it or try to fight
it.  It was hypnotic, and I often giv found myself giving in to it and
sometimes sought the feeling when it wasn't there.  It was as though I
was hooked on this state of being.

One of the ways of making things seem to slow down was to blink or to
turn the lights on and off really fast.  If you blinked really fast,
people behaved like in old frame-by-frame movies; you got the effect of
strobe lights without the control being taken out of your hands.

If anything, my blinking was sometimes a reaction to sound.  If the
tone of someone's voice disturbed.me, off I would go.  Similarly I
would Turn the sound up and down on the telivision, rea up people's
voices ut to watch the picture, or intermittently block my ears off.

This seemed to imitate the difficulty I sometimes had hearing people
consistently.

I talked compulsively when I was nervous.  I also talked to myself
sometimes.  One reason for this was that I felt so deaf When I said
nothing.

Itwas as though my senses only functioned consistently when I moved
within my own world, and that meant closing others out.  Years later, I
had my hearing tested again.

At the time, it was found that my hearing was better than average, and
I was able to hear some frequencies that only animals normally hear.

The problem with my hearing was obviously one of a fluctuation in the
awareness of sound.

It was as though awareness were a puppet, the strings of which were set
firmly in the hands of emotional stress.

One sound, however, that I loved to hear was the sound of anything
metallic.  Unfortunately for my mother, our doorbell fell into this
category, and I spent ages obsessively ringing the doorbell.  After I
had copped a bashing for this, they took out the batteries.  However,
an obsession is an obsession.  I took the backing plate off the
doorbell and continued to set it off manually from inside the door.

m I HAD BEGUN to feel something was missing but I did not know what it
was.  I had a doll and wanted very much to cut it open to see if it had
any feelings inside.

I took a knife and tried to pry it open but became afraid of the
consequences of breaking the doli and simply went on wondering for the
next few years.

I was sure that I had feelings, but they did not seem to make the jump
in my communication with others.  I began to become increasingly
frustrated, violent, and self-destructive.  This was made worse by
expectations for me to behave like a young lady.  The world around me
was becoming as unforgiving and intolerant as my mother.

I would talk and talk, regardless of whether any of my classmates was
listening or not.  The teacher would get louder, and so would I. She
would send me to stand outside the dassroom.  I would go for a walk.

She would tell me to stand in the corner.  I would spit and shout:
"No!"

She would try to come near me.  I would arm myself with a chair like
some sort of wild animal.  She would shout.  I would bring the chair
crashing down or throw it across the room.  I was no young lady.

AT HOME I'D begun to have night terrors.  I would be sleepwalking and
wake up in another part of the house, hiding from something in the room
that only my sleeping mind had seen.

I once woke up after being bitten by a beautiful blue-eyed kitten that
had suddenly turned into a rat as I went to pat it.  I had, during the
nightmare, gone downstairs and played the scene in the living room,
before waking up as I switched on the light.  I stood there screaming
as the blood dripped from my hand; then, like magic, it disappeared and
everything in the room changed back to how it was in reality.

Another night I woke up standing in the wardrobe doorway, rigid with
horror, glaring at a doll that had suddenly returned to normal.

Seconds before, I had seen it come to life, hands outstretched, its
lips eerily mouthing words I could not hear, like some scene from a
macabre horror film.

I had become literally terrified of falling asleep.  I would wait until
everyone was asleep and then, frightening as my mother had become, I
would go into her room and stand there watching her sleep, feeling
secure in the knowledge that if anything was to get me it would have to
get her, too, and she knew how to fight.  From sheer tiredness, I began
to hallucinate.  Images on the walls would move.  Unknown to my mother,
I lay still and silent under her bed, almost too afraid to breathe.

Tears rolled down my face.  I made no sound.  Like at Trish's house
four years earlier, I lay there in silence and waited for the fight to
come.

IT WAS my last year in primary school.  I was twelve years old.  It was
the seventies, and my new teacher was something of a hippie.  His face
seemed to peep out from a bush of bristly hair.  He was tall and gangly
with a gentle voice that seemed somehow "predictable."

Mr. Reynolds was fairly "alternative," I suppose.  He brought in
records and asked us to ten him what we thought the music and songs
were saying to us.

What I liked, most of all, was that there were no wrong answers.

Everything was supposed to be only whatever it was to each child.

We would put on plays, and everyone got to do bits of whatever they
chose to do-setting up props, painting scenery, or trying different
parts.  Even the audience was made to feel that they had a role to
play.

Mr. Reynolds never emphasized ability, but instead allowed me to show
him what I was capable of, and he would tell me which things I did
better than others.  It was as though the class was his family and he
had, for me, become new father.

MY This teacher spent a lot of time with me, trying to understand how I
felt and why I did the things I did.  Even when he raised his voice, I
could still sense his gentleness.  He was the first teacher at that
school to whom I had made an effort to explain what was happening at
home, though I still never discussed what was happening within
myself.

His mood never changed.  He never seemed to betray my trust.

It was the hardest school year I had had up until then.  I already had
quite a reputation as a weirdo, and after standing up for two other
loners who were being attacked, I found myself in the line of fire.

SARA WAS FRom England.  She had the brightest red hair I had ever seen,
and nobody could understand a word she said, which was nothing new to
me.  Sara's cousin would not play with her as she already had a best
friend and probably did not want to be brought down by playing with
someone the other children rejected.

At the same time a new boy joined our class.  He was tall and scrawny,
quiet, withdrawn, and looked a bit haunted.  The other children began
to call both of these children "Zombie."  Neither had any fight in
them, and I, able to identify with how it felt to be tormented, decided
that I was going to be on their side.

The name-calling, got out of hand.  Perhaps such things had always been
happening around me, but this was the first time I was aware of them.

Other children in my, class had begun to call me "Zombie," too, pushing
my sanity to the limit as they chanted it over and over again.

I watched the other children get violent with these two children,
puffing their hair, pushing, shoving, kicking, punching, all because
they were different.  I:began to fight back at some of them, trying to
kick people down stairs, hitting them with chairs, slamming fingers
under desktops, and becoming hard, quiet, and brooding.

As the school year ended, my attendance had been poor, as had my
concentration-as always.  Mr,.  Reynolds told 'me, defeatedly, that he
wondered if I had learned anything at all.  He explained how important
the final test was; it was to be the last test I would ever take at
this school.

THE PAPERS put in front of us.  My answers seemed to come from
nowhere.

I certainly had not studied for the test.

The test results were given out in alphabetical order a week later.

Christine was thought to be the smartest girl in the dass.  She got a
score of eighty-three.  A boy named Frank, whose last name began with
A, had the highest score read out so far, the prize for which was a
scholarship to continue on to secondary school at an expensive private
school.  Mr..  Reynolds got to the his and announced that he could not
believe it.  I bowed my head in shame, thhwng that I had not done very
well.  Mr. Reynolds announced to the dass that, contrary to all
expectation, I had a score of ninety-four.

My score was two points lower than Frank s, but I had achieved the
highest score for any girl in the school.  Frank went to the private
school.  I went on to be a high school dropout three years later.  In
the meantime, Mr. Reynolds stood there, pleased as Punch.  I had
proved that, regardless of whatever else I was, I was not a "retard."

In the last week of school, Mr. Reynolds announced that he was getting
married.  Something snapped I put my head into my desk and slammed the
lid down on my head again and again and again.

The room had become a jumble.  I was like a caged animal.  I wanted to
run.  I ended up in the nurse's office, where Mr. Reynolds explained
to me that his marriage did not mean we were losing him and that we
were all invited to the wedding and a big end-of-year party at his
house.

I went to the wedding.  I sat proudly in the it-ont row, oblivious to
the remarks that this was where the relatives were meant to sit.  I was
on my best behavior.  I sat on my own in that front row, said nothing,
and waved to my teacher as he took his vows.

I went to the party.  I hung in the background, too shy to take the
stage, and otherwise having no idea what to say.  I smiled and tried to
look like I was having fun.

On my last day at the school, a friend and I were hanging about in the
classroom while the other children were outside playing.  We looked in
the teacher's book, which Mr.  Reynolds had left sitting on his desk.

She read what he had written about her.  I looked up my name under W,
and a sentence jumped out at me from the page: "Donna Williams is a
disturbed child."

Mr.  Reynolds, who had been in the staff room next door, ?

@ i came in and caught us.  He was angry.

"What do you think you are doing?"  he demanded.

"Why did you write that about me?"  I asked.  "what do you mean I am
disturbed?"

"You had no right to be looking in that book," he retorted.

The report had, it seemed, come from Psych and Guidance.  I left that
school torn between resenting him and being confused about the me he
had been able to bring out.

IT SEEMED mAT the older I got, the more obvious it became that I had
trouble communicating, or perhaps I was just becoming more aware of
people's often "concerned" remarks.

When I was in a talkative mood, I would often talk on and on about
something that interested me.  The older I got, the more interested I
became in things and the longer I would go on about them.  I really was
not interested in discussing anything; nor did I expect answers or
opinions from the other person, and I would often ignore them or talk
over them if they interrupted.

The only thing that was important to me was to talk in an effort to
answer my own questions, which I often did.

If I did not know something, I would either pretend I did or convince
myself that I did not care to know.  If I had to ask questions, it was
as though I did so to the air.  It had been this way for as long as I
could remember, and I started to become very frustrated, wanting to
know something but finding it was more of an obstacle to address
someone than the question was worth.

I deve,loped various methods of getting around this problem.  At school
I would walk in front of someone to get their attention and then simply
begin to speak on the subject I was concerned about, usually without
lattin them know why I was talking about something; that would have
been too direct.  People often ignored my chatter, thinking that I was
making a series of statements rather than asking questions in the only
way I could.  This was complicated, I suppose, by the fact that I
ignored or spoke over anything they said in response.  Nevertheless, it
was iznportant for me to know that they were listening, so I began to
open all of my sentences with "they" or "Y'know what?"  and to end them
with "You know?"

"right?"  or "okay?"  These idiosyncrasies became so predictable that
people would make fun of me, mockingly anticipating my usual beginnings
and endings.

It was the same at home.  My mother, knowing that it disturbed me,
would sarcastically make me call her "Mum."  Under threat of violence,
I would comply, forcing the word out with such hatred that it sounded
like I was swearing.  Eventually I would, at most, call her by her
first name.

Nevertheless, I wanted to know things.  I wanted to accumulate
knowledge.

I would walk about talking, trying to attract attention and going on
and on about something in a very indirect way.  My mother called my
means of verbal communication "wonking."  This was equivalent in
definition, I suppose, to "unintelligible, mindless babbling."

For me, this "wonking" was my way of conversing and was certainly not
mindless.  It took an incredible degree of courage to seek out an
audience and talk about something I was interested in.  To me, this
made me painfully vulnerable.  I was expressing something about my own
personality and identity.

The fear it inspired would simply not have allowed me to express
anything personal in any other way.

It was as though I had even to trick my own mind by chattering in such
a casual and blasL6 manner; any other way stopped at the point of
motivation.

It was as though I were emotionally constipated and the words could not
otherwise escape my lips.  If it were not for the methods I had
devised, my words, like my screams and so many of my sobs, would have
remained silent.

People would push me to get to the point.  When what I had to say was
negative, this was quite simple.  Opinions that had nothing to do with
my own identity or needs rolled off my tongue like wisecracks from a
stand-up comedian.

I remember, when I was about seven, how I got a slap in the face after
walking into someone's house and announcing, "It's very dirty in here,"
and following it up by enthusiastically informing the host that he
"only had one arm."  This was fairly typical of me, and I came to earn
myself a reputation as rude, hurtful, and outspoken.  Later this same
quality sometimes came to earn me respect as someone who was "never
afraid to say what she thinks."

Hiding behind the characters of Carol and Willie, I could say what I
thought, but the problem was that I could not say what I felt.  One
solution was to become cold and clinical about topics I might feel
something about.

Everyone does this to an extent, in order to cover up what they feel,
but I had actually to convince myself about things; it made me a shell
of a person.

These were the same tactics I employed when I found it necessary to
create Carol in order to communicate all those years ago.  Deep down,
Donna never learned to communicate.  Anything that I felt in the
present still had either to be denied or expressed in a form of
conversation others called waffling, chattering, babbling, or
"wonking."

I called it "talking in poetry."

I WAS rwELvE, and my mother and older brother had embarked on a new
campaign of systematically teasing me.  It began with them asking each
other "What did she say?"  at which the other would reply: "Don't
listen to her; she's wonking again."

They had thought up a new name for me.  I was now "a blonk."  This
meant that I was a moron.  My older brother, secure in the knowledge
that I dared not fight back against my mother's "pride and joy," would
bring his face close up to mine, tilting his head from side to side as
I did, and announce, "Wonk, wonk, blonk, blonk."  His proximity deeply
disturbed me, but now so did his words.  Perhaps this was because he
had invaded my personal space by putting his face so close to mine as
he said this.  Perhaps it was the way he mirrored my habit of tilting
my head from one side to the other when I was trying to understand
someone, OT the fact that he had employed my tactics of creating
"special" words.

Regardless of how, he had made me relate to what he had said; visibly
the words had stung.  My brother and mother, having got a reaction,
hurtfully persisted as I viciously retorted with "I'm not mad!"  till I
finally gave up entirely.

My mother said that I had changed when I was twelve.  Never before had
I had to fight so strongly for the comforts of my own world.  "The
world" still seemed like either a battlefield or a stage, but I was
forced to keep trying to "play the game," if for no other reason than
to survive.  I would have been happy to "let go" and retreat into my
own world if not for my belief that my mother and older brother seemed
to thrive on my strangeness and inability to cope.  My hatred and my
sense of injustice were my driving force to prove them wrong.  At the
same time, my fear of feeling kept calling me back into myself.  Both
drives were intense and had a shattering impact, both on the real
"feeling me" within and the characters whom I threw at those who tried
to reach me.

MY MOm HAD wanted to send me to a girls' school.  I insisted that I
wanted to go to a nixed school or nothing.  I went to; the mixed
school.

The high school I went to was a rough school in a fairly tough
suburb.

Expectations at the school were not high, and I didn't disappoint
them.

I was disruptive, bad-mannered, and uncooperative.  I fitted in well at
first.

When I first started at the school, like many other firstyear students
I had no friends.  It was not long before I attracted other loners.

One by one I'd fight with them and inevitably end up in a brawl.  I was
earning quite a reputation as a fighter and a troublemaker, which were
the main ingredients required to make one popular at this sort of
school.  Not only did I brawl with any friends I fell out with, I also
brawled with anyone who picked on me or anyone else I felt was getting
picked on.

Other rough kids thought I was wild and insane: swearing at the
teachers, throwing things, watching out of school, and destroying
almost anything I laid my hands on @-including myself.  I would try to
get others to try to shake their hands off their wrists or shake their
heads to hear their brains rattle.  I would hold my breath and tense up
my stomach muscles, exerbng inner pressure on myself, until I turned
red, shook, and fainted.  The other students laughed and called me
crazy.  The teacher thought I was badly disturbed.  I felt that I had
not asked for "their world," I had no desire to participate in it and,
if I had to, it would be on my terms; I was free either to walk out or
to disappear whenever I felt like it.

91

IN PARTICULAR, GYM class was bad news.  I hated being in teams or
taking sides or being told what to do.  Any efforts to make me toe the
line were met with thrown equipment, which could sometimes be
dangerous.

One teacher who was clearly ignorant of the depth of my problems once
decided to "teach me a lesson."

This teacher made me stay back in the changing room alone with her and
she ordered me to catch the cricket balls she threw at me viciously.

I had always been afraid to catch; I had been hit in the stomach by the
first one and then pelted as I ran away from the rest like the
frightened little girl that I truly was.  Her intolerance angered me,
the throwing of the balls frightened me, but strangely her violence
didn't hurt my feelings at the time.  Looking back, it almost does.

ART, porrERy, AND woodwork were a Catch-22.  I liked to make things but
didn't like to be shown how, let alone be shown what to make or allow
others to see it.

I liked music, but wouldn't sing; and even being there, given how much
I liked music, made me vulnerable and caused me to misbehave in order
to "break up" the class.

I learned to dislike math, as I had always done the working-out in my
head but was now being told to "Show the working-out."  I simply took
the answers out of the back of the book and transferred them onto the
paper as a compromise.

In English, I would write, though never on the prescribed topic.  I'd
spend the time writing evasively about something that disturbed me.

I'd write in such a way that it almost needed to be decoded to be
understood, and I would always finish my work off with a lightly
penciled sketch drawn over the writing, covering the length of the
page, which, I, felt, would more adequately capture what I was trying
to express.  The pictures, too, would often be no more than symbolic,
as I could never reveal anything too personal unless I could create
some sort of distance.

Awmu of How little I was able to show my true self, I insisted that my
name was not Donna anymore and that I was to be called Lee.  This was
to signify that people were not communicating with Donna, only with the
characters that I felt they were worthy of: my anger, embodied in
Willie, and my ability to perform and communicate, embodied in the
emotionless and empty shell I secretly called Carol.  Others were not
even worthy of my explanation, which I have kept secret from everyone
for twenty-three years.

Most of the children who knew me refused suddenly to call me Lee (which
was based on my middle name) and I refused cheekily to acknowledge
them.

Eventually I developed several nicknames, most of which I would answer
to.  As long as they did not insult me by calling me a name I could not
feel, I was happy to pay the price of answering to whatever other name
they thought up At home I would still spend hours in front of the
mirror, staring into my own eyes and whispering my.  name over and
over, sometimes trying to call myself back, at other times becoming
frightened at losing my sense of myself.

I was losing my ability to feel.  My own world may have been a void,
but losing my ability to keep a grip on it left me unmercifully in some
sort of limbo without any feeling or comfort whatsoever.  I, like so
many other "disturbed" people, began to hurt myself in order to feel
something.  It seemed that other people's "normality" was the road to
my insanity.  My ability to close them out kept me sane.

Feed the stray cats, but don't bring home stray children.

Stray cats can take care of themselves.

Pretend they're not there, just pretend you don't care, Leave stray
children to somebody else.

As I was losing myself, my mother was coming to life.  As I began to
mature physically, she was rediscovering her own sexuality.  My father
stayed away a lot, and my mother had discovered that she could be a
party animal.  She began to get in touch with friends from her teenage
years.

The house began to come alive to the sound of rock and roll, and the
last thing my mother wanted was a pretty teenage daughter with behavior
problems.

It seemed that there was no excuse.  As soon as I walked in the door,
home from school, I would be met with punches and kicks, hair-pulling
and harsh words of filth.  As always, I'd never scream.

I had a friend from school, whose family, like mine, was in pieces.

Sometimes I would go to stay at her house, sometimes I would be sent.

Sometimes I would not be allowed to stay, and my friend would try to
sneak me in.  One night I had to find a place to sleep for myself.

Another girl from school lived a few blocks away.  I had gone straight
around to her house when I found I had no place to stay.  I hardly knew
her, but she had taken one of the stray kittens that I'd brought home
and had been forced to find another home for before it got killed by my
mother.  I interrupted this girl's evening meal to ask her if she could
arrange to let me into her garage to sleep.

It was set.  I went to this girl's house at about nine P.m. I had been
walking around and around and around the street blocks in her
neighborhood to pass the time.  But the garage was locked and all the
lights were out.

I found an alleyway and, secure in the duffel coat I wore everywhere,
lay down and tried to sleep.  I heard the sound of footsteps and, like
lightning, took to my feet and bolted.  It was probably the motorcycle
policeman who had been following me as I walked around the streets.

I considered sleeping in an abandoned house across the road from my
friend's house.  But people had said it was haunted, and I was too
frightened to stay there.

I sat on my friend's neighbor's fence.  It was two o'clock in the
morning.

It was summer in Australia, and people often found it hard to sleep,
including twelve-year-old girls in duffel coats.

A woman walked across the lawn in the darkness toward me.  I got up to
run.

"It's okay," she called.  "I just want to talk to you."  She seemed so
terribly calm and invited me inside for a cup of tea.  In my mind, it
was the fantasy I had been awaiting for almost ten years; she was an
imaginary version of Carol's mother.

"It's two o'clock in the morning," she said casually.  "Would you like
some cereal?"  I accepted without a thankyou.  "Would you like to call
your mother and let her know where you are?"  she asked.

"She knows where I am," I replied.

"How could she know you're here?"  asked the lady.

"She thinks I am next door," I replied.  "My friend lives next door."

"Then, why aren't you there?"  she inquired.

"Didn't want me to stay," I said.

The lady said I was welcome to stay and showed me to a tiny little
green room with a tilted ceiling and a mirror on the wall.  I could
have stayed forever.  Embarrassed, I left the next morning and never
saw her again.

EvERy DAY I walked home from school through the cemetery.  This day I
had decided that I was not going to cry anymore when I got home.  I
would go through the door this time and I would look straight into my
mother's eyes and smile.

The greeting was the same.  This time my hair, enmeshed with her
fingers, was being torn out.  Time and again, -my head met the wall
with a thump.  I felt the stickiness of my own blood and hair upon my
forehead.  The hallway was becoming dark.  I looked straight up into my
mother's eyes, a painted smile stretched across my face.

A voice was pleading: "Please, leave her alone."

My mother's voice defeatedly commanded: "Why don't you just tucking
cry?"

My energy was gone.  I melted to the floor.

I woke up and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom.  The silence inside
my head was incredibly loud.  People came and went, ashamed.  No
doctors came.

Donna was back.  She stared vacantly at the ceiling.  Screamin&
shouting, people were afraid now.  Donna did not respond.  My older
brother, knocking on my forehead as though it were a door, demanded,
"Anybody home in there?"  I didn't care at all, nobody was going to
answer the door.  Hie, face in my face, up to his old tricks.  "Leave
her alone," said a voice.

At the table, I was looking at a plate of colors, a knife and fork in
my hands.  I looked through the plate of colors, and everything faded
out.  Hands disturbed my vision-a silver knife, a silver fork, cutting
up a color.

There was a piece of something sitting at the end of the silver fork.

It sat there very stfli- My eyes followed the piece from the fork to a
hand.

Frightened, I let my eyes follow the hand to an arm, which joined a
trunk, a head, a face.  My gaze fell upon the eyes, which looked back
at me with such desperation.  It was my father.  I retraced his arm,
his hand, the fork, the piece of color, then back again.  Silently
tears streamed down my face.  It was my grandfather an over again.  I
was back to two years old, and my grandfather was feeding me.  I ate
from the fork.

IT WAS DECIDED that I should stay in the country for a while.  The
three-hour trip up was in slow motion.  Everything was back in bits.

Everything was a captivating pattern of colors -green triangles, gold
squares, a blue into which I looked up and felt myself swimming.

I entered the country house, eyes glued to the floor.  It was like when
I was three; carpet seemed to go everywhere, stretching like a series
of long snakes.  There was a little girl in a high chair who caught my
attention.

Taking in only her size and shape, I thought, Good, my little brother
is here, too.

There was so much silence in my own head, and everything else seemed so
"external."  It all seemed a thousand miles away.

I walked; crunching sounds, happening beneath my feet, as I walked a
long line - I climbed; dirt and grass, m. y old friends, beneath my
hands and feet.  I swung up and down on a swing, head back, higher and
higher.  That's it; I'm going to fly A girl began to watch me.  Her
voice, so far away, I followed automatically.  My hand upon short,
light brown hair.  It moved away of its own accord.  Startled, I saw it
was a horse.

The little girl in the high chair chattered.  Her voice was light and
playful.  I tried to understand.  I came close up to her, listening to
the sound.  We began to talk to one another.

Interrupted.  An adult moving about.  An oven opening.  Cooking?  "Yes,
it's eel.  Have you ever had eel, Donna?"  My name struck me like a
slap in the face.  I went into the living room, sat on the couch, and
listened to music.

The room full of colors, music in my head.

I had some money.  I liked the lady in the house; I was going to buy
her something.  Stones crunching beneath my feet.  My hand clenched
around money.

Hand open, hand closed, hand open.  Look at the coins!  I could hear my
own voice inside my head giving me a running commentary and, in doing
so, calling me into awareness.  "What am I doing?  What am I doing?

What am I doing?"  All the sentences were becoming patterns of sound
again.  Was I talking?  Did anyone see my lips move?  Did any noise
come out?

I began to fall in love with life.  I loved the sky.  I loved the
ground.

I loved the trees, the grass, the flowers.  I loved the glass windows;
I waved hello to myself.  I could tug at my hair and feel something.  I
began to chew on my arm, tasting 60 the salt on my skin, and looking at
my freckles.  I was me.  I loved the silver legs of the high chair and
the laminated bench-tops; I'd put my face on them and even fick them.

I loved the floor and the roof and the doors.  I loved the little girl
who talked to me and her mother who had fed me eel.

My mother came to pick me up.  On the way back to our house, I watched
everything leave.  I watched the trees leave and the golden fields.  I
watched the road stretch on and on and on.

BACK IN my old attic room I spent all my time losing myself in the
pattern of the wallpaper.  I'd sit there even as night fell, silently
staring into the darkness.  When I needed to go to the toilet I'd get
up and take a few steps across the floor before going on the purple
carpet I hated so much.

As time went by I became more and more aware of myself through doing
this.  I'd watch a puddle form and giggle as it seeped into the
precious carpet.  Symbolically this was "my world" with a "me" in it.

The more I covered that carpet, the more of a "me" in the world there
was.  The smell didn't worry me.  The smell belonged to me and closed
out other things.  By the time my mother discovered what I'd done, my
purpose for doing this had already been achieved.  I'd called myself
back out of my body into my room-a room I'd made sure belonged to me.

One day my mother picked up the rug that covered the latest puddle.

Complete shock registered on her face and matched my own nauseating
fear that my world would be taken away for having been found.

Incredibly she left the room silently.

She returned to drag me off to the doctor.  She went in, and I sat in
the waiting room.  She returned, drove to the hardware store, and
bought a plastic potty.  "You'll go in this," she ordered.  My older
brother mocked and teased me.  Amazingly she told him to stop.  No one
was to talk of it, not then or ever.

They discussed what to do with the carpet that had for the last few
months been my urinal.  "Let her put up with it" was the first
solution.  It must have dawned on them that I wasn't too disturbed by
that.

They tore it up, and I had bare floorboards to dance and roller-skate
on.  The carpet and the behavior had gone.  I never used the plastic
potty; I went back to holding on and keeping control.

I WAs BORED.  I wanted to go to school.  It seemed that I had not
attended school for six months and things were not going to be that
easy.  My mother fabricated a story.  I was to learn that story and
learn to tell it.

My mother sent me into the prindpal's office with a note of
explanation.

It seemed that I was to be the daughter of a single mother who could
not be contacted as she worked every day to try to support my
three-year-old brother and me.

It seemed that we lived in a flat in the suburb next to the school and
I had the sole responsibility of looking after my little brother.  I
had recently arrived, so it seemed, from a school in another state,
which was going to send them my details.  I had apparently done well at
this school.

The real story was that I lived in a house three suburbs away, I had
two brothers, the younger of whom was now nine years old, and we lived
off whatever money my mother could get out of my father.  I had been
attending the local school three suburbs away in the same state, but I
had not attended for the last six months.  I had done very badly at
this last school.

m EVERY moRNiNG I had to catch a bus and tram for the long journey to
this new school.  It certainly was a new school.

There were shiny red banisters and curved tinted windows.

There were indoor carpeted staircases everywhere, and the whole place
was a mass of corridors; a puzzle in which you had to choose the right
decor.

I liked the banisters, which led to hallways with red doors running off
them.  I was constantly going into strange classrooms and sitting down
before being escorted out and pointed in the direction of my own
dass.

I was quiet and eerie.  I never understood what I was being asked to
do, so, sitting obediently in the classroom, I would draw pictures,
before tearing them into tiny pieces and creating piles with them on my
desk.  The teachers were fairly patient with me-or, at least, I cannot
remember that they interrupted me.  Perhaps they left me alone, like a
new student who needed time to settle in.  Perhaps they were simply
glad that I was not disruptive.

Perhaps they thought that I was backward.

On lunch breaks, I would wander through the school, watching the
various colors that disappeared under my feet, and I would stop
sometimes and stare at something for the entire break, like the
polished floor of the gym or the reflection in the curved tinted-glass
windows.  Other children disgustedly began to comment that I was mad.

I ignored them, choosing not even to look at them or even let it
register that I'd heard.  I'd heard it all before.

Another girl was said to smell.  Nobody wanted to know her.  She lived
in the council flats with her drunken father and had the responsibility
of looking after her three younger sisters.  I guess she thought I
could relate to her.

Her father was hard and violent and used to hit her.  I could relate to
that.

She was tough and a fighter.  I had, it seemed, lost all of my fight.

She began to fight people who teased me.  I never rejected her, and she
hung around, helping me find my way to classes, hopelessly trying again
and again to teach me to read the timetables.  For once I was allowing
other people to do all the talking.  If I replied at all, it was either
with "H'm" or in very short sentences.

I began to participate in art class.  I had a huge sheet of white paper
upon an easel and I painted a series of colored fluffy spots.  Somebody
asked what it was.  "Don't know," I replied.  I decided, after that,
that I would only draw in black and white; black on a white
background.

I began to draw stars everywhere and on everything.  My mind was
clearly back to when I was a baby, though I now had the ability to lash
out violently if anyone tried to get too near to me.  One day someone
at the school did.  I have no idea what they may have done or said, but
they had tried to get too near.  I picked up a chair and began to swing
it.  I was asked to leave the school.  I had lasted two weeks.

I ARMVED AT a new school one more suburb away.  This was to be my last
chance.  If I had trouble at this new school, I would be sent to a
children's home.  I was fourteen years old.

I tried to be as cooperative as possible, which meant that, instead of
lashing out at others so much, I would take it out on myself.

I had been put on painkillers for rheumatism, to be taken only when I
needed them.  The pain by now had become excruciating, and I would slam
myself side-on into the walls and knock my head against them in an
effort to ease the pain.

PainklUers hardly seemed to help at all, and I felt as though my bones
were grinding together in the same way that I would grind my teeth.  I
had also been put on "nerve tablets" by the local doctor, to calm me
down.  The doctor on the other corner of the street had given me
sleeping tablets, as I was still terrified of sleeping.  Instead of
taking any of these, I would store them up and take a handful of them
at a time when I had put up with more than I could take; then I'd
eventually find a place to sit, propped against a fence somewhere on my
own, and everything would disappear.

As before, I would swing between silent and vegetative, wild and
destructive, and just plain weird.  As I continued to slip back into
myself, I began to be quietly escorted out of class and sent to welfare
officers and sh@s, where I would sit and be observed as their words
went on and on, falling on my deaf ears in some sort of annoying
pattern of sounds.

All I ever remembered of such sessions was the beginning: "Come in,
Donna; we would like you to meet.  . . " It was just like my records
when I was little: "This is an original little long-playing
record....

We are going to begin now to read the story.... You can read along with
me in your book.... You will know it is time to Turn the page when
Tinker Bell rings her little bell like this....

Let's begin now.  . . ."  I don't think I was mad, but I was certainly
very distant and too far away to be reached.

m I WAS BEIN(; myself.  I had been sitting in class losing awareness of
everything around me as I stared into nothingness.  It was a reading
class, and I had my pen in my hand and had been staring straight ahead
in the direction of a piece of green chalk on the blackboard ledge.

My folder, the cover of which I had torn to shreds, had now been
painted by me in shiny household paint.  My hand was moving
mechanically back and forth as I stared straight ahead.

The teacher's voice had a tone of sympathy, and I panicked momentarily,
thinking that I must have been sick.

As I was lifted from my chair, I grabbed for my folder and found that
it had been carved almost in half and was covered in a mess of blue
ink, as was my hand.  My pen was merely a tube of clear plastic with
the rub hanging limply on the end of it and blue ink everywhere.

I was escorted to the assistant headmaster's office and placed in a
chair.

"What's your name?"  said an interrogating voice.  "Where do you
live?"

Mechanically I replied, stating my name and the address I'd been taught
to give.  "What's your name?  Where do you live?  What's your name?

Where do you live?  What's your name?  Where do you live?"  came the
echoing assault upon my ears.  I replied, in Turn, to each echo,
becoming faster and faster, building up to a crescendo before jumping
to my feet, grabbing the chair that I was sitting on and screaming:
"I'm not tucking mad!"

"It's all right Donna," came a voice.  "Would you like to come with
me?"  it said calmly.  I was led away to an office and given some paper
to draw on.

I was being treated well at this school.  They had stopped keeping me
in or giving me lines.  It was simple.  If I misbehaved beyond the
level of tolerability, I was escorted out to sit in the office again,
under observation, and if I aed I could draw.

I LIKED GOING to art class.  I began to play as though the whole room
were my toy chest.

In a dream state, I jumped from desktop to desktop, a chair raised
above my head, which I shook from side to side as though it were a pair
of maracas as I sang, first slowly and then fast, the song "I Go to
Rio."  I was putting myself, my words, steps, and actions, on speed 33
and then speed 78.  The rest of the class was in stitches.  They would
watch me, enthralled.  I really didn't care.  It was as though they
were in another world, looking at me having fun in my world under
glass.

Stella was one of the children watching.  She was Italian, with
bleached, cropped hair like cotton wool, and cartoonlike features.  She
had had a lot of behavior problems and had no hesitation in joining
me.

We did a duet around the room.  Like a sellout concert, the other
students went wild watching, and we became friends.  This girl was
intrigued by my "madness."  She admired the way that I didn't seem to
care what anyone thought of me and the way I stood up for myself when
people tried to stop me.  I also became her yardstick and an excuse for
her own bad behavior.  Truth be known, she led me into more mischief
and danger than I would have been likely to get into on my own.

I also made my own classes.  Often I found myself wandering out of the
school.

Each experience would lead to another.  Sometimes Stella would come
with me.  I was never going anywhere in particular, just going.  I'd
climb the stairs at the high-rise flats, play in the elevator, or try
to find how to get on the roof with every intention to jump off and
"fly."

Other times I'd walk into factories and explore the materials around
and sometimes ask people what they were making.  I played in car
washes, walked along endless railway tracks, rode on the back of trams,
and joined classes at other schools.  When I was approached or
challenged, I'd bolt.  I think I learned a lot about things this way.

My teachers in the meantime were often out looking for me-sometimes
even driving around the streets to catch me and bring me back.  I
wasn't behaving, however; if they'd found me and told me where to go,
I'd have followed.

AT HomE I became quiet, brooding, and intense.  I would walk up to the
faces of family members, lunge forward and weave my hands back and
forth in repetitive figure eights.  Slap!  came the response again and
again, and I smiled with every hit.  I worked especially hard on my
mother.  I tried to assert how completely in control I was.  She tried
to prove that someone like her could never have a "spastic" for a
daughter.  Eventually it was clear she was willing to play for the
ultimate stakes.  I decided my obsession wasn't worth the price.

I was riving as completely as I could within my own mind, and what I
did express I expressed in a very symbolic and disturbing manner.  I
decided to murder a part of myself.  As anger grew, this intemahzed
version of my mother threatened to shut me out from my inner self.  I
decided to kill Willie.

I had been given a small boy doll dressed in jeans and a shirt.  I
wound a scrap of red tartan around its body, which was the material my
grandmother had often worn.  I colored his eyes with green crayon so
that they glowed an iridescent bright green.

I found a small cardboard box and painted it black.  I waited until no
one was at home, then went outside to the fish pond and buried my
symbolic version of Willie in his black coffin, going to great lengths
to cover up any sign of the burial.  I went inside and wrote him an
epitaph: Let go, I say, my tear-soaked stranger.... I'm afraid that you
have drowned beneath the many dreams which did evade you and the many
stars so out of reach.  Let go, I say.  I must take over ... and perish
in a past of shadows, so that I may vvlk a stronger path.

Looking back, it was not a return to my nothingness that I sought.

This incident was an expression of my desire to overcome the conflicts
within that had made my world of nothingness so necessary.  The
conflict was caused, and always had been, by the necessity to give up
control and interact with others.

The more I tried, the worse became the conflict.  The more I kept to
myself, or kept others at a distance, the clearer things became.

AS ALWAYS, MY Motivation to interact was to prove my sanity and avoid
getting locked up in an institution.  My inability to maintain this
situation for any length of time was due to the state of mind of which
"my world" consisted.  In this hypnotic state, I could grasp;the depth
of the simplest of things; everything was reduced to colors, rhythms,
and sensations.  This state of mind held a comfort for me that I could
find nowhere else to the same degree.

People often asked me what drugs I was taking.  Ever since I was a
toddler my pupils had been huge and often made me actually look like I
was on drugs.

When I did take prescription drugs, it was more to provide me with an
excuse for my behavior or to intensify my already distant state of
awareness.  This state of mind was, I suppose, like some sort of
semiconsciousness, as though my body was awake but I was still
asleep.

When I gave up being aware of and responding to things around me, I
would return to this state and would only then feel I was being true to
my nature.  When I stayed aware and alert to what was happening around
me, it took a lot of energy and always felt like a battle.  I suppose
it appeared that way to others, too.

If I was like this because of brain damage, it did not affect my
intelligence, although it seemed that I lacked what is called "common
sense."

Anything I took in had to be deciphered as though it had to pass
through some sort of complicated checkpoint procedure.  Sometimes
people would have to:repeat a particular sentence several rimes or me,
as I would hear it in bits, and the way in which my mind had segmented
their sentence into words left me with a strange and sometimes
unintelligible message.  It was a bit like when someone plays around
with the volume switch on the TV.

Similarly my response to what people said to me would often be delayed
as my mind had to take time to sort out what they had said.  The more
stress I was under, the worse it me.

The significance of what people said to me, when it sank in as more
than just words, was always taken to apply only to that particular
moment or situation.  Thus, when I once received a serious lecture
about writing graffiti on Parliament House during a class trip, I
agreed that I'd never do this again and then, ten minutes later, was
caught outside writing different graffiti on the school wall.  To me, I
was not ignoring what I had been told, nor was I trying to be funny; I
had not done exactly the same thing as I had done before.

My behavior puzzled others, but theirs puzzled me, too.  It was not so
much that I had no regard for their rules as that I couldn't keep up
with the many rules for each specific situation.  I could put things
into categories, but this type of generalizing was very hard to
grasp.

Everything over which I did not have complete control (that which
occurred through the motivation of others) always took me by surprise,
often either shocking or confusing me.  It often felt like the effect
one gets in a 3-D movie where you duck and weave as everything seems to
be coming at you.  For me, life was a movie theater and my only means
of walking out was to close out anything else that was going to reach
out and affect me, particularly touch or affection.  just like in a 3-D
cinema, the things on the screen began to invade my world.  That which
was only a picture came to life.

This was the frightening reality of moving within "the world"; and, in
comparison, mine held a lot more comfort.  "My world" may have been
lonely but it was predictable and came with guarantees.

I don't feel that I was like this because of my home life, although
that was certainly not "normal."  I believe that I was like this
because of a constantly changing state of awareness.  My home life only
affected some of the forms that my behavior took, though not the
behavior itself.  I didn't close out the world because of the violence
so much as the violence was closed out because it was one of many parts
of "the world."

I HAD MADE friends with a girl named Robyn.  She was a new kid at
school and didn't have any friends yet.  I went home with her to her
house, which was a council flat not far from the school.  We sat
outside beneath a tree and called it "our tree."  We sang and danced
ULke a pair of overgrown fairies in the grasslands in the center of the
council estate.  She liked being made part of my world, and more
important, she didn't try to invite anyone else to join in.

Sitting beneath this tree, this first day, it began to get darker.  I
saw a man approach us who simply stood at a distance and waved.

"What's he waving at?"  I asked her.

"Who?"  she replied.

"That guy there, the old guy," I explained.

She could see no one, and asked what he looked like.  I explained,
describing his size and build, his stance, looks, and dress.

"That sounds like my grandfather," she said in surprise.

We went upstairs and she told her mother about what I had seen.  I
described the man again, and her mother agreed that it certainly did
sound like my friend's grandfather.  Three days later her grandfather
died.

At school strange things were happening.  I would have daydreams in
which I was watching children I knew.  I would see them doing the most
trivial of things: peeling potatoes over the sink, getting themselves a
peanut butter sandwich before going to bed.  Such daydreams were like
films in which I'd see a sequence of everyday events that really didn't
relate in any way to myself.

I began to test the truth of these daydreams, approaching the friends
I'd seen in them and asking them to give me a step-by-step detailed
picture of what they were doing at the time I had the daydream.

Amazingly, to the finest detail, I would find I had been right.  This
was nothing I had controlled, it simply came into my head, but it
frightened me.

MY ability TO "know" things fascinated my friend Robyn's mother, and I
became welcome to stay at their place, which eventually became my
second home.

The first night I stayed for tea, Robyn's mother was appaged.  "What on
earth do you think you're doing?"  she exclaimed as I scooped up my
mashed potatoes with my fingers and put them in my mouth.  "You'll eat
with a knife and fork, Missie," she said sternly.  I began to scoop up
my food, holding my fork like a shovel.  My friend's mother took my
plate away, saying: "You'll learn to eat properly or you won't eat at
all."

Although my mother had given me detailed eating, sn-dung, standing, and
manner lessons, they had generally been short-lived, so I, like my two
brothers, had always been allowed to eat like this.  None of us was
ever taken out anywhere (my mother hated going out to public places),
so it didn't seem to matter.  Nevertheless, this woman was not going to
be defeated and told me that, if I learned to eat properly, she would
take both me and her daughter out to a restaurant.  I learned to copy
them like a prize actress.

One thing that I couldn't learn was how to feel.  Robyn's mum would
always hug her before she went off to school, and she insisted on doing
this to me, too, "Come and get a hug," she said one morning after I'd
stayed the night there.

"I don't like to," I said.

"You're going to have to learn to," my friend's mum insisted.  "If
you're going to stay here, you will learn to do what my own daughter
does."

So every morning, like a rock, I learned to tolerate being hugged.  I
told my friend's mother that being hugged hurt me and that it felt like
I was being burned.  She insisted that this was nonsense, but that
didn't help the feeling go away.

At first my head would spin.  I felt that I was going to faint.  I
would only hug her when routine called for it; and in exchange I became
her "foster" daughter, with the packed chool lunches, the clothes, the
collection of school report cards, and eventually even a bed of my
own.

At first I had to share a bed with Robyn.  This was impossible, as I
could hardly sleep while I was trying to maintain the distance between
us.

Nevertheless, I felt quite close to my friend and began to tell her
about some of my problems.

They'd save scraps for the stray cats, And leave out the plate.

It'd always be empty the next day.

What she didn't finish, she'd leave for the cats, For she knew what it
felt like to live like a stray.

I always paid for closeness with fear and found that, although I did
not want to go home, I sometimes could not bear my growing emotional
dependence on Robyn and her mother.  Instead I would go across to the
other side of their suburb, hang about until the last tram had left and
then walk back in the dark to where my friend Stella lived.  I became
her alibi and her scapegoat.

Stella's mother said that I was evil and thought that I was a bad
influence on her daughter.  Her daughter no doubt encouraged this
impression by blaming my supposed example whenever she got caught for
doing anything.

Nevertheless, the daughter liked me and was always happy to be involved
in any new drama.

Stella arrived in a little terrace house, at the back of which was a
cobblestone alleyway.  I arranged with her to climb her back fence and
sleep in the tiny shack in the back of her yard.

In the early hours of the morning I would climb this tall
corrugated-iron fence, scramble over the roof of the shack, and let
myself in.  I'd snuggle in, next to her brother's greasy motorcycle
and, wrapped ly in the duffel coat that had become my mobile home, I'd
fall asleep.  Her parents kept bottles of homemade wine in this shack,
and sometimes, if I was cold, I'd smash the top off one of the bottles
and fall asleep drunk.  In the morning my friend would sometimes sneak
out with the scraps from the evening meal, which I was always grateful
to get.

I was beginning to look quite rough.  I never washed my coat and rarely
took it off.  If I did, I would place it beside me and take it with me
if I left the room.  My hair was often greasy, and I never brushed my
teeth.  I began to wash myself under the taps in the front yards of
people's houses.

My friend Robyn understood.  I had explained to her my need to
"disappear," and I was always welcome to stay whenever I wanted to.

Her mother made a point of tawng to me about the way I dressed and
spoke, and tried to teach me class and sophistication.  I liked her,
and I was a good student.  I stopped swearing and began to behave more
like a "lady"-at least, while I was there.  The duffel coat still
followed me everywhere and did for another eight years.

Robyn's mother had taken on a huge project when she took me in; but
away from her house not a lot had changed.

I may have been secretive and private but I was not sly or cunning.

Her rules, like all rules, only applied to the particular situation I
learned them in.

I certainly believed in the value of the things she had tried to teach
me, but everything I learned I learned for her.  I simply never
realized that such lessons had relevance for me.  Thus, no sooner was I
out of the door than my manners, stance, and means of communicating
went back to square one.

There were, however, a few exceptions.  Most important, Robyn's mother
was the only adult I would listen to about anything to do with my own
body.  She also taught me how to tolerate affection, proximity, and
concern.  I learned to trust Robyn enough to let her brush my hair and
tickle my feet and forearms, and this allowed me to experience the
pleasure and relaxation I could get from touch albeit in a very
primitive form.

The experiences I had gained from this family unit also helped me
several years later when I learned to reflect on what I had learned as
a means of mechanically constructing a more stable, presentable, and
sociable identity under the committed guidance of an equally invaluable
human being: my psychiatrist.

Every so often I would go home.  My mother had recently rented a piano,
and I loved the sound of anything that tinkled, and had since I was
very small.

I would string safety pins together and, when I wasn't chewing on them,
would have them in my ear.  Similarly I loved the sound of metal
scraping metal, and my two most favorite objects were a piece of cut
crystal and a tuning fork, which I carried with me for years.  When all
else failed, music could always make me feel.

I believe that I had always played music, even before I ever had the
use of an instrument.  I would create tunes in my head, and my fingers
would play the intervals.

My mother also had a passion for classical music and had decided to
teach herself to play.

As soon as I had noticed it, I was at the piano in a flash.  Within a
few minutes I was tapping out tunes I knew, and a little later I began
to make up tunes, playing them quite fluently.  It had occurred to me
at the time that this is what I had been doing with my fingers when I
had heard music in my head.

My mother had decided to hang about and watch me in her usual critical
way.  She sat down and showed me how she had learned to play some
pieces in a beginner's book she had bought herself.  She began to play,
slowly, with two hands.  I watched her and looked at the music.  She
explained how some of the notes went up and some of the notes went down
and that the distance between them ...

I was not interested in sheet music.  I began to hang about the house,
and when she was not around I would play the piano, though always
playing up in "the tinkles."

I had created a beautiful piece of music.  It was a classical waltz
with melody and accompaniment.  My mother walked into the room,
catching me by surprise.

"I know what this is," she said snarlingly"I made it up," I replied.

"No, you didn't," she retorted.  "That's Beethoven."

It was meant to be an insult, but she never knew how much she had
complimented me.  I guess I couldn't blame her for her jealousy.  It
seemed I had the Nhdas touch for all the things she so admired and at
which her sister so excelled: artistic and creative ability.

My mother satisfied her own insecurity by emphasizing that people who
played by ear could not learn to read music.  She began to take music
lessons and, in fierce competition with her daughter, who was in no way
trying to compete, she did extremely well.

As if to prove her point, she took me for an introductory music
lesson.

The woman teacher told me to forget entirely anything I "thought" I
knew about music.  She was there, it seemed, to undo such bad learning
habits and teach me the discipline of music "properly."

Predictably I would not follow the teacher's instructions and would not
cooperate.  Satisfied, my mother gloated viciously over my obvious
"failure."

Five years later I bought MY own piano and began to compose.

The piano had been my only renewed interest at home, but the jealousy
my playing had inspired again made life at home intolerable.  My
mother, however, began to phone me at my friend's house, commanding I
come home.  I'd travel several suburbs back home, she'd send me out to
the shop at the end of the street, then tell me I was free to return to
my friend's house.

ANY TIME I spent at home I spent in my room listening to records.  Like
so many other teenagers, I would Turn the record up as loud as
possible, sing at the top of my voice and play the same record over and
over again.

I had drawn spirals on all of my records and would sit watching these
wind themselves in.  At other times I would place objects on the
records, experimenting with the speed control until the objects would
go flying across the record and sometimes across the room.

Like at school, I would imitate my records, singing them at various
speeds.  When I was home, I was driving everybody mad.

My little brother would try to enter my room.  I'd almost scream the
house down.  My mother would come up and she'd scream the house down.

One day my father came up to try to talk to me.

It was the first time in my life that he had come into my room to talk
to me.  He tried to make conversation.  He asked me about the records I
was listening to.  I played some of the songs that had special meaning
for me.  I never explained why; this was one of the only real efforts
I'd made at trying to share how I felt with anyone in my family.

My father had all the right responses; he simply sat within my
presence, letting me show him how I felt in the only way I could-via
objects.  He came back several times, and I eventually had the courage
to show him some of the secret pictures I'd drawn and the poems I'd
written.

He wanted, I suppose, so much to bridge the gap between the members of
the family that he made one fatal mistake.  He not only praised the
quality of my work, but did so in front of somebody who was not
included in my efforts to share: my mother.

Cuttingly my mother insisted that I show her what I'd written.  I
handed over my poems, and she mockingly read some of what I had written
out loud, aiticizing the grammar, the linages I had used, and "its
madness...... It's typical," she said, as though that summed up
everything.  Fortunately, in the evasiveness of my so-called "mad"
writing, its meanin eluded her; and so, to my mind, it remained .  9

"uncontaminated" by "informed" criticism.  My father looked at me
apologetically.  I guess he was something of an eternal optimist.

My father had never laid a hand on me.  Despite this, my mother sought
to convince me that my father was "looking at me."  I was always so
easily fooled, often believing the most unbelievable things, only to be
made a fool of later.

I began to ignore my father as my mother so actively encouraged.  Sadly
it was the last effort at reaching me that my father was to make for
three years.

AT SCHOOL no other children had begun to pick on me.  I'd become fairly
insensitive to being caned mad but I was now being called stupid, and
though I was quite aware of my own nalvetd, this still hurt.  As
always, I reacted violently, though this time my opponents were boys.

My mother, in sympathy for the way I was being attacked, gave me one
last chance at another school.  This time it was to be on her terms.  I
was now fourteen years old, and I was going to go to a girls' school.

SEXUALITY HAD ALWAYs disturbed me, probably because of how
claustrophobic I felt when other people came near me.  My mother, who
was extremely paranoid about me becoming a teenage mother, took every
available opportunity to put me down and physically abuse me for any
signs of my femininity.

In somie ways her fears were justified.  I was extremely naive and
believed anything I was told.  I often went off with strangers, enticed
down lanes and toward strange cars by lures of saving poor starving
kittens or getting sweets.  Fortunately it had always been another,
very characteristic part of my nature that saved me from any real harm:
my complete dislike of physical proximity and being touched.  I may
never have screamed, but if anyone tried to touch me I ran -like
hell.

However, at this particular time the comments of other girls were
worrying me.

I had occasionally actually wanted to be spoken to by boys I met.

These boys, however, were always the quiet ones who never approached
me, and so I never spoke to them.  At the same time, other boys were, I
suppose, attracted to my naivete.  I was easily led and easily conned
and was easy pickings for egocentric bullying types who got a kick out
of how evasive I became.  I was already well skilled in the art of
kicking such beasts where it hurt, but my increasing need to appear to
be coping and "normal" meant that I put my friend's mother's lessons
about tolerating affection to very bad use.

As I was completely unable to say, let alone acknowledge, what I did or
didn't want, boys found that they could mentally corner me.  I had
nevertheless grown up in a house full of strangers and parties, and was
skilled in evasiveness if not in emotional self-defense.

A rough school can put forward many challenges to the "normality" of a
teenager's sexual development, and the girls' school I had been sent to
was no exception.  The girls at this school would leer at passing
strangers, compare notes on their experiences, and talk about their
latest heartthrob.

I was never communicative, but owing to my background, l always became
anxious about challenges to my "normality."  The old fear was still
there, always driving me to try to keep at least one foot in the "real
world" lest I be sent to my mind's conception of irretrievable hell on
earth: a children's home.

78

ONE COULD, I suppose, blame my mother for putting the fear of
imprisonment into my head.  Then again, it was my mind, not hers, that
conjured up the monstrous connotations of the words.  To me, a
children's home was a prison, and I was absolutely terrified of outside
control.

I did not fear that my arms and legs would be ripped off in a
children's home.  They would have been welcome to take them with my
blessing.  I was terrified that they would make me do things there;
that they would not leave me be; that they would deny me my freedom to
escape into my own lonely, though secure, prison.

When I locked myself in, I locked other people out.  In my own family I
felt I still had reasonable control over this.  At the same time, it
was the very threat of having my circumstances changed (no matter how
bad they may have seemed) that made me try so hard to convince people
that I was capable of their precious "normality."  It was this that, so
strongly against my own will, caused me to fight so hard for so little
reward for the joyless achievement of remaining aware and responsive.

It was this fear of having "my own world" taken away from me that
resulted in behavior that forced me to deny I'my own world" in place of
a more presentable, well-mannered, sociable, though emotionless,
shell.

"They" never got to lay a hand on the real me, but more and more, to
their elation, I began to stop visiting myself.

I began to stop looking at the spots and losing myself in the colors.

I began to lose a grip on my love of the things around me and, in doing
so, was left with "their" shallow securities and complete lack of
guarantees.  My hatred became my only realness, and when I was not
angry, I said sorry for breathing, for taking up space, and even began
to say sorry for saying sorry.

This total denial of a right to live was a consequence of learning to
act normal.  Everything outside of me told me that my survival was to
rest on my refining the act of acting normal.  On the inside I knew
that by definition this meant that whatever and whoever I was naturally
was unworthy of acceptance, belonging, or even life.

MY HISTORY AT this last school was the same as at the others.  I was a
failure.  I still failed to participate, or did so inappropriately.  I
still walked out of classes, threw things, and got violent.  I still
failed to hand in any work at all, with one exception.

I had liked one of my teachers, which was quite unusual for me as I
normally either disliked them or was indifferent to them.  Liking
anyone, however, posed major difficulties for me, as it made me far
more nervous and left me more unprepared than when dealing with someone
I disliked.  I don't know why I liked this teacher, perhaps it was
because she seemed to have little "self' about her.

She was always talking about what had happened throughout history to
various disadvantaged groups.  Nothing she ever said had any feeling of
stubbornness, bias, or opinion.  She simply discussed facts.

I found it impossible to talk to her in a normal voice.  I began to put
on a strong American accent, making up a history and identity for
myself to go with it.  As always, I actually convinced myself that I
was this new character and consistently kept this up for six months.

While the other teachers found me a devil, this teacher found me to be
bright, amusing, and a pleasure to teach.  At the end of the term, I
handed her the most important piece of schoolwork any of my high school
teachers had received.

The students had all been given a set date and topic on which to
write.

I had been intrigued by the way black people had been treated in
America in the sixties.

I told my teacher that what I wanted to do was a secret, and she agreed
to extend my due date as I enthusiastically informed her of the growing
length of my project.  I had gone through every book I could find on
the topic, cutting out pictures and drawing illustrations over my
written pages, as I had always done, to capture the feel of what I
wanted to write about.  The other students had given her projects
spanning an average of about three pages in length.  I proudly gave her
my special project of twenty-six pages, illustrations, and drawings.

She gave me an A, and I shyly, though immediately, dropped the American
accent.

In all my high school years, this was my greatest achievement.  I had,
of course, done this project not so much out of my own interests as in
an effort to win this teacher's approval.  Unfortunately, this tendency
is one I have been largely unable to overcome.

MY MOnm DECIDED that it was time for me to get a job.  I was fifteen
years old.

I had been the housecleaner and done cleaning jobs for my father.  I
was also very keen on sewing.  It was a toss-up between being a cleaner
or a machinist.  I began my first fulltime job as a machinist and
lasted exactly three days.

Though I am now opposed to the killing of animals for fur coats, I
still loved the feel of fur at that time and made no connection between
a live animal and a fur coat.@ I had always had difficulty with the
concept of something being turned into something else.  I understood
cows, but when they became a herd they stopped being cows for me.  I
understood that "herd" was a word used for a group but did not
understand the word "cattle."  Fur was like that, too.

Once it was being sewn, it was material and had never been and could
never be animals.

What I did know is that I loved the feel of fur on my face.  I was a
runny-nosed, freckle-faced, fifteen-year-old kid rubbing her face into
fur coats with no conception of or respect for their value or for the
notion that they were supposed to stand for "class."

The boss was Italian and, like so many Italians, was a hard worker and
expected the same of his employees.  I was to begin on the easiest of
machines: the buttonholer.

The buttonhole machine cuts a hole in the garment and then stitches
around the hole it has made.  It was magic.  I was fascinated by the
feel of fur under my hands.  I was in paradise.

I worked hard and I worked fast.  Soon the box of fur coats began to
fill up, and the @ passed by, impressed with the speed of my work.  He
decided to check the quality.

A horrified look grew upon his face, and he began to shout as he turned
each garment around and around.

"What have you done?"  he screamed over and over.  "Buttonholes in the
sleeves, buttonholes in the collar, buttonholes in the back panel ...

Get the hell out of here."

"Can I have my money?"  I asked shyly.

"No!"  he screamed.  "Do you know what you've done?  You've caused me
thousands of dollars in damage.  Get the hell out of here before I kick
you out."

I hadn't realized that the buttonholes were meant to go anywhere in
particular.

I WAS ABLE to apply myself much better to a fun-time job than I ever
was to schoolwork.  At school I had never had one consistent identity,
and my behavior was all over the place.  In my new job I was given an
image, and the whole point seemed to be to be true to this role at all
times.

My form of concentration was never to be alert, as this would cause me
to drift off.  Instead I would lose myself in the monotonous tasks I
was given to do.  I moved so freely and systematically through my work
that most people hardly noticed my very distant state of mind.

I had been very lucky, I was told, at having landed a job as a shop
assistant in a department store.  I loved my job but hated dealing with
people.

It seemed that I was again in paradise, surrounded by racks and shelves
of colored garments, shiny shoes, rows of numerically ordered
packages.

Everything was arranged in aisles.  It seemed almost unbelievable that
I would be expected to do the thing I loved most: put things in
order.

There were numbers to be counted and ordered, there were colors and
sizes and types of article to be grouped; every department was kept
separate from every other department and called by a different name; it
was a world of guarantees, and this department store even offered
those, too.

I was the best little worker they had, I was told.  Heads of various
departments would ask to "borrow" me to tidy up the mess in their
departments, which I would do in record time, in every detail.  I was
the sort of kid who vacuumed the floor by hand without the help of a
vacuum cleaner.  If there was anything slightly out of place, I had to
straighten it; and doing this, restoring order, made me feel secure.

Despite this, I was being continually reminded of my "attitude
problem."

Customers would approach me for help, and I would completely ignore
them.

As this was my most important role as a shop assistant, my bosses could
never overlook this.  When I did help them, I often did it with such
bitter resentment that customers would complain to management about the
rude girl in such and such dep@ent.

Sometimes the customers would tap me on the shoulder.  I'd tell them to
wait a minute, as I continued compulsively to sort out racks and
shelves.  if they persisted, I would abruptly remind them that I had
told them to wait.

People sometimes couldn't believe my arrogance.

However, I was not being intentionally arrogant.  These people had,
uninvited, tried to take away my control over being touched, though to
them it was a mere tap on the shoulder.  These were the people who, out
of their own selfishness, would rob me of my sense of peace and
security, which, unlike them, I could not find in their version of
"everyday LIFE."

As people began to explain how other people experienced my behavior, I
came to learn that all behavior had two definitions: theirs and mine.

These "hellpful" people were trying to help me to "overcome my
ignorance" yet they never tried to understand the way I saw the
world.

It seemed so simple to them.  There were rules.  The rules were
right.

I obviously needed their help to learn them.

THERE WAS ALso another problem-.  the way I spoke.

I would often fluctuate between accents and pitches and would vary the
manner in which I described things.  Sometimes my accent seemed quite
polished and refined.  Sometimes I spoke as though I was born and bred
in the gutter.

Sometimes my pitch was normal, at other times it was deep, like I was
doing an Elvis impersonation.  When I was excited, however, it sounded
like Nhckey Mouse after being run over by a steamroller-high pitched
and flat.

Someone didn't know the price of a soft toy.  I was told to get on the
microphone and ask for its price and code.  I was nervous and
excited.

I was going to say something on the microphone that would,be heard over
the entire store.

I looked at what I was to describe.  I saw a yellow stuffed duck.

Whether polished and refined or subtle as a sledgehammer, I had always
when notorious for bluntly telling it like I saw it.  I got on the
microphone and in a very loud, Rat, high-pitched drawl demanded: "Give
me a price and code on a yellow stuffed duck."

Laughter poured forth from the walls.  The entire shop seemed to be
laughing.  I walked back to where I had been working, wondering what
had happened since I'd been gone that had made everyone laugh.

My boss glared at me, mortified.

"What did you say?"  she announced ih disbelief.

'when?"  I asked.

"On the microphone, you stupid girl," she added.

I was called up to the office.

"Donna, we've got a new job for you.  We're sure you'll like it," said
the assistant manager, sitting behind his desk, hands clasped, looking
like a ridiculous praying mantis.

"But I don't want another job," I said innocently.

We've decided that you should go and work in the storeroom.  You'll
like it in there," he added, sounding like he was convincing himself,
for I certainly didn't feel convinced.

The STOREROOM WAs dark, a long corridor with other long dark corridors
running off it.  Like the rest of the store, everything was divided up
into separate sections.  There was neatness and order, but a lot of the
prettiness was missing.  Nevertheless I was content with the
isolation.

With this now being the domain of my boss and myself alone, I began to
treat it as such.

People often came into the storeroom to see if something was in
stock.

I began to close the door on people, trying to keep them out.  Then I'd
walk away back to what I was doing.

I was extremely possessive of my tidying and would go off like a
firecracker if anyone left anything out of order.

I had also decided that I would take orders from one person and one
person only.  One day my boss's boss came in, the store manager.  He
began to talk to me.  I had become upset about something and was
huddled in a ball down one of the long corridors.

My own boss had been unable to approach me, as I had picked up the
merchandise and hurled articles at her like missiles.  She had arrived
with the manager as a backup.  I went berserk.  Like some insane little
pixie, I stamped my feet, pulled out my hair, screamed, and threw
things at both of them before giving up and banging my head
rhythmically on the shelf next to me.  There was nowhere to go from the
storeroom but out of the exit.  Fortunately my boss talked the manager
around, and I was not out of a job.  She managed to explain that I
couldn't take orders from more than one person.

Like Robyn's mother, my boss had seen me as a wayward child in need of
guidance.  She didn't realize that I was already functioning in line
with a very stringent set of rules that were not compatible with life
as a secure, well-adjusted social being.

Ull OUTSIDE WORIK, I had, like so many times before, cut myself off
from the people I knew, some of whom had grown quite fond of me.

I had begun to skate, which was something that gave me a great sense of
freedom and beauty.  I felt untouchable as I sped around the skating
rink, people becoming a momentary blur of color as I whizzed past
them.

Like everything else, I had taught myself well and, dancing alone,
oblivious to everyone else around me, I began to attract attention.

A young man approached me and began to skate around with me.  As
always, boys would comment on how well I skated or challenge me to
defend myself by saying that I thought I was good.  Some would skate
around me, trying to be impressive.  I was not easily impressed, and I
was not particularly impressed by this young man.  After the usual blah
blah blah, he offered to walk me home.

I atcepted.

I walked ahead of Garry most of the way, and he didn't seem to
acknowledge my evasiveness.  I stood at the front gate, not
particularly wanting to go inside.  He kept saying WOTds.  I replied:
Yes, sir.  No, sir.  Three bags full, sir.  He kissed me-or perhaps I
should say he kissed my face, as I wasn't in it at the time.

I met Garry almost every night when I went to the rink.  He said he
loved me.  Echoing, I said I loved him, too.  He wanted me to come and
live with him one day.  Me, too, I said.  He kissed my face again.

Well, I'd said the words; it must have been love.  He wanted me to live
with him.  Great!  I didn't want to live at home anymore.  I would go
and five at his place.

I called a taxi and filled it up with my bags and tins full of
treasures, my stereo and records and the few dothes that I had bought
for myself since I had been working.  I arrived at Garry's flat and, to
his flatmate's complete surprise, moved in.

Garry arrived home to the sheepish grin of his flatmate's girlfriend,
who informed him that I'd moved in.

"What!"  he exclaimed in disbelief.

"You said you wanted me to live with you," I explained.

"One day, I said," he stressed.

Nevertheless, I was there, and that was that.

My mother freaked out entirely.  She had a strange feeling about my
absence and checked my room to find I'd taken everything personal, g t
e p ce with the eeriness o a mortuary.  The bare floor, wall-to-wall
mirrors, the barred windows, and a hoard of untouched, unwanted dolls
spoke of who I was.

My mother stood there among the rejected dolls and, so she told me,
cried for the first time.

I had no intention of returning.  It was not that I thought I'd found
the love of my life.  I was not particularly excited about the
adventure of leaving home.  I had simply been invited (or so it had
appeared to me) to take the next step along the road to independence,
which I thought was synonymous with being left alone.  I had a lot to
learn.

I did not particularly want to share this man's bed or have sex with
him.

I was disturbed and anxious about the changes that had taken place
during the day and didn't want to be on my own, though I'd have been
happier if my company had been deaf, dumb, blind, and indifferent to
me.  He wasn't.

At first Garry was furious with me.  He told me that he didn't
particularly want to live with me, but that it was too late now and
he'd have to learn to live with it.  For my part, I found it useful to
play my old role of Carol, always willing to please, anything to avoid
being sent away.  Garry was an immature and insecure adult.  He thought
this pliant role suited me, and he learned to make use of it as one
would a household utensil.

I was not particularly thrilled about sex.  I had decided my body
didn't belong to me at all.  I felt it was something quite separate
from me, numb; my eyes staring into nothingness and my mind a thousand
miles away.  I felt somehow killed and yet somehow free by being so cut
off and unreachable.  And in some perverse.way I'm sure Garry liked
having a victim instead of a partner.  I understood that sex was a
condition of my staying with him.  He created many new conditions,
too.

He was to receive all of the money that I brought home from work, and I
was never to ask for anything or complain.  I tried to argue for the
money for my fares to work and soon learned that life was no better
living in a relationship than it was riving at home.  Just as my mother
had, Garry began to bash me night after night.

There were four of us altogether, and we moved into a house with one
other: a man named Ron, recently separated from his wife.

The violence still went on night after night.  I'd hide in a corner,
huddling, holding my head.  It was cat-and-mouse, and there was nowhere
to hide.  Sometimes the others would tell Garry to close the door while
he hit me because he was making too much noise.

One night I sat up in the living room, again too afraid to go to sleep;
now frightened by both the bashing and the darkness.  The darkness in
my soul, however, was the greatest, and I sat there staring vacantly
into space, tearing my arm up with a nail I had found.

Ron came in.  He sat next to me and, in my dazed state, I thought he
was trying to understand.  He said I could come out with him driving in
his van.  I went.

Ron pulled over to the side of the road and told me that if I wanted to
go home I would have to have sex with him.  I opened the van door, got
out, and began walking up the road, out in the middle of nowhere, with
no idea of where I was going.

"Get back in the van," he said through the open window as he drove
slowly along beside me.

I continued to walk.

"You don't know where you are," he said.

"Don't care," I said bluntly.

"Come on, get in the van.  You won't have to do anything," he said.

I continued to walk.

"You're mad, you know that," he said.  "You're stark raving mad."

Eventually I got back into the van, and he drove me home without
incident.

The next day I walked around the block, hypnotized by the monotony of
going around and around and around again.  I heard only the rhythm of
my own footsteps and saw only the blur of the houses that, like the
people at the skating rink, whizzed past me.  As I did this, I tore
apart the inside of my arm-the part of my body my friend Robyn had
taught me to feel.

There was a couple staying in the house, Garry's cousin and his
pregnant fifteen-year-old giriffiend.  The inside of my arm was a mass
of blood and pus and torn flesh.  The eightmonths-pregnant girlfriend
couldn't stand the atmosphere anymore.  Her boyfriend decided that the
violence had gone too far.

It was time to get out of there.  They decided to move into Garry's
sister's flat.  Out of sympathy, the girlfriend insisted I come with
them.

Garry's sister had a flat a few suburbs away.  She lived there with her
three-year-old daughter in a neighborhood teeming with cats.  The
couple were to sleep in the daughter's bedroom.  The daughter was to
sleep with her mother.

I was to sleep on the riving room floor after any visitors had gone.

I had no mattress, pillows, or blankets.  I was allowed to use the
cushions off the couch after everyone had gone to sleep.  I put my
treasures in the linen cupboard next to where I lay, covered myself
with a towel, and went to sleep.

GARRVs SISTER WAS very like him.  I gave her most of my wages and
almost all of the rest to the couple, in exchange for their offer to
take me with them when they moved upcountry in a few weeks' time after
their baby was born.  On top of this, I looked after Garry's sister's
daughter after I got home from work and on weekends.

There was never any food in the house, although half of the money I'd
given this woman was intended for food.  I went to work in my job in
the storeroom and watched people eat.  When people asked me why I
didn't eat, I told them I wasn't hungry.  People offered me some of
their food.  I scoffed it down like a wild dog.  Some of the women at
work got into the habit of buying themselves too much for lunch and
giving me what they'd bought.  Their kindness brought tears to my eyes,
and I ate gratefully, with the tears silently rolling down my cheeks.

At home in the flat my only salvation was that little girl, and she
became the entire world for me.  I would take her with me everywhere,
and almost everything she did I did, too.

It was as though I had a playmate my own age.  At times I was in a
dream state possibly not even as complex as the world seen by a
three-year-old.  At other times, as I was beginning to come out of
myself, being three with this little girl felt about all that I could
handle without my defenses distorting my self-expression and leaving me
a thousand miles away from who I really was.

I had spent my last birthday away from home.  My family had given me a
set of colored pencils.  I sat looking at them intently, alone in the
flat I was sharing, and felt deeply hurt that I no longer could allow
myself to draw in color, for the self-expression of using color
demonstrated choice and inspired too much fear.  I cried as I clung to
a tiny doll on a string that my little brother had given me.

I had begun to get quite sick, and under my nervous painted smile it
was quite clear that I was extremely depressed.

Up until now I had refused to have much to do with my family.  My
father had been deeply hurt by my leaving and had begun to snub me when
I phoned, nervously waiting to be asked if I wanted to come back
home.

My two brothers had rejected me as someone who had, it seemed, proved
to them that they were as worthless as discarded rubbish.  My mother,
who had told anyone who asked that I'd left because I was a slut, was,
for a change, more understanding.

Charitably she invited me to come back.  I agreed.  I had been the
three months.  It was Christmas time.  I WAS NOW sixteen years old.  My
family, which had often felt so very foreign to me, now felt even more
so.  I hung about on the fringes like an outsider.  My presence at
Christmas had been unexpected, but I still received presents from
people.  The presents from my parents' fiends and relatives hurt
most.

Although they had often given me Christmas presents, I felt they were
making a special effort toward me, and I couldn't face them or even
bring myself to say thank you.  I simply felt too fragile.

MY OLDER BROTHER had begun teasing me, and I began teasing him back.

Things got out of hand, and I was on the receiving end.  My mother
decided that it was time for me to move out.

I had been home for only three months.  My mother knew I'd lost all of
my money and came into the shop where I was working.  She threw a bank
book at me.

In it she had deposited the cost of the security bond on a flat.  I got
home and she threw the newspaper in front of me, telling me to find
myself a flat.

I found one two suburbs away and, because I was still only sixteen, she
came with me to the real estate agent and gave them her assurance that
I would be able to pay my rent.

I had left my job as a storeroom assistant and taken a job in a factory
near my flat.  I had come full circle and was now working the dreaded
buttonhole machine again.  I lived on my own and felt proud of the way
I was taking control over my own life, but I was terribly lonely.

Every night I would walk barefoot down to the local shop and telephone
my old friend Robyn, with whom I had still intermittently stayed in
touch.  I would phone up with nothing to say and ask her "So how are
you?"  about ten times before saying goodnight and hanging up.

Her mother had always enjoyed showing me off as her charity project,
and the novelty of that had begun to wear off for me.

I had been walking back home after one of these phone calls when a
group of boys my own age who hung about outside the shop began to
harass me.

I guess I looked like an easy target for harassment, as I was always
out making phone calls at the same time each night, barefoot, in the
sam,e long, oversized saggy jumper, come rain or shine.  I'd never talk
to them or look at them.  I'd just walk straight back home.  For kicks,
they decided to follow me.

The three of them walked directly behind me.  I was frightened.  I
opened the door of my flat, and one of them put his hand on the door,
holding it open.

"Aren't you going to invite us in?"  he asked.

"Get out," I said frightened.

"That's not very nice," he said.  "I think we'fl come in and take a
look around."

With that the three of them entered my flat as though they owned it.

"What have you got here?"  one said, opening up my kitchen cupboards
one by one.

"Please get out of here," I pleaded, as they went through the contents
of my cupboards, laughing at my poverty and mocking my vulnerability.

I became so scared that I went and stood outside my own front door.

The three gave up, cheekily strutting out the front door one by one,
laughing.  The last one announced that he needed to "take a piss,"
which he promptly did, in full view, on my front door.

I stood there horrified as the three of them proudly strutted off.

That night I put on my best dress, took a handful of sleeping pills,
played my favorite record, and danced around the flat.  Dazed, I caught
a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror and began, like all those
years ago, to talk to Carol.

I began to cry, and all I knew was that I didn't want to be there
anymore.  Hypnotically I began to cut my wrists as I stood in front of
the mirror.

The look on my own face was too much.  It wasn't Carol looking back
anymore.  I panicked.

Withe stood in front of the mirror thinking that, if I died, people
would see me dressed like that, like a pretty little girl.  I took off
my dress and put on my old jumper.  As Willie, I ripped a sheet and
wound the scraps around my wlists and fell asleep.

When I awoke it was clear that I needed help.  Carol had no intention
of telling anyone what had happened, but she could no longer face the
mess in the flat.  I put on my jeans and walked, at six o'clock in the
morning, up to my friend Robyn's place.

Robyn's mum answered the door.

"HeHo, pet," she said.  "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said Carol, laughing lightheartedly.  "Just thought I'd come
down for a visit."

Carol sat at the kitchen table while she made me the customary cup of
tea.

I had begun to bleed through my jumper, and Robyn's mum looked at me in
shock, saying: 'What have you done?"  Knowing that I might run if she
panicked, she cah-rdy asked if she might take a look at my arms.  Carol
complied, explaining that she'd had a little accident.  Robyn's mother
explained that these "scratches" might get infected and asked me to let
them take me to the hospital.  Carol agreed to let Robyn take me
there.

Everybody was calm, cool, and collected.  The nurse came and spoke to
me.  The doctors took blood tests.

I was given food to eat and lots to drink, and when I told them I was
ready to go they told me I was not.  I was made to see a
psychiatrist.

Mary, my psychiatrist, didn't frighten me.  She seemed to be a firm but
gentle person who didn't react to whatever images I tried to throw at
her.  She asked me why I'd done what I'd done.  I told her it was
because "there was no love left in the world."

She sat across from Willie and told me that she didn't think that I was
as tough as I thought I was and that she thought there was a scared
little girl inside me who was trying to get out.  I wondered if she
knew how right she was.  Willie spent a year thinking about what she
had said.

I RETURNED TO the flat and the factory and the ritual telephone calls
from outside the local shop.  A tall, lanky man sat on a crate outside
the shop.  This was the local haunt, and this was his usual spot.  A
friend and he were paying a lot of attention to me as I made my usual
phone calls.

"Ffi, how are you, so how are you, yeah ... yeah ... yeah .  . ."  I
said on the phone.

"Hi," called the young man as I hung up and walked past, ignoring
him.

"Aren't you going to be friendly and talk to me?"  he persisted.

His friend interrupted, suggesting that I ask the young man, Chris,
back to my place for coffee.

"I haven't got coffee," I replied.

"That's okay," said his friend.  "He'll take tea."

It seemed to be settled as far as these two were concerned.  Chris was
to come to my place for a cup of tea.

I walked into my own flat ahead of him, almost oblivious to his
presence.

He took a seat on my fifteen-dollar couch from the Salvation Army and
made himself quite at home.

"I haven't got any tea," I exp@ed.

"That's okay," said Chris.  "I'll just stay for the conversation."  He
hung around making one.

Chris was Italian and arrived around the corner from my flat.  He had
noticed the bandages on my wrists, and I told him that I had sprained
them doing a handstand.  He didn't believe me.  I told him about the
incident with the three guys, which had led up to my "accident."  As it
turned out, the one who had urinated on my front door was his younger
brother.

I move from place to place, a life of nameless faces, Looking for some
place that I'd call home, I'd always be moving on; Aluvys trying to
find some place I could call mine, But that never came my uwy and the
feeling was here to stay, Not knowing who I used to be.

I look in the mirror, in the face looking back I see ...

"Don't know.  Who is me?"

I gave Chris a key to my flat, and he made good use of it, throwing
parties and referring to it as his flat.  I sat about, a stranger in my
own flat, watching Chris bring the world in mercilessly as he played
the playboy role to a T.

My flat got flooded from a blockage in the flats' sewerage.  I stood
there screaming.  The landlord stood there saying, "Not a problem.

We'D clean it up with a mop."  The estate agent agreed that he wouldn't
allow a dog to sleep in those conditions.  I was given another, though
more expensive, flat.

Chris's friend, Peter, moved into the spare room.  He taught me to cook
and to iron clothes and, being quite a giant, he would throw me up into
the air and catch me.  I'd fall to the ground laughing, and he'd tickle
me as I wildly came to life.

Life moved fast, and I moved even faster.  It wasn't long before I had
left this flat far behind, and Peter with it.  I was saying words,
taking actions, but I wasn't there.

I moved every two months, and when I wasn't moving house I changed
jobs.

Chris would see the cardboard boxes laid out on the bed and realize
that I was moving again.

I spent my spare time inspecting new flats, though never moving outside
the one suburb.  I lost a fortune in security deposits, but I felt
compelled to move as two months in one place had begun to feel like two
very long years.

Living as Carol, completely cut off from my real self and the emotions
it embodied, I became terrified of being left alone.  I feared becoming
possessed by the real me, which seemed to lurk in the shadows like a
ghost, waiting for Carol to be left alone, waiting for life to slow
down and catch up with her.

I played the role of Carol so convincingly that I hardly acknowledged
that this fear was my fear of losing a grip on this character.  I had
played Carol so persistently that she had become a self.  My little
brother came around to see me.  But Carol had no brother Tom.

Tell me, do you remember me?  Do I look like I belong?

See, I've been looking around, To find a face in the crowd that I might
know.

Do you have the time for one more friend?

Do I have a face you'd like to know?

Well, we might just start there, It's as good a place as anywhere.

Tom had come to the door of the flat.  Carol opened the door and stood
their staring at the figure of a ten-year-old boy on the doorstep.

Having not seen me for almost a year, Tom probably remembered the real
me, Donna, who had shared her world with him when he was three.  The
girl who answered the door was the one who had walked away from him-and
from everything else in her lifebecause there was too much closeness to
handle.

"Hi, sis," Tom announced as he stood on the doorstep, dwarfed by his
older sister.

"M.  What do you want?"  said the-seventeen-year-old facing him.

"Mum brought me down.  She's out in front.  Do you want to see her?" 
he said.

"Nuh," said the girl flippantly.  "Want to come in?"

"I can't," said Tom.  "Mum's asked me to come and ask you to see her,"
he added.

"Oh, well, tell her I can't," said the girl casually.  "I guess you'd
better go."

Tom went.  It was his last visit for two years.

Chris had moved in.  He liked the latest flat.  Carol brought out the
cardboard boxes, but Chris refused to move with her.  Carol was now on
a trapeze that had begun to swing without mercy.  Donna's older brother
entered the scene before Carol's last curtain call.

The older brother had never liked Donna.  She'd always been hard to
understand and never seemed to say anything he could make sense of.  He
was, however, going through his own teenage years; an adult way before
his time, alone and lonely.  For better or for worse, he decided there
was now some advantage in reaching out to his sister.  He was greeted
by Carol.

He sat on the couch, talking to the channing and captivating character
who sat there masquerading as his sister.  I had switched to "automatic
pilot," and watched myself from outside my own body as I responded
openly and effortlessly to the brother I had never had any desire to
get to know.

It seemed to him that he had found a friend who was almost made to
order.

Fortunately, his sister had.changed.  This girl had no longing look for
understanding, and spoke casually and amusingly without any of the
distrust or cautiousness he had known in his sister.  He liked her, and
decided to come around more often.

It was as though I had been watching a play, although I was
simultaneously in the audience and on the stage.  But as my older
brother continued to visit, Carol began to falter, finding it
increasingly difficult to communicate.  Donna had reverted to "talking
in poetry" evasively.

Playfully my brother began once again to call me "a blonk" and told me
to stop "wonking."  I froze as though he were a nightmare come to
life.

He was again calling me mad, stupid, and incomprehensible.  I looked at
him, wondering at how he had come to feel so comfortable in my flat.

He eventually began to realize that this was no mere mood I was in.  I
had gone back to being the same way I used to be, and he had better
things to do with his time than waste any more of it on his,"crazy"
sister who seemed to resent or ignore his company.

My older brother didn't drop in again until two years later, when we
were once again enemies as always.

m DONNA WAS THE ghost, and the ghost was back.  People, however, had
come to expect Carol, and Carol put up a fight.

I had become agoraphobic.  I tried to walk to the local shops.  I would
shake, feeling my knees give out from under me.  I was again a
frightened caged animal, running from and flinching at any efforts to
come near me, though clutching at Chris as the only adult who could
protect me from the invasion of the outside world.

I became unable to work, running out on jobs without explanation.  I
began to tremble and feel like I was going to faint.  In panic I would
look around my once familiar surroundings, unable to make sense of them
or why I had forced myself to be there.  Carol would sail tluough each
job interview, but Donna would run out on the job after every few
weeks.

I developed two nervous tics, and would break out in a purple rash that
covered my chest, neck, and half of my face every time I was approached
on or spoke about any emotionally laden topic.

Chris was unable to cope and began to go out every night.  One day he
announced that he was going away for the weekend.

I was in a state of panic.  Chris's going away was like the feeling of
desertion I had had when my grandfather had died when I was five.  At
the same time I had to paint a smile upon my tear-soaked face and wave
bye-bye with my best impression of the Carol he had grown fond of.  I
was not convincing.

Carol had progressed to being a teenager, but Donna was still only two
years old at a stretch.

I sat alone in the flat, deserted and terrified.  I needed a mother
desperately, but could not remember ever having one; and, truth be
known, this, too, would have to be a construction within my own world,
if it were not to send me running.  I felt homesick for the home I'd
never had because I'd never been able to reach out freely.

Carol had brought Chris into my life.  Giggling, sociable, and made to
order, Carol had become all he expected and demanded, yet he had walked
out on Donna as though she were a complete stranger.  I remembered the
words of another complete stranger that had been echoing in my mind
since meeting her the year before.  I went to the emergency room of the
hospital and asked to see Mary, the psychiatrist who had been able to
see the frightened little girl inside me trying to get out.

I WAS CALLED into the cubicle of the emergency room and seen by an
insensitive orderly who tried to insist that I could not see Mary and
that I was just a little bit upset and would soon be fine.

Words were to be my only chance, and Willie's complete lack of tact
came viciously to the rescue.  His eyes raced around the cubicle,
scanning it for objects that could be thrown.  He verbally assaulted
the unsuspecting orderly with attacks of "What do I have to do?  Tear
this room to bits, cut myself up and bleed everywhere?"  The orderly
arranged for Mary to see me.

Mary and Willie sat in the office across the table from one another.  I
was fighting to break the surface of the character who sat there
desperately trying to defend me and, at the same time, defeating the
purpose of getting help.

Willie explained the nature of the problem at hand in a relatively calm
and; controlled way.  It was explained to Mary that the problem was an
inability to trust Chris while he was away and that this was causing
pressure on the relationship.  Mary, testing the water, questioned my
own ability to be trusted and then asked me what my family had been
like.

The rash began to creep, and I could sense emotion creeping to the
surface with it.  "What does that have to do with anything?"  Willie
asked rather defensively in a last-ditch effort to clutch at straws
that might temporarily block my encroaching fragility.  He was wasting
time in order to think up a new strategy.  Mary explained that it had a
lot to do with things and asked me once again about my family.  Willie
began to describe my family situation with the objectivity with which
one would narrate the moves of a sporting event.

Mary left the room.  I panicked.  By the time she came back I was a
crying, babbling mess.  She suggested we meet again the next day.

It was Sunday.  I had only one more day to get through before the whole
world would once again come through my front door in the form of
Chris.

I bought some strawberries on the way to the hospital, from the shop,at
the end of the street, and entered the hospital waiting room, where I
waited to be called.  Donna was called into the office; Carol, ca@g the
bag of strawberries, entered.

Carol was always sent out to test the water before Donna decided it was
safe to jump in.  Mary and I ate the strawbernes.  Tokenistic as the
gesture to offer them may have bftn, Mary had accepted them and got
past the first hurdle.

My fears began to emerge.

"I'm not mad, you know, am I?"  said Carol, hoping that Mary would not
confirm the fear that I actually was.  Mary was always reassuring,
telling me that I need not worry so much about it.

"They're not going to lock me up, are they?"  asked Carol, echoing the
old fiear of being sent to a children's home.

"No, you're not going to get locked up," echoed Mary.

My fears broke the surface, and I began to sob like a child.

It was arranged that I would see Mary twice a week for the first couple
of weeks.  These weeks were to stretch on into months and then into
years.  Mary was to become the most important mental influence on my
life since I met that stranger named Carol in the park fourteen years
before.

An adult trapped in a child's insecurity, Seeming complete, and yet
not, To open its eyes to a world never seen, And hear the sound of
people, As though for the first time, without fear, 100

C D 0

N Most of these photos were taken by my uncle (the one who was going to
adopt me).  He and his family moved to the country when I was about
six, so there are not many photos of me after that.

Ri(;HT: Here I am no more than a few months old.  Even in this picture
my eye contact isn't quite there.  One eye stares blankly ahead and the
other turns in (I used to do this later to put "the world" out of focus
and thereby close it out-hard to tell if I was doing that here).  My
expression is, however, fairly divided, with one side animated and the
other lost.  Still, others may only see a little baby staring at
nothing in particular.

RIGHT: This photo captures best how contented I was in "my world," as I
stare obliviously through the camera.

LEFT: Taken moments after the previous photo, this one demonstrates the
way my cognitive, emotional, and sensory shutdown happened-I am clearly
stunned and rather "dead" in contrast to my brother.  I have
disappeared here, so to speak, and my brother clearly has no idea that
I don't really know he exists.  from: Donna's world."  it was taken
after lunch with Bryn.  i was twenty-two.

ar.  You can still see ABovE: The shed wall, taken on a visit to MY old
house last ye where I wrote "Donna is a nut" in huge letters.

To express in its own words gratification, And to feel in its heart
some of the security it's longed for Is a gift.

What better gift than to give someone their self?

Mary had asked me what I expected to get out of the sessions.  I had
told her: "I just wanna be normal."  I had never questioned the concept
of normal but I felt that I didn't fit the category by a long shot.

We almost always sat in the same office; the same view, overlooking the
city street and the park across the road.  When it was nighttime, I
would look out at the city lights, and sometimes, in my mind, I would
feel as I might have done in one of my flying dreams, this time moving
through the blackness to the colors.

This office symbolized my dilemma.  I was stuck in a small room of
brightness, and the rest of the world was a beckoning but unreachable
light that lay miles beyond a terrifying journey through the dark.

Mary was to help guide me there.  At home I would draw pictures of this
over and over again in my diary: a white square within a larger black
square, surrounded everywhere by the blinding whiteness of the paper.

Recently I saw this picture again.  It had been drawn by a young
autistic girl and was featured in a book by a psychoanalyst who worked
with such children.  The adult analysis of the picture was that it
expressed this girl's longing for the breast.  When, after becoming
close to her counselor, she drew two white squares in the darkness,
this was interpreted as two breasts.  When she then reversed the
picture, with a black square now in the middle of the white paper, this
was taken to be her version of the "bad breast" as opposed to the "good
breast."

I laughed myself stupid when I read this.  I had drawn the same picture
over and over, writing beside it, "Get me the hell out of here."  This
was the symbolic representation of my trap, which was due to the
infanfile nature of my unreached emotions.  The blackness I had to get
through was the jump between "my world" and "the world," though I had
never been able to make it in one piece.  I had learned to fear the
complete loss of all attachment to my emotional self, which happened
when I made the jump, and this was the only way that communication was
possible.  Giving up the secret of this was simply too deadly.  Too
many well-meaning people would have tried mercilessly to drag me
through the darkness unprepared, killing my emotional self in the
process.  I may never have died physically, but psychically I had died
many times in the effort.  I had multiple fractures of the soul as a
result.

THE ENnitE PsycHiAmc outpatient department was bland and colorless.  In
a way, that made me safe.  It was like a huge room of nothingness with
other little rooms of nothingness dotted along the corridors.  Mary's
office had a picture on the wall, two chairs, and a desk.  The picture
was bland and washed out, the sort that was meant to make patients feel
calm.  I remember looking at this picture and finding nothing in it
that I could mentally grasp.  Even the colors, which were a mass of
bland, dull pastels, blended into one another until the picture was
merely a square frame with a blob of vague color in the middle.  It
looked like a framed version of the morning after the night before.

Nevertheless, during the day session, I preferred to look at this when
I was speaking rather than to look at the buzz of daily life going on
down below, which only reminded me of my own lack of normality.  I also
became preoccupied with Mary's notes.

"You're not writing anything down about me, are you?"  I'd ask her
anxiously as she scrawled unintelligible notes down on paper.  "They're
not going to lock me up, are they?"  I'd say over and over again.

Mary's strategy was very appropriate.  We would enter her office.  She
would sit in her chair and say nothing, and I would mirror her until
the silence became deafening.  Then I would bombard her with a series
of statements, posed as questions.  She would mirror me, and my fears
would bounce back off her at myself.

I would talk about myself.  In the same clinical, matter-of fact
manner, I was able to relate some of the most horrific experiences of
my past with very little feeling for these incidents at all.  It was
simple.

So little of what had happened around me had actually reached me.  Even
when something had happened to my body, it was as though my body was
either a mere object existing in "the world" or, at other times, a wall
between "my world" within an "the world" outside.

Not surprisingly, in the recall of such events, I referred to myself as
"you."  This was because "you" logically captured my relationship to
myself.

One develops an "I" in interaction with "the world."  Donna didn't
interact; the characters did.  Mary would try to get me to clarify
whether I was implying that the events I was talking about applied to
her, as she was the only "you" in the room.  I tried to explain that
this was how I described things.  She continued.  I reverted to using
"I" in a conforming effort to avoid her pedantic emphasis on the
pronouns I was using.  Her efforts to get me to refer to these
incidents in a personal manner overlooked the fact that my use of the
word "you" captured the impersonal way in which I had experienced the
incidents at the time they happened.  She probably felt that she had to
help me to overcome my depersonalization, as though this were some
recently developed defense reaction.  I don't think she realized that I
had actually experienced life this way since the creation of Willie and
Carol, and my subsequent ability to communicate through them, thirteen
years before.

Every so often, Mary would trigger a reaction that wasn't experienced
so objectively-.  fear of confinement, fear of rejection, fear of
hopelessness, and fear of desertion.  Such things were generally
triggered by talking about the happy things: my grandparents, my father
when I was small, and my little brother up until he was three.  These
fears, however, were not the cause of my problems, but the crippling
result of my efforts after I began to participate in and try to reach
out in "the world."

Such fears had never, as I remember, caused my withdrawal and psychic
retreat.

I had done this even while I was with the few people who were honorary
objects in "my world."  My retreat was most often, a response to that
which tested my gentler emotions.  I had no trouble with the coarser
ones.  Willie took care of those just fine.  Bad feelings had no part
in "my world."

I had a preoccupation with keeping control, as Mary saw it.  I had been
trying to get reassurances from her that I could reach out yet keep
control at the same time.  I was trying to reach her in order that she
could reach me, but she stood her ground and tried to make me realize
that this would have to be on her terms.  What she didn't realize was
that, in laying down such ground rules, she was giving me the merr sage
that my efforts to reach out weren't good enough.  She seemed to be
challenging me to compete on her level.  I could only do so by being
mentally detached from my emotions.  We were both hitting brick
walls.

I decided I would help her to reach me.  I would give up some of the
secrets that formed the strong foundations of "my world."  It was as
though I had gone to a summit and put forward a proposal for
disarmament.

Mary, in her protected role as the professional, had learned and leaned
on the lessons of professional distance and was not going to come to
the party.  As she put it, "You came here to see me; I didn't come here
to see you."  This statement was meant for both our good, I suppose, so
that I would not become too dependent or bring her down to my level,
and so that she would be free of the personal assault often expected in
the emotional turmoil of therapy.

My dependency on Mary, however, was the only way she was going to see
the real me.  The character of Willie thrived on distance.  Carol could
adjust to anything.  Donna, however, could never reach out for a hand
or ask for it.

That hand simply had to be offered unconditionally on whatever terms it
would take to bring Donna out of the darkness of the cupboard.  Carol
charmed and chatted.  Wire explained, analyzed, and impressed.  Donna
lurked in the shadows waiting to see if Mary would find the key to the
cupboard door.

No AS FAR As normality was concerned, though Carol and Willie could act
relatively normal, Donna was actually closer along the continuum to
normal.  Crippled as hers were in "the world" only Donna had emotions
that functioned in "her world."

Carol strutted in one day to give up the secret of Willie's
existence.

Willie always took things too seriously, pulling the plug on the good
times and pulling everybody into line.  Carol seemed to fall into line
with the rest of them and, in the process, disappear.  Carol kept the
performances going, t charm, sociability, and cheerfulness simply
couldn't coexist with Willie's cutting criticisms of the self she
portrayed.  Her solution, as far as therapy was concerned, was simple:
she wanted the good rimes back.  She wanted her relationship with Chris
back to how it was.  Mary, though charmed by her social nalvetlfi,
found Carol's goals in need of development.

"I hear this voice over and over inside my head sometimes," said Carol,
referring to Willie but not willing to give UP the secret of who the
voice belonged to or the feelings from which it originated.  Mary asked
what the voice was telling her.  "It tells me, 'Don't tell them; they
won't believe you,' " said Carol, testing the water.

Mary was intrigued, and together they discussed the possible origins of
the message; Mary finally deciding that it was a memory of something my
mother had said.

Of course it had been something my mother had said.  The character of
Willie had arisen from Donna's ability to mimic combined with her
mother's ability to taunt and torture her into responding.  As Willie,
I had mimicked the words.  Unable to acknowledge any communication,
Willie had stored frustration, these same weapons were used against the
self from which this character had sprung.  In an effort at autonomy,
Willie had learned to resent Donna's vulnerability, the very quality he
had been created to protect.  Both Carol and Willie had progressed
through the various stages of personality development and this could
have helped to refine and shear off their rough edges had it not been
for their fear of recognition, which developed as an antithesis within
the same body.  There is no operation for psychically connected,
incompatible Siamese twins.  Integration was the only real solution.

Unfortunately, each character had his or her own solution.

Mary had written me out a prescription.  It seemed to me that she had
interpreted my predicament as schizophrenia.  Naturally I, was
insulted.  I had tried so hard to believe otherwir,e, yet I still
feared that I was mad.  Mary had unknowingly confirmed it.

My friend Robyn had said that people believed what they wanted to
believe.

Mary's behavior had exemplified this.  Carol took the tablets randomly,
abusing them as she would any other medication she was given.  On top
of about eight tablets she downed a quantity of Cognac, then called
Mary's number at home.

Carol was losing awareness, and I felt the fear of hopelessness come
over me, thinking that permanent damage might have been done; so ironic
to have it happen at a time when I was getting help.

Mary answered the phone.  She spoke to me casually and calmly.  I found
it hard to understand what she was saying, but my mind had latched on
to an image as Mary described how she was playing chess with her cat,
which was prancing about on the covers of her bed.  My mind was
replaying a similar image from a Shirley Temple movie.  I was again
back to three years old.  My voice was switched to "automatic pilot"
while my sense of self came over me in waves.  It was as though I was
flying through myself every so often.  Yet I had had this experience
before without the influence of drugs or alcohol.  Through this, I was
able to be myself with Mary more than I ever had before.  Perhaps, like
the television set years before, it was the distance of the telephone
fine that made it possible.

Mary took me off the tablets.  The only jot of difference they had made
was that I had become convinced that I could not trust Mary enough to
give up the secrets that could have helped truly to undo some of the
damage in a more permanent way.  The strategy for "letting go" lay not
in my reliving of the events that had gone on in "the world" around me,
but in my giving up the defenses that had shielded me from the effects
of these events.  These defenses consisted of a book's worth of secrets
steeped heavily in symbolism, as they came well before a time when they
could capture by words in any traditional sense.

Mary had obviously little grasp of the world I remembered expectation
of participation.  She set about helping me to tidy up the
constructions that had been suffocatingly built upon faulty,
undeveloped foundations.  I was two years old, and she had never really
seen me.

I HAD BEEN working in a shop not very far from the hospital.  boss
there had two daughters around my own age and was sexually harassing
me.  I found it hard to get along with anyone or serve customers but I
managed to hold things together and get through each day.  I had become
attached to one customer, an old man who waved hello to me every day
and who had become my new grandfather.

Perhaps in latching on to grandfather figures I was trying to continue
in my emotional development where I had left off.  Yet at the same time
my grandfather had begun to die for me long before he actually passed
away.  I remember always believing that both he and my father had died
when I was three.

They had both stopped being objects in my world when I was three, but
my father continued to live as one of many of the adults around me, and
my grandfather didn't die until I was five, whereupon my grandmother
left to live in the Australian bush.

I can actually remember trying to reach out for my grandfather with my
eyes.  It was in this sorrowful, unreachable state of longing that I
had stood by his bed when he passed away.  I guess it was the sort of
state of being one might expect from a ghost who had come to visit but
could not communicate.

The old man who used to come into the shop I worked in had waved and
said hello; and, though I had looked straight at him, I hadn't seen
him, and he thought I'd ignored him.  He came into the shop to buy
something later the same day and ignored me.  "Ffi," I said, in an
effort to reach out.  He left without saying a word.

I began to panic.  My body was operating on automatic pilot as I began
to lose sense of what was around me.  The shop was a mess of confused
color and noise.  I looked at the people I was working with:
strangers.

I didn't know why I was there, and I had to get out.  I grabbed for my
bag and bolted out of the shop.  The city street was a nightmare:
moving walls of people, my feet surrounded by feet everywhere.  I was
running.  I pushed through the swarm of people, the confusing noise of
the city screaming in my ears.  I had to get to somewhere safe.  I had
to get to somewhere familiar.  Mary would help me.  Mary was my only
hope.

A tram moved in front of me.  I shoved people aside like objects
blocking my path and climbed onto it.  A man walked down the center of
the tram.  He was saying words over and over.  I couldn't understand
him.

"Money," he had said.  I tore open my purse and threw he coins that
were in it at his intruding feet.  I got up and ran to the door,
banging furiously on it with my fist.  I was trapped, nowhere to go,
nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.  I began to cry hysterically, the
noise rising up in my own ears until I could hear nothing else.  The
door opened.

I jumped out and ran across two intersections, cars screeching,
shouting assaulting my ears.  A car had tapped me.  I fell forward,
momentarily sprawled across the hood.

The shininess of the hood stunned me.  I lifted myself up with my
forearms and looked at the two figures behind the glass of the
windshield.  They were pressed against the dashboard of their car, a
look of shock upon their faces.

I had recognized one; he was the state political leader.  I ointed at
him, surprised at my recognition, and announced his name, like a scene
from my first days at primary school: naming objects.  That was my only
moment of clarity as I rushed toward the doors of the hospital's
psychiatric department.

I HAD FoRGorrEN Mary's name.  I had forgotten how to get upstairs to
where she worked.  I had forgotten how to speak.

I stood there at the reception desk in a state of panic, trying to
articulate words and coming out with an unintelligible series of
unconnected, half-articulated sounds that only heightened my panic.  I
began to cry and hyperventilate.

I felt I was going to drown in my own tears as I looked frantically
into this receptionist's eyes, trying to pronounce Mary's name.  She
was a large, jolly-looking woman and reminded me of my friend Lina's
mother.  She remained patient, calm, and friendly as I stood there
frantically choking on sounds.  "M ... Mar ... M ... Mary," I blurted
out finally.

The woman got on the phone and called her down.  Mary came downstairs
and responded immediately to what she saw.  She tried to put her arm
around me.  I edged away cautiously.  She offered her hand.  I followed
her into the elevator, shooting glances back over my shoulder
anxiously.

WE ENTERED ANOTHER office.  It was not her usual one.  I was taken
aback by the difference, but secure in her company.  I sat without
saying a word.  She looked at me kindly, then reached into her bag and
took out a sweet.  My grandfather was back.  I was three, and he hadn't
yet lost me.  I put the sweet cagily into my mouth as I sat across the
room from Mary, like a rat in the corner.  I began to smother a giggle
caused by the secrecy of Mary having found her way into my world.

"So, want to tell me what happened?"  she asked with a rather calm,
friendly yet concerned manner.  I began to reply, then lost all sense
of myself as Willie embarrassingly took the stage and tried to cover
the tracks of how significant the events of the last half-hour had
been.

"What happened to me?"  Willie asked.

"You had what is called a panic attack," explained Mary.  She asked me
what had led up to it, and Willie told her that I didn't know.  She
helped me to retrace my steps, which i e ia en wa as an o as ran lessly
through the city streets.

Willie explained all the moves I had made.  Mary pushed me to examine
the personal s@cance of the old man.  She was pushing me too far, I was
discussing the events like some sort of newsreel commentator.  The way
I saw it, the old man was simply a friend who had upset me by snubbing
me.  Mary delved deeper, inquiring as to whether this had any personal
significance for me.  She was getting too close.  There were simply
some answers I was incapable of giving without losing control.  Yes, he
stood for my grandfather.  The acknowledgment was made, and Donna sat
there sobbing at the brutality and betrayal of the realization.  She
sat there sobbing and, because she could not be touched, there was no
one to comfort her.

My grandfather's actual death had been discussed.  No one mentioned the
key to the real problem: that he, along with everyone else, had died
when Donna was three, at the same time that Willie began to look into
people's eyes with anger and Carol came through the mirror to keep them
happy.  If expectation had killed Donna, it was only because she was
nowhere near ready to meet it, while her imaginary creations took on a
life of their own and succeeded where she had failed.  The real me was
still hypnotized by colors at a time when Carol was learning to dance
and Willie was learning to fight.  It was as though I had died in "the
world."  Everyone had died when Donna disappeared, and nobody seemed to
notice.  In fact they thought she'd finally come to life.

Mary seemed to change her tack.  It was as though she had decided that
my problems were essentially social rather than simply psychological.

We began to talk about the future.  She asked me what I wanted to be.

Antagonistically I replied that I wanted to be a "psychiatrist, just
like you."

Mary and I continued to meet.  She made me believe that nothing was
impossible, and until then I had never tried to reach so high for the
stars.

Perhaps, to her mind, the sort of things I had been through had
understandably made me unstable.

seemed to jump back and forth until we had reached some agreement that
my lack of social awareness was due to my family.

My family's lack of awareness and their inability to value many
accepted social norms largely stemmed from their low socioeconomic
status and their instability.  Mary and I seemed to have agreed that
most of my problems were due to the way in which people responded to
me, which was an understandable deduction in view of the fact that I
found most social contact hard to understand or respond to and that I
saw the world very clearly in "them and us" terms.

I DECIDED THAT I wanted to go back to school.  I felt that if I could
achieve my diploma I could get a job in a bank.

op in n wore un] op w o wore uniforms were respected.  I wanted to be
respected.  Therefore, I wanted to work in a bank.  It didn't seem to
make any difference that, at this stage, I had been giving away more
money than the shops I'd been working in had been making or that I
found it difficult even to add or subtract.

I had been seeing Mary for a year by this stage.  I was nowDONNA
WILLIAMS eighteen years old.  I had begun to fear the obviousness of my
own instability, which became ever more noticeable and unforgivable
with my increasing age.  At times I felt I was in my twenties, at times
I was sixteen at the most, and at other times I was still only three
years old.  I had been talking about this and had explained that I
still was not ready to leave home, though it seemed I'd never had
one.

I had naively stated in a defeated tone that the problem these days was
that no one wanted to adopt eighteen-year-olds.  I looked up at Mary,
who seemed to have tears in her eyes.  I was touched that she was able
to feel emotion for my words in a way I had never been able to.  I
responded to this with the respect I would have hoped for my own
display of emotion.  I said nothing and pretended not to notice.

The world was leaving me behind, and I knew it.  The most blatant
example of this was my unemployment, for I had by now been unemployed
for two months and had to face the harsh reality that I was eighteen,
unskilled, with an uneven work history and the same education as a
fifteen-year-old, whom an employer could pay at almost half the adult
ente.  Chris was no help, and having no friends and no contact with any
family members, Mary had become my whole world.

Mary helped me arrange an interview with the career adviser at an
advanced education college near where I lived.  I believed in her hopes
for me and strutted through the college doors like I had found myself a
new home.

"No," was the reply from the friendly man across the desk, he didn't
think I had much chance of being admitted to school after having missed
so many years.  It was not that I'd been away from school for three
years that mattered; it was my wanting to jump the two years I had not
completed and go straight into the final high school year.  I explained
that there was no funding for students to return to secondary school
and that, as I had no financial support from my family, I could not
afford to make up the two years I had not completed.

It was suggested that I didn't necessarily have to tell:anyone about my
lack of education.  It worked.  all that was left was to pass an entry
interview.  I told the interviewer at the school that I'd been away
from secondary school working and that I only wanted to jump one school
year and said nothing of the two I'd missed.  I explained that I had
been to many high schools before I left, and that it might be hard to
trace my records.  I emphasized that I'd learned a lot since I'd left
secondary school and asked if that shouldn't count for something.  I
must have done something right.  I got a letter saying I could start.

It was to cost forty dollars.

MARY WAS OVER the moon for me.  Chris didn't think it was a good
idea.

Basically Chris had been secure in the supposed superiority of our age
difference and level of education.

Chris loved to laugh at the way I could be convinced of anything, like
when he told me that all the sand at the beach was made by a machine.

I had put some in my mouth and bitten into it at his instruction.

"See," he said, "it's a special sort of plastic which is made by these
really big machines."  I was unpressed.  Armed with my newest piece of
general knowledge, I went around showing off how much I knew and
scoffing at the ignorance of all the people who never knew this before
or didn't believe me.

Chris laughed under his breath all along, and it would sometimes be
several months before he'd undo the damage.  It wouldn't matter who
told me the truth; the original teller had to change the story or I
would remain confused and in doubt.  Chris thought that my nadvet6
would change with education.  When it came to this sort of na:ivetL6,
he was wrong.

Chris wasn't a complete opportunist.  In some ways I think he did care
about me.  One time he met my father through his business and invited
him back to the flat for a cup of tea.

It was awkward.  I hadn't seen much of my father for a few years,
except for the few times when I'd passed his workplace.  Nor had I seen
my mother.  In the meantime my mother had not mentioned my existence to
anyone who didn't know of me.  To those who did, she got out of having
to explain anything by enthusiastically telling them that I was a slut
and a drug addict.  Because I was not around to disprove it, this was
eventually accepted by some; who showed sympathy toward her where
before had been only blame and silence.

Here was my father sitting on my couch, in my living room, in my
flat.

He laughed and joked as though he accepted me exactly as I was and
always had.  He had such a good time that evening that he invited
himself back.

My father and I had never really been allowed to talk to each other
freely since I was about three years old.  He had always been barked
down by my mother, who jealously insisted that he should not "waffle
back at me."  It was assumed that anything I said as a child was not
much more than mindless chatter, and my mother was not going to
encourage this by letting someone talk to me on my own level.

My father's actions became his words-his laugh, the tone of his husky
voice, the way he sang or whistled, and the way he would make objects
speak.

He would make the cats dance and sing.  He would make a matchbox talk
to a cigarette packet.  When he came around to the flat, he hadn't
changed.  Chris had never really seen me like this.  It made him feel
even less important.

My father had never encouraged me to do anything, though he was
enthusiastic about anything about which I was ent siastic.  I guess he
was a bit like a cross between the real me and Carol.  He made my
return to school seem like an adventure, and I began to look forward to
it, not just as an effort to be more like Mary and more acceptable to
her, but also as though it was possibly "that special something" that
was missing in my life.  I decided that if my answers were to be found
at school, then come hell or high water, I was going to find those
answers, even if it killed me.

I had paid my forty dollars.  I had selected the subjectsincluding
biology and sociology-I had to take in order to take psychology.  I was
going to be like Mary.  I had also decided to take music.  English was
compulsory.

IT was my first day.  I was as pleased as Punch and looked the part,
having taken great effort to look impressive.  The only thing that was
missing was a hanky pinned to my jac*et.

I went to biology dass.  The teacher tried to test our knowledge by
asking what we knew about how plants five.  My hand was up in a shot.

"They eat dirt and drink water," I said proudly.  Everyone fell about
laughing.  They thought I was a comedian.  I was deadly serious and
didn't know what they were laughing about.  The teacher asked one of
the students to explain the process of photosynthesis.  The student did
this with ease.  The teacher asked what happens to the plant's waste
products.  Unperturbed, my hand was up with all the urgency of a child
about to wet itself.  The teacher, wanting to be encouraging,
acknowledged me.  "They do it into the dirt," I said proudly.

More laughs.  "Not really," answered the teacher carefully, keeping a
more or less straight face.  He got someone else to explain.  By this
stage, I think people were unsure as to whether I was trying to be
funny or whether I was a complete moron.  To my way of reasoning, it
was simple.

I thought my answer was entirely logical and therefore must have been
right.  I was a bit bored by the prospect of having to learn other
people's answers by heart.

ENGLISH WAS DIFFERENT.  There were no truly right or wrong answers.  We
were expected to read a lot of novels and poetry, and my long-winded
yet evasive descriptions of what I had got out of what I'd read usually
sufficed as some sort of excuse for an intellectual response that
needed refinement in order to be understood.

English dass was about the use of symbolism to convey an impression.

If there was anything I was good at, it was the ability to create
pictures out of words to expl@ what might otherwise have been
disjointed strings of black print on white paper.

In English I had something of an advantage in that I'never read books
thoroughly and had avoided getting weighed down in the useless little
words, which seemed to steal away the story's meaning.  The teacher was
not looking for a blowby-blow repetition of the books we reviewed, but
an ability to capture the feel of them.

The books would be read out loud in class from cover to cover.

Sometimes I'd watch and not listen.  Sometimes I'd listen to the tone
of the reader's voice in order to try to make out what he or she was
understanding.

English class was also about creative writing.  Enthusiastically I
wrote my first piece of work, complete with the usual drawings over the
words in order to capture the feel.  The topic was to write about
something that had happened to you.  Naively, I wrote about the tragic
events that had led to my first meeting with Mary.  I had drawn tears
over the pages.

"Donna, this is supposed to be a piece of personal writing," said the
teacher.

"It is," I replied.

"Then who are you writing about?"  she asked.

"Myself," I raid confidently.

"Then, why have you referred to yourself as 'you' throughout the
essay?"  she asked.  I didn't know why at the time.

"Is this meant to be a joke?"  asked the teacher, referring to my
essay.

"No," I replied, feeling a little bit hurt.

"What have you done with the periods and capital letters?"  asked the
teacher.

"I put them in," I replied innocently.

"Yes, but you've just put them in in any old place," she said.

"I put them in so the reader can get some breath," I replied with
seeming logic.

"Are you serious?"  she asked.

The teacher drew a series of sentences upon the blackboard to test my
use of punctuation.  "Put in the periods and capital letters," she
commanded.  I approached the words upon the blackboard and put in
periods after every five or so letters, so that the reader could
breathe.  I then put capital letters on all the words in the sentence
that were things, because these were names of -things and all names had
capital letters.

"I think you are going to need some remedial work," said the teacher,
surprised and somewhat shocked.

"You gonna throw me out?"  demanded Willie.  "No," said the teacher.

I HAD BEEN looking forward to music.  I thought I might have a chance
to play a piano.  But the activities in the classroom were very tightly
controlled, and the piano was no exception.

There was no way around this.  The piano was kept locked at all
times.

We were all told to choose an instrument we would like to learn.  I
wanted to play the piano, but was told that I couldn't because I didn't
have one at home to practice on.  When it came down to that, I didn't
have one of anything to practice on.

Everyone was informed that they would have to pay for exams, which were
required in order to pass the course.  The cost of the exams was to be
eight dollars each.  It didn't take a genius to work out that someone
who was not even earning enough money to pay her share of the rent
could not afford the eight dollars a throw.  I gave up music and took
philosophy, though I had no idea what this was.

I DID NOT last very long in philosophy.  With the foulest look on my
face, my fists clenched, my arms stiffly by my sides, I stormed out of
the class after the first few days.

The teacher later asked me what the problem was.  "They talk bloody
Japanese in there," I said.  "I can't understand a word they are
saying."  He assured me that if I came back to class he would try not
to use "too many long words" and said he would not ask me any questions
so that I wouldn't get embarrassed.  I told him it was no use.  He told
me I would eventually get the hang of it.  He reminded me of Mr.
Reynolds.  I decided to give philosophy another chance.

I eventually did learn a lot of big words, and it was also a very free
class where there were really no right or wrong answers, so I didn't
find it too embarrassing.

The point of the class was to discuss the beliefs of certain people,
like Jesus Christ, among others.  I found it interesting to hear what
people believed in.  It was a bit like eavesdropping.  The way that
people criticized the ideas of famous people who were not there to
stand up for themselves brought out Willie's protective streak, and he
began to argue against anyone who tried to make a point.  The only
problem was that when people would challenge me about what Willie
personally believed, he would be completely at a loss.

Willie had learned to argue for any side but still believed in none.

For me, it was all a word game, but it was fun.  Besides, my teacher
liked me, and it was like having Mr.  Reynolds back all over again.

SOCIOLOGY WAS ALL about the effect of family, education, and social
class on making a person who they are.  Well, Mary was not a
sociologist, but this seemed to be similar to what she believed.  The
last year of therapy had taught me a lot about analyzing such things,
as well as about breaking down therapy into a system.  I then used this
system to try to understand the analyzer so I could work out how to be
like her.

The idea of social class became my primary, more impersonal way of
accounting for my feelings of "them" and "us."  In part Mary had helped
me to interpret things this way, which was a quite natural yet
subjective way of making sense of my feeling of not belonging in "the
world."  I certainly found it too frightening to own up to the secrets
of what "my world" versus "the world" really meant, even to myself.

I jumped at the opportunity to examine my dilemma by analyzing
something similar to, yet removed from, the real situation.

Mary was my mirror.  Mary came from a different class background.

Therefore, the fact that she felt a sense of belonging and I didn't
must have been due to this.  The fact that she did not dismiss the idea
made it true.

MOST OF ALL, I lived for psychology.  Though my teacher was as hard as
nails, I felt that she had some sort of respect for the effort I was
making.

A lot of psychology had to do with finding out how things worked.  The
subject of the mind was, for me, like the study of an object that
worked according to a system.  Systems were relatively predictable, the
sort of thing that came with guarantees.  I could respect this sort of
knowledge.

The textbook had a lot of pictures and diagrams, which made the rest of
the text easy to follow.  There were lots of big psychological terms to
be memorized, and all of it would add to my ability to take myself
apart and put myself back together.

I had discovered that my mind, too, was a system.  if I understood it,
then that was a form of protection.  I could learn to explain why I was
the way I was.  I could work out whether I was in fact mad or stupid,
and I could explain it as though I were that very symbol of
intelligence and sanity I so looked up to-my psychiatrist.

Nevertheless, I was not like Mary.  My language was filthy, coarse, and
uncontrolled.  My manners were almost nonexistent.  I took everything
extremely literally.  And I handed my work in on reused paper.

The psychology teacher handed back our work.  She had marked it purely
on content rather than on presentation.  She got to mine and announced
that she had to give me the highest mark in the class even though she
had never had to read from so disgusting a piece of paper.  I had used
white typing fluid to go over an entire page of previous wcirk before
writing my new work on it and handing it in.  I was poor, it was true,
but it never occurred to me that the whitener probably cost more than
the paper I had used it on.

MY BIOLOGY TEACHER found out that I could not add or subtract.  I had
been confused by my earlier high school teacher who had asked me to
show all of my workingout on paper.  I had my own system up until then,
which had worked just fine.

When I couldn't learn theirs, I had also assumed that, although
correct, if I couldn't show my calculations, then my system was no
good, either.

As I had never learned their system, I continued unsuccessfully to try
to use it, never reverting to my own logic.

The biology teacher suggested that I use the calculator.  I didn't know
how.  He tried to show me how it worked.  When he asked me to work out
a percentage of something, I tried to find the "of' button and gave up,
furious and frustrated.  My teacher realized I had big problems.

My remedial math teacher was a dream.  She was not at all like a
teacher.

She had plaited blond hair and reminded me of Elizabeth, the girl at
the special school fifteen years earlier, whose hair I'd reached out to
touch.

I watched her work things out on paper.  A smile would break out across
my face.  "That's great," I'd say.  "Can you show me how you did that
trick?"  She would try to explain that math was not a series of magic
tricks, and I would sit there trying hard to believe her.

There were some things I could work out just fine, but, unlike
mathematics in school, I could not say how I reached the answers.

Eventually, however, she helped me to learn a reasonable amount of
math.

She was very proud of me, and I was very proud of myself.

MARY WAS VERY proud of me, too.  I sill went and saw her every week,
but our sessions were progressively becoming more social than strictly
professional.  I wonder if she realized that it was this acceptance
that raised my self-esteem and motivated and inspired me more than
anything else.

There was not really so much to be gained by my lean-dng to be more
social with people in general, as I continued to close most of them out
and most of them continued to find me weird.

I had reached out to Mary as somebody I could trust in "the world."

She had accepted me as more than a patient; she had accepted me
personally.  I had become attached to her in my own distant way.  In my
mind she had become Carol's long-awaited mythical mother.  Yet, as all
relationships existed within me rather than between myself and others,
there was only one way to bring this attachment inescapably into my own
world.  Willie compulsively set about becoming like this person who
symbolized protection, strength, and self-control.

I was swinging from one extreme to the other, as both Carol and Willie
were each other's antithesis.  Yet as the trapeze swung ever higher,
and each horizon broadened with my new experiences, I began to catch
glimpses of my true self.

m I MANAGED TO find myself another flat, despite the fact that I had
only two cleaning jobs to support myself with.  I had no bed.  I had a
couch and a coffee table from the Salvation Army, but I had left Chris
with almost everything else One of my neighbors gave me an old radio
that made a loud hum.  This became my best friend.

I was earning twenty dollars a week; the rent on the flat was
thirty-five.

I was living on a wish and a prayer when a part-time job I had applied
for came through just in time.

I cycled down to my new job in the take away food shop almost every
night after school.  I ate the scraps that were left over at the end of
each night, and nobody knew that this, and the meals my old friend
Robyn was supplying, was the only food I had to eat.

Cheryl, one of the girls I worked with, caught on and, against the
establishment's regulations, began to sneak food into the bottom of my
usual take-home cardboard lunch box full of chips.  She would fill up
this box with chips for me each night.  One night I got to the bottom
of the box and found pieces of warm roast chicken.  I cried.

My father started coming around.  I was grateful for the company.  He
would take me out shopping.  I would buy my usual packets of jelly and
a packet of rice.  He would try to impress the castders with the amount
of money he spent on groceries.  He even bought chocolate biscuits for
his dog.  I paid for my own shopping.  He didn't seem to notice my
poverty, and I never drew his attention to it.

One day I dreamily suggested that he loan me the deposit on a flat I'd
seen in an advertisement.  I would pay the weekly installments so that
I would never again be homeless.  The deposit was four thousand
dollars.  "I'd love to," he said, "but I'd never have that kind of
money."  The next week he told me how he had just given my mother four
thousand dollars to cover the cost of switching places between her
bathtub and toilet, putting special mirrored tiles on the bathroom
wall, carpeting the bathroom floor, and changing the stainless steel
taps for gold-plated ones.

If learning had made me able to see such cruelty and injustice for the
first time, I wondered if it was really worth it.  Then I thought of
Mary and told myself that I would be like her, and never so inhuman and
materialistic as this.

I HAD PASSED the school year with average to high marks.  It was an
incredible feeling, and Mary and I were both quite over the moon about
it.  But with the enthusiasm came the fear of it all ending.

My structured life of relative consistency was coming to an end.  I
felt like I was drowning in the uncertainty of the future.

In the midst of the glamour of celebrations on the last day of school,
I stood alone, as always, watching people talking with one another.  I
had not made many friends among the students and had spent most of my
spare time either alone in the cafeteria or up in the atmosphere of the
college counseling service, where I felt so at home.

A student from my class approached me and surprisingly asked me for my
address.

I had taken on my class as I had taken on my family: a one-woman war
against the masses I vaguely tanned "them."  In Turn I had been
shunned, and even worse, some had approached me on their own but
apologize d that they couldn't speak to me in front of their friends,
who thought I was mad.  Yet this girl had blatantly walked away from
her group of friends to approach me.  She gave me her address.  I gave
her mine.

At Christmas time I received a card from this girl.  She said that,
although she had never been dose to me, she had been inspired by me and
had learned a lot about Rfe by the courage and endurance she had seen
me display.

She felt guilty for having had a privileged life and wrote that she had
decided to become a nurse.  Tears came to my eyes as I read this, alone
in my empty flat at Christmas.  It was the first time I realized that I
had inspired anybody, though I had done so not through courage but
through the dual motivations of hope and fear.

I HAD STOPPED seeing Mary on a professional basis.  I had come such a
long way since that first day I had come into the hospital in pieces,
mentally, emotions , an p Our therapy sessions had become coffee
sessions.  More to the point, they had become too personal to continue
on a purely professional level.  We had decided to stay in touch, and
for once in my LIFE, I kept to that promise.

It was now possible for me to don that uniform I had dreamed of and
walk into a bank teller's position.  My math, though much unproved, was
still not up to scratch.  It wasn't this, however, that changed my
mind.  I had come further than to still believe so simplistically that
wearing a uniform would bring me the respect I had so wanted as the
foulmouthed little girl who worked in a factory.

I had survived a year with virtually no income, and my marks qualified
me for entry to a university.  There I would be eligible for a tertiary
education allowance, which ironically was not available at the time for
the secondary level.  I decided to go to a university.

IN SOME ways Mary had been right.  My nal-veto, and the way it left me
floundering socially, had been compounded by my lack of education.  On
the other hand, my lack of education had served as a good excuse for
it.

The more educated I became and the wider the social group I mixed in,
the more I came to be seen as an eccentric and comic figure when my
newfound sophistication would slip and I'd do or say something far more
representative of a fool then of a scholar.  I still had a few
advantages.  I was only nineteen years old, and I could always blame it
on my class background.

I had two months to wait until the beginning of the university term.  I
had applied for several courses, including youth work, social work,
welfare, arts, and interior design.

The caring professions appealed to that part of me that already had a
strong protective instinct and had come to mirror Mary.  Arts appealed
to the indecisive part of me that could not fie itself down to any
particular choice of subject.  The subject that was probably closest to
my truest nature was the one I took least seriously: interior design.

This appealed to that same part of me that had created miniature worlds
in the special school sixteen years before.  This was the part of me
that loved to organize things according to shape, color, and pattern,
and fefl in love with the things in people's homes far more than I fen
for the people themselves.  As always, in the end, this part of me lost
out and the other two struck a compromise.  I took the arts degree and
transferred during my second year to the School of Social Sciences.

FINANCING MY SMDM didn't seem like it was going to be too much of a
problem.  At this stage, fees had not been introduced and the education
allowance seemed only to be a matter of sending in a form.  I was
wrong.  It took six months for the first payment to come through.

My job at the take away shop had been cut back, and I could no longer
afford my flat.  It was ffime days before New Year's Eve, and I was
homeless.

I had tried place after place to get a room in a shared house.  Finally
some people took pity on me and called me back as I walked away
dejected from yet another attempt to get a room.

I spent New Year's Eve alone in the darkness of this new home.  I
played a Bette Nfidler record called "Friends" and cried at my
inability to sustain any real sense of belonging or attachment, and
thought about the many well-meaning people I had walked away from ben
and time again Finally I called up my family.  My mother was partying,
and strangers kept grabbing the phone and drunkenly wishing me a Happy
New Year.  I could hear the music in the background and imagined people
dancing and laughing.  I wondered what it would be like to be there.  I
tried to imagine what it might have felt like if I could just once have
felt like part of things.  I hung up and counted the seconds to
midnight.  "Happy New Year, Donna," I said to myself.  I burned a
candle and, watching it, fell asleep.

THE iTy TERN began, and I tried desperately to get lost in it all.

I had chosen linguistics and philosophy on the basis of having walked
down the hallway and asked someone what the subject was, if it was
good, and if I should take it.  I also took sociology, in pursuit of my
goal of becoming like Mary.

I was completely lost.  The place was far too big, with too many walls,
too many people, and too many fluorekent lights.  I went around
everywhere turning them off.  When I didn't, they made me fan asleep.

I slept in the middle of my philosophy classes.  When I wasn't sleeping
with my eyes closed, I slept with them open.  Eventually the teacher
had said I was quite simply "scatty."  I had tried to explain that I
couldn't follow the class timetable, that I couldn't understand the
instructions set out in the handbook, and that I couldn't get anything
but words out of what I was reading.

The head of the department caned me "a complete and utter moron."

I enjoyed linguistics.  Linguistics took language apart and put it back
together.  It showed how all language can be broken down into different
types of systems.  The class was a series of diagrams and cycles.  I
took to this like a duck to water.

In sociology I tried so hard to do well that I tied myself up in
knots.

I tried towrite and wound up giving the teacher a handful of evasive,
jargonladen, disjointed sentences.

I was sent off to remedial English.  The problem, however, was simply
that expressing my own opinion and behefsexpressing what I felt-was
simply too threatening.  "Evasive," "impersonal," and "disjointed"
captured how I found things very accurately.

Socially nothing had changed.  As always, I had made few friends, and
things remained this way for two years.  Carol found it very hard to
attend classes, but Willie was a born scholar.

The wait for my aBoWance had one saving grace.  I had, with the back
payments of my allowance, bought myself an old piano.  I learned to
love and live for the time spent with my piano.  I began to write music
straight away.

I could mimic other people's music with relative ease, but I learned
truly to express my feelings through the creation and playing of my own
music.  At first I wrote classical music.  I could not read sheet
music, so I could not as yet write my music down on paper properly.  I
had simply to remember my pieces, which usually sufficed.  As these
pieces became more complex, I developed a strategy of writing down
everything using a series of dots and dashes of differing lengths, and
learned to write the pitch over these dots and dashes using their
letter names and arrows showing whether they went up or down in
pitch.

Eventually I brought home some music theory books and taught myself a
bit about standard notation, though largely I still relied upon my own
system.

Through my music I began more and more to reach and express my true
self.

My music spoke of the things I loved, of the wind and the rain, of
freedom and hope, of happiness in simplicity, and of triumph over
confusion.  However, the closer I came to bringing myself out, the
greater became the fears, which caused serious conflicts between my
inner self and the characters I used to communicate with the outside
world.

I BEGAN To have night terrors again.

I got up and went into the bathroom in a sort of dream state.  I caught
a glimpse of the hallway light shining under the closed door of the
flat.  It triggered something, and I felt myself falling, losing a grip
on any sense of the true reality around me.

Like the day I had run out on my job and made my way to the hospital, I
again forgot where I was or why I was there.  Terror swept over me.  I
was on my hands and knees whimpering like a baby.  I felt the coldness
and hardness of the tiles and looked at my hands sprawled out on
them.

I couldn't breathe.  I felt the fear of the unknown, which lurked
somewhere in the same room.  I whimpered, terrified, lost, and
helpless.  I curled up, shaking with fear, and rocked like a baby.  I
tried to speak but I couldn't find how to.  I cried myself back to
sleep.

This disturbed me profoundly.  I had been through two years of therapy
only to find that I was sill vulnerable to these ghostly reminders of a
self that had been buried long ago but refused to die.

I phoned Mary.  I told her that I felt there were obviously some things
that I still hadn't sorted out.  I felt that these things lay somewhere
in my past and it was time I began to unbury them' I Went around to my
mother's house and climbed in through the laundry window.  I sat in the
big empty house; the ghosts of the past that had haunted me through so
many nightmares seemed to sit around the table with me.

The door opened.  Voices entered.  Not surprised at my behavior, but at
my presence, family members rat down.  Willie glared at my mother
hatefully, demanding answers.

I WENT TO see the doctors who had seen me as a child.  I wanted to hear
what was on my medical records.  I also went to the primary school I
had attended and stood at the foot of the tiny staircase that led to
the Psych and Guidance room -an attic that the school now no longer
used.  I visited my first high school, from which I had disappeared on
my trip to the country.  Finally I went to see an aunt who had been a
regular visitor to the house during my early childhood.

My aunty was surprised to see me.  It was the first time I'd visited
her in about six years.  She had always been very fond of me.

I told her that I had found out that my birth certificate was not a
copy of the original; that it was a "second schedule" and that the
registrar had told me to go and ask my parents to give me the answers
to why this was so.  I felt that here was a good place to start.

I had once been told that my aunty's little girl had overheard a
conversation between her parents about how I could veer sister.  I told
my aunty that the adoption agency had identified my certificate as an
adoption certificate, and I wanted to know why.  I grilled her for the
answers.

My aunty told me the story behind my mother's neverending threats to
put me in a children's home.  My aunty and my uncle had discussed the
poss o a ting me.  had, however, been put into my grandparents' care by
my father, and as my grandparents lived in a shack in our backyard, I
remained at home.  Upon the death of my grandmother, my parents once
again became my full custodians.

I looked at my aunty and wondered what it might have been like growing
up with her, with a little sister instead of a little brother.  Still,
I wouldn't have swapped my early experiences with my little brother for
the world.

My aunty was cornered.  She told me everything she could remember from
the moment I was born.

When it came to everything that was wrong with me-my not speaking to
people, my aversion to closeness, my preoccupation with the unreachable
world within my own mind -to her it was simple: my mother had caused
it.

There was much that justified this opinion, but Willie examined what
she said from an objective observer's point of view.

I had noted the tragedy of what she had seen with the pleasant,
beautiful, and hypnotic experiences of mere color, sensation, and sound
that had held me spellbound until I was about three and a half.  I had
been unaware of the pain of sores from unchanged diapers or my mother's
neglect or brutality until I began to become aware of people's efforts
at getting my attention.

The hypnotic fascination I had for the spots in the air left me with
very little sensation of my own body except for the shock and repulsion
of the invasion of physical closeness.  Even the comfort from being
picked up by my grandmother was found, not in snuggling up to her, but
in holding on to the chain around her neck or enmeshing my fingers in
her crocheted cardigan.

There was something overwhelming about giving in to physical touch.  It
was the threat of losing all sense of separareness between myself and
the other person.  Like being eaten up, or drowned by a tidal wave,
fear of touch was the same as fear of death.

My aunty had recalled many memories of my early childhood, but none had
really struck a chord.  Willie stood'there remembering many of these,
but did so without any feeling for the self who had experienced them.

Then, as my aunty recalled an event when I was three, it triggered
something, and my mind replayed it in all its vividness and horror.

I was back there.  I could see rpy aunty across the room.  I could hear
the pleading tone in her voice and sensed danger.  I was watching
everything around me happen as though in slow motion, though still
moving far too fast for me to be able to m-spond in time.

I looked up at the figure of my mother.  I shot silent glances in the
direction of the pleading voice from across the room.  I looked down at
the opened tin of cold spaghetti in front of me and was aware of the
fork in my hand.

I had not heard the introduction: the threat of death against my
spilling a single drop of food.  I never connected the repeated
slapping with the event.

It was just something that came to me from out of the blue as a series
of shocks.

I felt the dishcloth being forced into my mouth.  It made me gag.  I
was choking as I vomited up against it.

The pleading voice was at war with the cutting snarl of my mother's
voice.

I glanced at the black and white striped cord as though it was a
snake.

It began to whip my face.  I could not cry, or speak, or scream.  I
looked at my aunty and collapsed on the cold smooth surface of the
table in front of me and vomited through my nose.  I thought I had
drowned.

Willie stood there back in the present, with the sound Of my aunty's
sobs begging me not to make her tell any more.

There was a rising choke of vomit in my throat and a deafening scream
inside my head that couldn't get out.  Willie glared at my aunty, and
the stifled tears had not even made it to his eyes.  In a calm, hard,
and stilted voice Willie had asked why she had done nothing.

Without waiting for a reply, I went wandering down the hallway of my
aunty's house like an automaton.

My cousin's room branched off to one side.  I looked through the
door.

My cousin had been given the furniture from my old room as a child.

There on my old bed was the same bedspread, white with fine yellow
flowers embroidered on it.

The bed was white and curved and smooth, and I could remember tracing
its shape with my hand over and over.  I could remember biting into the
wood and feeling it give way with a fine crackling sound as the paint
chipped away.

Against another wall was the matching dressing table.  Its three
folding mirrors seemed to have captured the ghost of Carol, who had
stood in front of it many times, whispering the name Donna and trying
to feel it.

The mirror seemed to call me.  I approached it and looked deeply into
the eyes of the girl looking back.  Willie was gone.

Against the other wall was the wardrobe-the wardrobe in which Carol had
left me behind.  I held my breath in front of it.  I ran my fingers
along the pattern of the wardrobe door's handle.  I was afraid and felt
as though I was being swept up in a sort of magic.  The magic of
childhood.  I opened the door and got in.  In the darkness, dosing the
door behind me, I sat down and curled up in a ban.

After awhile I got out of the cupboard and left the room in a hurry.  I
left my aunty's house like a cornered rat that had suddenly found a way
out.  I had begun to touch upon the answers to what was ntissing.  I
went home, curled up in a ball, and rocked for three days.

I HAD MOVED in order to live up-country, an hour's drive each way from
the university.  I enjoyed the drive every day, often getting lost as
the road went around one bend after another.  I often arrived and knew
only that I had driven by the fact that my hands were on the steering
wheel when I stopped.

The country was absolutely delightful, with the smell of the rain on
the wind and the feel of dirt, grass, and dead leaves beneath my
feet.

I had cats, and I had a vegetable garden and a special place to put my
piano.

The place I shared sat at the foot of a small mountain.  A mountain
stream trickled over a steep path of naturally multicolored pebbles.

There were trees everywhere, and 'each seemed to have its own
personality.  The mountain stream ran down into a creek, which ran
directly past the back of this house.  I'd cross the creek and throw
pebbles onto the opposite bank, creating an island, then go and sit
upon it, safe, untouchable, and alone.

I WAS -ONE.  My older brother had invited me to his new home as a
special gesture on my birthday.  I had insisted that my mother not be
there.  This agreed, I consented to go.

My father and younger brother were there, yet it was as though they
were miles away.  The atmosphere was strained and eerie.

My younger brother felt like a complete stranger.  Looking at his
almost adult body, I was disturbed by his presence and could not
recognize him as my brother, though my logic persisted in telling me he
was.

My father was tense and distant.  He was perfomiing with all the fervor
of a circus clown, trying to keep the atmosphere light.  My older
brother and I threw cutting remarks across the table at one another as
Willie celebrated my twenty-first birthday.

Not unexpectedly, the whole evening came to blows.  Willie was trouble
looking for a place to happen, and as usual, he got it.  Willie looked
at the strangers surrounding me and knew that the sense of belonging
that evaded me would not be found here.

I BEGAN TO think a lot about my grandfather.  I began to wonder what
had happened to me that had caused him to die in "my world" two years
before he had passed away in "the world."  I decided to go to the
cemetery for a visit.

I sat upon his grave.  I had not visited it for eleven years.  I
remembered how we had gone to visit it when Tom was three.  My father
had told Tom that Pop lived in there under the ground.  Tom had tried
to find a way into the grave and became frustrated and angry that we
were not able to go in.

A leaf tumbled upon the wind across the grave and landed UP against my
body.  I picked it up and said: "Thanks."

On the way home I pulled into an isolated service station in a
semirural suburb.  A goat began to nibble at my tire.  I asked the
attendant if the goat would do it any harm.  He replied that he was
going to do harm to the goat and said that he was going to shoot the
goat that night.  "No, you're not," I said boldly.  "I'll take him home
with me."  The attendant was happy to let me have him.

On the way home I began to cry.  My vision was a blur as I watched the
road in front of me through a blanket of tears.  After sixteen years it
had suddenly occurred to me that my grandfather had not deliberately
intended to die.  I named the goat after my grandfather.

I FELT RELAy at home living in the house in the country, and the long
drive to school each day gave me time to dream and think.  Yet I still
hadn't found the mythical sense of home that seemed to evade me.  I
awoke one day from a dream that told me I was not going to stay where I
was.

I had dreamed of a dark-haired young man.  Though I had never met him
in my waking life, I knew his name, his family background, the sort of
person he was, and his way of life.  He and I had a great friendship,
the likes of which I had never had with any man I'd so far lived
with.

In the dream I had been sharing a house with this man but was now
sharing a house with a woman who, curiously, I recognized as an
acquaintance I had met through my friend SteBa when I was fourteen.  In
the dream this woman and I became best friends.

I dreamed that it was again my birthday.  The three of us stood around
a dining table that was draped in an antique lace tablecloth.  We had
all raised our glasses (crystal glasses I had later been given by a
friend).  "Happy Birthday," these two had said.

I told a friend about the dream in detail.  "Looks like I'm leaving," I
had said.  Two years later the dream came true, exactly as I had seen
and described, down to the last detail.

I was Now in my third year at the university.  I had learned to make
sense of sociology in terms of my own experiences.  I had dropped
philosophy and began to choose subjects that were more closely aligned
to the areas in which I thought I might find the answers I was looking
for.  I had left behind MY compulsion to become like Mary in the face
of something even more valuable.  I had begun to try to find out about
myself.

I had become known for my strangely detached and outspoken viewpoints
on the usefidness or lack thereof of what I was learning.  I had begun
to earn popularity as myself to an extent.

Each side of me had begun to become more closely aligned to my true
self, though they were still miles apart from one another.  It was as
though they were all one continuum and my real self was kept protected,
unexpressed, within the middle.  At their extremes, the characters I
had become had denied my existence and lost awareness of me.  At other
times, they were depersonalized, communicative, worldly versions of
myself that were able to sound out people and enviroruments for a self
that could not cope with things of such complexity.

if my true self was merely my subconscious, then by some tragedy it
hadn't completely gone to sleep.  If it were my conscious mind, then it
was like a waking dream state that had not truly woken up.  The depth
of the feeling I felt as myself made all else feel empty, manufactured,
and two-dimensional by comparison.The world these two communicative
versions of myself endured was, to me, a complexity of confusing and
invasive inflictions.  Thus, everything my characters created had to be
torn apart in my effort to break free.  Carol's friendships were torn
apart and discarded.  Willie's strong ideas were constantly turned on
their head and discarded-always at the point at which they were held so
dogmatically.

Life behind glass.  Living death made tolerable.

Pure fear of the one touching touch, Which could smash the glass
forever, And send the dancer plummeting from her tightrope, Into the
knowing of the unknown.

Today it seemed the world was a scene In a book of secrets from which
we tore a page.

A touching touch shattered the glass between two worlds, And the cold
wind of uncertainty whistled a chill Through body and soul, entwined
for the first time, Like vines wild and free.

Bryn was unusual.  ]Ke stood out from the crowd.  He was quiet and
solitary, but there was something more, something quite different.

Other people would speak to me when they wanted to get to know me.

Bryn would simply come and exist within my company.  Bryn was able to
communicate but was very hard to reach through the usual kind of
communication.  He had sensed a differentness about me, too.  As we
clicked, the rest of the world around us disappeared.

Never, since the girl I had met in the park when I was three, had
anyone been able to capture me so totally.  I was either in Bryn's
world or he was in mine.  Perhaps we existed in a world altogether
different, and until now, I had never found any other person who
existed in it, too.

Bryn and I simply found ourselves in the same places.  We could not say
what we felt; we merely sensed it, and, in the style that the respect
for distance called for, we said nothing.

In fact Bryn and I communicated very little at all.  We communicated
via our discussion of nature and the things around us, poems we had
read or written, and films we had seen.  We never discussed what the
significance of any of these things may have been for each other.  In
fact we spoke to ourselves about such things far more than to each
other, and simply allowed the other person the privilege of listening
in.

I began to brush Bryn's hair.  He bought me lunch, and we shared the
food on the grass, beneath a special tree.  We both found it extremely
difficult to look into each other's eyes, and when we did it was again
the frightening feeling of losing oneself.

People said we were in love with each other.  I defensively told them
not to degrade what I had with Bryn by any comparison with a usual sort
of relationship.

During the year I had grown so close to Bryn, I had never lost my fear
and absolute nervousness at seeing him.  Sometimes this had made seeing
him a torture almost impossible to tolerate.  I stuttered and shook
much of the time.

Because he was like me, he had all the right responses and merely
looked into space, never letting it register that he noticed.

Basically such things did not matter, and it was this' simple
unconditional acceptance that meant that in each other's company we
were not "being there for each other"; we were simply "being."

There was no desperateness to reach out and touch each other in "the
real world."  The only thing that mattered was that someone had been
able to touch me emotionally within my world."

One day we silently and without any deliberateness touched hands.  I
was terrified.  The pain of this emotionally touching touch was almost
more than I could bear.  We sat side by side, ignoring the fact our
hands were touching, and allowed ourselves to experience the feeling.

I felt as though I was going to die.

I WAS GIVING a girl from the university a lift home.  As we drove past
the special school I had been to as a small child I pointed out that I
had gone there.

"You couldn't have," she said.  "That's a special school."

"What do you mean?"  I asked her.

"It's a school for special-needs children," she explained.  "My mother
works there as a speech therapist."

"It must have changed," I said naively.

"No, it's always been a special school," she said.  "You can ask my
mother."

Bryn and I lay stretched out on the grass.  I told him what this girl
had said.  "I went to a special school, too," Bryn confided.  "I had
been sent away because my parents thought I was mad," he said.  He told
me how he spent time in the "home" and that he had had trouble
communicating with people.  His parents had thought that he might have
been schizophrenic.

Bryn didn't have delusions about the people around him.  He did,
however, often feel painfully uncomfortable with them.  Bryn was not
tortured by hallucinations, only by his communication problems and his
fear of emotional contact, which he had been able to handle almost
better than me.  If Bryn was schizophrenic, then I must have been so,
too.

The thought was frightening; yet, from what I had read of
schizophrenia, I didn't fit the description of symptoms terribly
well.

Though I feared closeness and felt people were invasive, these weren't
deluded or paranoid feelings.  Though objects were sometimes reduced to
their more simplistic characteristics-color, sound, sensation-I never
felt threatened by this.

Though I behaved wildly at times, or with completecomplacency at
others, it was not a matter of delusion; it stemmed from a shock
reaction triggered by any type of closeness, from physical proximity to
the mental closeness of undersianding I had trouble with words, but
this wasn't due to disordered thinking, and I never jumbled them up
like a tossed salad.  I either spoke them as emotionlessly mimicked
repetitions of what other people had said, used a strange accent,
stuttered, or found myself unable mentally to form the words to speak
at all.  all of these problems were due'to fear of the overwhelming
intensity of my very untouched emotions.

I had wanted to communicate and had created personas with which I could
communicate and relieve some of my frustration and try to prove my
intelligence and sanity.  These, however, were not mythical monsters;
they were the family I had created for myself within my insular and
extremely lonely unreachable world.

They served as translators to overcome the communication problems
between "the world" and "my world."

I felt as though a ghost were watching me as I allowed people to play
to my characters, to which I'd res accordingly.  It was more like an
out-of-body experience.  This had been happening for so long that, as
an actress in my body, in a state of automation, I had lost sight of
the controls that could bring me back down to earth.  Mine were extreme
versions of experiences of many people and didn't seem specific to
schizophrenics-I TELEPHONED my father.

"Why was I sent to that special school?"  I demanded.

"What special school?"  he said evasively.

"You know what I'm talking about," I said, and named the school to help
jog his memory.

"Oh, that school," he said in sudden realization.  I explained what I
had been told by the girl whose mother worked there.

"What was wrong with me?"  I demanded.  "Was I mad?"

"No, listen," he said, "You were a little bit funny when you were
small, but that was your mother's fault.  There's nothing wrong with
you."  like I aded.  "Please, I don't blame "But what was I e?"  I Pe
anyone.

I really need to know.  What was I like?"

"They thought you were autistic," my father said.  I asked him why.

u and you "Well, you wouldn't let anyone come near you talked a bit
funny.  You used to go round saying what everyone else said all the
time.  But it's no wonder.  Your mother used to hit you and shout at
you an the time.  No one listened to the things you said," he explained
defeatedly- I thanked him.

I didn't know what "autistic, 'really meant.  I simply thought it meant
withdrawn.  So!  I was withdrawn.  so what?  I knew that all along.  I
knew the problems I had with being touched, with people saying kind
things to me or wanting to get to know me.

I knew, from my mother, that for a long time I had only repeated the
things other people said.  I still did not understand the way that this
had affected so many other things in my life.  I decided that I must
have been mad, and buried my head in psychology books in order to find
out just what it was exactly that I was afflicted with.  None of these
books made reference to autism, and I remainedas before, in the dark.

I moved back to the city, into the backyard of a shared house, where I
lived in a trailer I had bought for myself.  My piano lived inside the
house.  I lived out in the back garden with my two cats; I had left my
goat where he belonged, in the mountains.

I spent all of my spare time writing music, and I had now begun to
write songs, which began with the inspiration of knowing Bryn.  When I
wasn,t writing music, I was buried in books on social psychology.

I had been forced to dose myself off from Bryn.  Unlike the
relationships with Other people I'd terminated in my life, he hadn't
stopped existing.  I simply felt too real in his company and felt I had
to run away.  For me this was a clear distinction.

There were some people I left; there were others I ran away from.

Problems arose for me when the people I left tried to hold on to me
because they thought I was running away, and the few I ever ran away
from saw me as merely leaving them and felt rejected and discarded.

These seemingly subtle differences arose from striking differences in
the emotions I felt at the time-all or nothing.

I retreated very strongly into being nothing again.  The fight to
regain and hold on to my true self had now reversed itself.  I was not
leaving; I was running.

Carol took the stage with a vengeance.  This time my character was
positively manic.  Life became a constant barrage of nonstop parries
and laughter and dancing and people.  Willie sat in the director's
chair.  Carol turned back the hands of time and was now playing the
part of the perpetual teenager.

I SEGAN To spend a lot of time soci@g at the university.

Tim lived on campus.  When I was first introduced to him I casually
waved hello and couldn't have given two hoots about him one way or the
other.  He was tall and dark, and was studying medicine, as had his
parents.  He wasn't terribly impressed by me, either.  We simply went
on coexisting.  I had not yet realized that he was the man I'd seen two
years before in my dream.

run was into music, so was I. Somehow I had actually forgotten that I
arrived in a trailer in the backyard of that shared house with a piano
of my own at home.  I began to spend a lot of time playing the piano in
the university music room.

Tim AND I found each other listening to one another's music.  Tim
didn't write very much but played beaudwy.  Carol gave him the right to
hear the songs and music that Donna was never sociable enough to
play.

run loved the songs and had a beautiful voice.  He took the songs out
of the shadows of Donna's world, where they had been shared with no
one, and brought them out into the light.

Carol sang along.

Tim loved the songs as though they were his own and began to relate to
Carol through the music.  Somehow Tim triggered another "on" button,
and Donna began to emerge, not waning to sing the songs anymore and
wanting to take the music away from him.

At the same time as I resented him singing my songs, Tim was able to
captivate me with his splendid ability to play my music almost as well
as I had heard it within my mind at the time of writing it.  In my mind
I heard an orchestra as I composed; Tim's playing almost made that
real.

I began to close myself off from people once again.  I had moved into a
one-room bungalow with my piano and would only emerge to make tape
recordings of the songs I was wo d producing week after week.  With
each new song, I ut disappear to Tim's place to play him a copy of my
latest piece apologetically.

Tim had become my closest friend since Trish when I was seven years
old.

I began to sleep in Tim's room beside his bed.

My relationship with Tan was different from that with Bryn.  I was not
so afraid of my closeness with Tim; he had ability to get close to me,
but didwt capture me in the an same way that Bryn had.  With Tim, I was
still able to escape into the characters when gs got too muc , yet when
I h with him I felt it was okay to feel only three years old.  I was
felt that at times he was only three years old, too.

Tim and I moved into a house together.  From his room across the
hallway, he would sing me to sleep.  I let him brush my hair and
invited him into my world.

Tim was the sort of person who accepted people exactly as he found
them.

Mentally Tim had his act together, though he was shy and, like me, hid
behind a number of very convincing faqades- Also like me, he had walked
away from every person he had established seemingly close relationships
with.  Somehow I never became one of those statistics.

We established a marvelous sense of home.  Everything in it was our
special something or other.  It was a three-year-old's paradise.  In a
childlike way, I grew to love Tim and he grew to love me.  Sometimes we
would talk so much that we would get no sleep.

We began to spend every waking moment together.  It was the holidays,
and we drove to work together, met for lunch, phoned each other up to
say hello, and waited anxiously to see one another when we got home.

The realization of how close we were becoming, as always, signaled the
beginning of the end.

I began to fear Tim.  There was a greater sort of depth in his eyes,
and I became consciously aware that I had come to mean a great deal to
him.

We went dancing together.  I felt relatively safe in his company, as
though he had the ability to scare off anything that frightened me.  As
we were dancing, sudden waves of fear washed over me.  I looked into
Tim's eyes, searching for a way out of the fear, which I could not
express.  Tim leaned over and told me that, if there was any woman he
wanted to be with, I was that person.

It was like a slap in the face.  I was frozen in time and space.  My
body continued to dance, but his words had killed off the sense of
security I had found in him in one fell swoop.  Tim became quite
clearly an adult.

Carol stepped in as she had before: shallow, sociable, and skilled in
the art of adult relationships- The house shook with laughter and
music.  Carol sang her heart out, and Donna disappeared.  Carol looked
up SteHa's number in the phone book and invited around the girl who so
long ago had used Carol's eccentric behavior as an excuse for her
own.

SteRa loved to go out to nightclubs.  Carol dragged TiTn along.

"@N!"  CIUED SNLLA as she made her way across the room to the
flamboyant woman in the leopard-print dress and fur coat.  "You
remember Karen, don't you?"  said Stella.  "Remember, I took you to
meet her when we were kids?"

"Hi," said Carol, and sat down.

Karen went on and on about men.  Her philosophy was simple: all men
were woman-using pigs and it was up to women to get in and use them
first.  I told her that I had left the men in my life with everything,
including many of my own things.  She told me that it was about time I
learned a thing or two about the facts of life.

Karen and Carol both loved gossip.  The more this had to do with
relationships, the more fired up became the conversation.  The
conversation 4turned to the topic of Tim.  Karen insinuafingly asked
about the situation with Tim, and Carol mirrored her expectations.

Karen in her own perverse way decided to help misguided Carol devise a
step-by-step plan to "capture" this man once and for all.  Carol was
not so aggressive and tried to back down, doubting whether'Tim was
interested in anything more than a platonic relationship and falling
back on the excuse that she had already been through enough
relationships and didn't want to "make the same mistakes."  Karen
interpreted this as lack of selfconfidence and tried to help Carol to
"send out the right messages."

Tim WAS INmGu-ED by Carol's enthusiasm over her newfound friendship
with Karen.

He began to visit Karen himself.  Karen had introduced the element of
responsibility.  Carol was supposed to take responsibility for helping
Tim over his suppose,d shyness of relationships.  This was a fatal
mistake.

Res'p'responsibility had never been Carol's realm.

The house began to rage with arguments, accusations, and long-winded
analytical discussions.  -Willie, one of whose strongest points was
responsibility, as always won the arguments.

Tan had decided to go and stay at a friend's place.  He returned to the
house with a friend to find me packing all of his things into boxes and
placing them inside the door of his room.

"You're throwing me out," he accused.

"I'm not," I tried to reply, unable to get a word in edgewise.  I tried
to explain that I simply couldn't bear to walk around the house with
the feeling of Tim's things closing in on me, making me feel trapped
with nowhere to run.

I no longer felt safe in the presence of his things.  I didn't want him
to leave.  I just didn't want to share my world with him anymore.

I wanted things back to the way they were long before, but the
innocence of our relationship had been corrupted and he was now just
another person.  He moved out.

THE FINAL UNIVERSITY year came and went.  I had passed with flying
colors, and faced the uncertainty of what to do now that school had
finished.  I couldn't bear the thought.  The university had been my
only consistency throughout the chaos.

It gave structure to my life while allowing me the distance of relating
via books and theories.  It had given me the independence of choosing
what I wanted to learn and doing so in my own way at my own pace.  It
had also provided me with a facade of nomality.  I decided to continue
as an academic.  For my thesis I chose the subject of "Deviance and
Normality"; my material came from the lives of people, many of whom, as
I once had, lived on the street.

What I had, as Willie, come to understand of my own evasive sense of
belonging and self-expression became the basis for a theory that
accounted for why some people use, abuse, or rip off themselves or
others.  It was part of my continuing effort to understand all of these
aspects within my self, and I established, at the end, that the same
mechanisms were at work in all people but that some were tied up in
more knots, either mentally, emotionally, or socially, than others.  It
made me reflect on what Mary had done for me.  She had helped me to
untie the mental and the social knots, but the emotional ones were
still haphazardly causing havoc.

For my thesis, I had chosen a supervisor whom I felt I could relate
to.

In the end it was this very ability to relate that almost cost me the
thesis.

I had basically chosen this professor for the sound of his voice.  It
was characteristic of a type of voice that I had found I could lose
myself in.  I didn't have to dose him out, as he could go on and on
without disturbing me.

Also, his way of seeing the world did not appear to be too different
from mine.

He questioned the idea of any truly unquestionable reality, saw all
things as relative, and like me had a workingclass background that gave
him some understanding of what it was like to sense a "them" and
"us."

Throughout the course of writing this thesis, my behavior became more
and more bizarre.  I was extremely possessive of my work, refusing to
show my supervisor any fragment of what I had been doing.  I became
extremely evasive when he asked me where my life fitted into my pursuit
of this particular topic.

He pursued an answer relentlessly, causing me to answer him with
riddles.  if I could have lied, it would have been easy, but any lie
would have given away more about what I had to hide than my ability to
hide and run away did.

My supervisor may have been sensitive but he was also sarcastic and at
times cunning in trying to combat my evasiveness.  He was, I believe,
both surprised and amused by the way in which his sarcasm went over my
head.

Though I was clever in other ways, the subtlety of prompts and jibes
was beyond my grasp.

He eventually realized this and asked me in no uncertain terms why I
was so evasive.  He called me an enigma.  I went home and looked it up
in the dictionary.

He tried hard to reach me, but I was running as fast as I could.  The
often dangerous world in which I had immersed myself didn't help, and I
sometimes wonder if I set myself up for turmoil and danger in an effort
to shock myself into feeling something.

I think my supervisor wondered about this, too.  He noticed the
constant changes in my character, the most basic reflection of which
was the way I dressed.

Like the characters I portrayed, my dress reflected my personality and
its constant changes.

As a self who would rather have disappeared, I dressed
uncharacteristically in hand-me-downs, which so appropriately express
nothing of who I was.  This was truest of, me.  On other days I would
dress in a conservative, yet oldfashioned way, like a person old before
her time, a self who had fought too many wars.  Then, in staggering
contrast to this, I would dress loudly and provocatively.  Like some
walking piece of art, a mobile performance, I would strut into my
supervisor's office, a self who had no feelings to be reached and no
depth to be challenged.

My supervisor's canng concern did nothing for my thesis, though it did
a lot for me.  He was the one uninvolved mirror in my life at that
time.  The me his comments had captured stayed with me as snapshots in
a photo album I looked through to remind myself of who and where I had
been.

I had, for fear of him seeing it, avoided writing up the final draft of
my thesis, or handing it in, waiting until the last possible moment.  I
had cut from it all richness of expression with the skill of a fitemry
surgeon.  There was not a personal element in it, except for a brief
dedication.  The animated extracts of inforxnation I had used to
dluniinate the text stood out as some perverse mockery of my own
complete inability to expose myself emotionally to a waiting
authence.

The thesis was as clinical and sterile as a surgeon's instrument
cabinet.

Tim HAD BEGUN to come around to the house again, trying to salvage the
friendship I had torn apart before his eyes.  We fought furiously, him
usually coming off second-best (though this was more indicative of the
comparative strength of our fears than of anything else).  We had begun
to undo some of the damage when Karen moved in.

It was my birthday.  Tim had been invited over to celebrate.  Carol,
Karen, and Tim stood around Karen's dining table, which was draped
elegantly with an antique lace tablecloth.  The wine was poured into
the crystal glasses I had been given for my twenty-first birthday.  The
glasses were raised in a toast.  "Happy birthday" came the announcement
as the entire scene began to run in slow motion.  Awake, yet in a dream
state, Donna stood, frozen.  My mouth hung open in shock.  I had seen
it all before, a few years ago, in a dream, exactly like this.  just
when Carol had begun to think she was relatively normal, a realization
came crashing down on her world.  There was something very strange
about the way this sort of thing continued to happen.

THE UNIVERSITY YEAR finished.  I was, at one stage, interested in
continuing even further, but my fear of the exposing potential of
long-term friendships was simply too great.  My supervisor had, in my
final week, begun to see me as I truly was.

I wondered if he realized that, as I handed him a goodbye gift: a
riddielike poem.  I was terribly nervous.  This was a huge effort at
reaching out.  The poem was a gesture to pay him back for his interest,
patience, and support.  Its contents was an attempt to explain the
dilemma I was living and trying to overcome.  He appreciated and was
grateful for the gift.  I truly wished he had accepted it with relative
indifference.  The acceptance of compliments or gratitude was something
I had not yet quite mastered.

I was terribly afraid of what I was going to do next.  I had done a lot
of volunteer work in a variety of settings.  This had given me some
concrete social work experience within related fields that I could
combine with everything I had studied, which would allow me to try for
a "professional" job.

I decided to try for social work positions.  My many personal and
professional references made for an impressive resume.  It wasn't long
before I was offered two jobs.  One was working with children, a lot of
which I had already done.  The other was working in a housing service
for homeless people.  I chose the latter.

DAVID WAS ONE of the hundreds of people I met in this new job, and he
struck me as being the most unfortunate.  He was the same age as me,
yet was climbing as desperately toward self-ruin as I was trying to
climb out of it.  He appeered to symbolize who I had been at my most
hopeless.  Willie's protective instincts came to the fore, and Mary's
role as psychiatrist was about to be put into practice.  My office
carried an open invitation for anyone who wanted to come in and discuss
the hopes, the fears, and the dreams so many of them were drowning in
alcohol daily.  David called this office his second home, and Willie's
sense of self-importance soared.

The staff at the center were disturbed by my approach, which they told
me was all wrong.  They were upset that I had achieved a higher proffle
among the clientele in two weeks than the previous social worker had
achieved in two years.  Furthermore, they insisted that I learn to
socialize with the pro@onals and told me to spend my lunch hour up in
the staff room.  Willie had never had much respect for authority and
quit the job after two weeks.

Meanwhile, David had sobered up in an effort to gain Willie's
respect.

It didn't work, but it boosted Willie's sense of self-importance and
adequacy as some sort of social worker.  David had heard I'd quit my
job.  I said goodbye and gave him my number in case he needed to @
sometime.

It wasn't long before he called, creating a drama that he'd been thrown
out and needed a place to stay.  Willie, who had spent a lot of time
picking up other homeless representations of socially na7I've Carols,
came to the rescue and offered David a place to stay in the shack out
in the back, so representative of the shacks and garages Carol had
found shelter in years before.

David was a compulsive liar.  In fact he was compulsive, period.

Immensely insecure, David used every piece of emotional blackmail in
the book.  Willie, who could run rings around others on an intellectual
level, was completely lost when it came to talking about their
emotional problems.  Willie's detached and objective approach was being
shot down in flames by this pdu manipulator, who operated on a far more
underhanded and emotional level.

Carol, though without empathy, could appear to possess it.  Her mental
shallowness and social naVvet6 made her a prime target.  She was about
to be taken to hell and back.

For him, EACH of us are the survival mechanisms of fight and flight.

Willie was the personification of my response to fears outside
myself-my fight response.

Carol embodied my flight response: to run from fears that were sensed
as coming from within-fear of emotion.

The new relationship that Tim and I had forged was again that of two
innocent children.  Tim tried hard to keep a grip on it, but at its
most intense moments my fear of closeness came to the fore and Carol
emerged ready to run.

Tan came around to see me.  Unable to cope with the exposure of my
feelings in front of anyone else, let alone an oppo@st like David, I
hid behind Carol, who tried to entertain and keep everyone laughing.

David found it all amusing.  He watched as Tim brought me flowers at
work.

He listened as I spoke to Tim on the phone.  He waited for a chance to
shoot Tan down in flames.

"Do you know we're getting engaged?"  David announced flippantly.

Tim's jaw dropped.  His face hardened.  There was tension in his voice
as he said in a controlled manner: "Congratulations."

It was the first I'd heard of his proposal.  I knew it was a game, but
had I understood at that point its intentional cruelty or felt at ease
with the depth of genuine fl-ehng Tim had for me and I for him, I would
have grabbed Thn by the hand and run away from this monster who so
cunningly disguised himself as an adndrer.

Inside I was screaming.  Inside I was reaching out to Tim.  On the
outside Carol held the stage, laughing and talkin I 9 trivia, and
ignoring the fact that David was cruelly rubbing Tim's face in the
dirt.

The scream and the tears and the desperation never registered in
Carol's eyes.

They were always shallow.  They were always smiling.  They were always
dead.

SAw DAVID for the worm that he was.  She tried to warn me, saying she
wanted him out.  WflW, protecting him from being thrown out in the
street, fought her accusations desperately.  Stuck in time, Willie was
protecting the mental image of Carol from a life on the streets; the
same life that had led to her sellout as a domestic prostitute to men
who didn't care that she was only a child.

Karen, in fury at my blindness, violently created dividing lines
through the house, making it impossible for me to continue living
there.  She had condemned me to the very thing I was trying to avoid.

I was once @ homeless.

David took me for everything I had managed to budd up, mdudmg my sense
of self.

David and I lived in the garage of a friend's house on a makeshift bed
beneath greasy black wooden beams and spider webs.  Carol settled into
her role of domestic prostitute once again.  As always, the eternal
optimist in the face of adversity, she made light of the situation.

David mocked her stupidity and dictated the plan of action.  Carol
followed blindly.

David didn't want to work.  He was recovering.  He wanted, however, to
see the rest of the country, and the money from the sale of my things
and my car were going to be his means of doing it.

David was quite at home in his position of torturer.  He insisted that
I do nothing without his permission.  Even then he wanted to follow
me.

I couldn't go to the shop on my own.  I couldn't talk to anybody unless
he was there.  I couldn't even go to the toilet on my own.

He would wait for me outside the door and tell me off if I took too
long.  I was once again the poor, uneducated, battered wife.

Everybody David met despised him, whkh meant that I was unable to talk
to anybody else even if I found the courage, as nobody could tolerate
his company long enough to build up a friendship with me.

I began to think of run, and big silent tears would stream down my
face.

"What's wrong with you?"  David would demand.

"Nothing," I'd reply, painting a smile across my face.  I needed to
talk to Tim so desperately, and it was only thoughts of him that kept
me going.

Ironically it was fear of the closeness I felt for him that also kept
me from going back.

DAviD AND I had reached the other side of Australia.  I was isolated,
alone, and broke.  It was the wet season in the tropics of the top end
of Australia.  I had become extremely weak, unable even to go walking
for more than a few minutes at a time.  I would begin to gasp for
breath and feel faint.  David had used my money for this joyride to
visit his sister, and having run out of the money necessary to get my
car to his destination he refused to work.

We were riving in a dredge of a trailer park, but had to find cheaper
accommodations.  In the search from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, a
woman had offered the possibility of a room in exchange for teaching
her nephew English.

David volunteered my services.

Teaching Carlos would be fairly straightforward, I thought.  As it
turned out, Carlos was ten years old and almost completely illiterate
in both his native language, Greek, and in English.

I was very weak and had to spend the entire day in bed to get enough
energy to speak for the two-hour lesson with Carlos.  I didn't know it
at the time, but I was suffering severely from multiple food allergies
and malnutrition, getting virtually no vitamins from anything I was
eating.

Carlos was a delightful boy.  I grew quite fond of him, and he and his
sister grew quite fond of me.  David was extremely jealous, but rent
Was rent.

Carlos was coming along well, and even in my weakened state, he had
aroused a sense of pride in me that conjured up the side of me I would
need to get me out of this mess.  I found the courage to write to
run.

It was a stilted letter, with no return address.  Nevertheless, my
acknowledgment that I had had courage prompted me to take things one
step further.  I told David I was leaving.  David, who'd had it pretty
good so far, decided to come with me.  I had to sell my car to cover
the cost of both our tickets.  I was returning to my own city.

WE Took A room in the backyard of a house.  It was cramped and small,
but I was back home in my own city.  I telephoned Tim's mother and told
her I was back.

She asked if I wanted to see Tim.  I told her I wasn't sure yet.  She
told me that Tim had been depressed since I'd left and that she was
sure he'd be glad to know that I was back.  I told her to tell him that
I was doing fine and hung up.

After a few weeks I again rang Tim's mother.  She had given him the
message.  She went on to ten me that he had just moved in with
someone.

She was upset about this as he'd already been through a lot and he
hadn't known this person very long.  I told her to give him my
address.

Eventually Tim got in touch.  We met in a take away shop -all four of
us.

It was awkward.  Tim and his partner sat on one side, David and I on
the other.

We tried hard not to show how glad we were to see each other once
again, but agreed to stay in touch.

I had begun to slap myself and pull out my own hair.  I wanted
desperately to get out of my own body, to leave it there to be stomped
on, tired, and abused as its invaders so chose.  I was annoyed at this
physical body and the way it held me in like the walls of an
impenetrable prison.  It seemed to me more than useless.  I screamed,
and my own ears were deafened, but no sound ever came out.  I pleaded,
but nothing got past the lips of my painted smile and the dead look in
my eyes.  I had a capacity for closeness, but my intense, relentless
fear of it made closeness a sort of mocking, unreachable dream.  This
was the pn'ce of what may have been termed my autism.  It went far
deeper than the simplistic blanket description of "withdrawn."

I had managed to cry out to Tim for help, but Tim came with his
partner.

It seemed a cruel fate that she should have been so threatened by a
child's closeness, for although I was an adult I was an adult trapped
in a child's insecurity.

Tim responded like a policeman dealing with a domestic dispute.  David
had said I was completely mad.  I had tried to explain what had
happened.  It was no use; everyone was a thousand miles away, and no
sound came out.

I again took a job in a factory.  The money I earned helped me to buy
another trailer.

David had long since destroyed my friendship with Tim; and Tim, whose
life in some ways was running parallel to mine, had begun to give up
the battle to save it, convinced that he had obviously not meant as
much to me as he had thought.

David and I moved into the trailer and again began to travel.

I began secretly to write to and phone Tim now that my transience made
our closeness less threatening.  Tim's letters were written as
evasively as my own.

They held messages about holding on to oneself and not blaming oneself
for the compulsive need to run away.  I knew those letters by heart.

In the end it was the strength these had given me, and the hope that
despite my compulsion to behave in contradiction to all I was there was
still one person who had never given up on me, and had almost always
continued to fight to see me for who I truly was, that helped me to
reach a decision.

One evening, in the dead of night, I put a plan into action.  I was
leaving David.

I ran away, into the night, in another strange city, surrounded by
strangers.  I had spoken to a stranger on a telephone advice service
who had fortunately challenged -my ability to have the guts to leave.

This was exactly what I needed in order to fight back and have
something to prove.

I sneaked back to the trailer and silently slid a note through the
door.

The note instructed David to meet me at a particular place in the city
at a p@cular time the next day.  I sneaked away back to the car I had
parked, lights out, motor running.  I drove to the other side of this
strange city, parked the car, and fell asleep, cold, hungry, and
homeless.

The next day I returned to the trailer at the time I had told David to
meet me elsewhere.  I took all of my personal belongings and left
everything else, including the trailer and my piano, for him to keep so
he would never bother me again.  I had wasted a year and half of my
life with this beast.

Whatever I lost, it was worth it.

I drove through the night until I saw double.  I was extremely tired
and hungry and had only enough money to get back to my own state, if
that.  I slept in the car, in a carpark, parked next to a trader full
of barking dogs.  I was the happiest I had been since I had arrived
with Tim in the early days.  For once, this was a real happiness.  I
felt it inside and, for a change, it was reflected by the expression on
my face, which was peaceful.

I A D AT Tim's place by surprise.  Tim's partner was understanding
about my predicament, aware of everything I had gone through and the
strength of the friendship between Tim and me.  I stayed long enough to
get a job and a place to live, then left as quietly as I had come.

I moved into a shared house in a beautiful semirural area far across
the other side of town from Tim.  The owner of the house had a little
girl who was two.  The little girl responded to me, and I began to open
up and come out of my shell.  I began to go out on my own.  I had never
done this as my real self and, unlike Carol, I had no intention of
being social.

A GROUP OF young men sat across from me and began to try to talk to
me.

They were Irish, and I couldn't understand a word they were saying, and
when they persisted I told them so.  One of them looked into my eyes
intently.  He was silent and signaled in the direction of the dance
floor with his eyes.  I silently responded.

We went to his friend's place.  It seemed quite acceptable to me to be
in their company and yet refuse to socialize..  My answers were short
and invited no conversation as I examined my surroundings.  His friends
gave up trying to speak to me.  The man hardly spoke and appeared at
ease and intrigued by my silence and detachment, so there was no
realthreat.

Neither of us wanted to be in a relationship.  Our desire simply to be
in each other's company suited both of us just fine.  We knew we did
not want to feel attachment or any sort of mental familiarity with one
another.  This was the beginning of the most equal, undemanding, and
unstressful relationship I had so far ever had.  In silence and
unfamiliarity, it was also the only way in which I could feel
unthreatened while indulging in what pleasure there was to be gained
from being touched.

This man was dyslexic and had communication problems similar to mine.

Our past was simply irrelevant.  Most of it would have been in
contradiction to my real self in any case.  We kept all conversation to
a minimum and communicated largely through sense.  Our overwhelming
sensitivity meant that the relationship was far more sensual than
sexual.  We saw one another for three months.  In his own way, he began
to try to get to know me.  We began to lose touch.

when I was with David were back.  I began to fall asleep in the middle
of the day and nothing seemed able to wake me.  Other rimes I would
find that I had been staring into space doing nothing for hours at a
time.

My ability to concentrate on anything was very poor.  I would watch the
television with no conception of what I was seeing but for a series of
colors, patterns, and movement.  The only thing that seemed able to
snap me out of this was the television commercials, whose simplistic
tunes and jingles would stick in my mind, replaying for hours, days, or
even weeks on end.

One day I left a building through the same door I had come in, yet I
found that somehow the building had changed places.  It was not on the
same side of the street as before.  I walked back into the building,
turning my back on the street outside, then I walked back out again.

It was still opposite from the way it had been when I had originally
gone in.

I was afraid.  I asked what the name of the shwt was.  It was the same
street.  I had parked my car further down the street, but now, with no
sense of direction whatsoever, I had no idea where it might be.

"Please, which way is Mitchell Street?"  I asked, though I had grown up
in this city and knew the streets like the back of my hand.

"Over there," said the voice, pointing.

I followed the direction of the arm and became alarmed.  How on earth
did Mitchell Street get down there?

I began to cry; I was afraid.  A stranger's voice asked me what was
wrong.

"I'm lost," I explained.  "I have no idea how to find my car."

"What sort of car is it?"  said the voice.  I explained, saying that I
had parked it in the same street I was standing in but could not say in
which direction.  The man who was helping me spotted it.  I ran to my
car.

The whole world seemed to have turned itself upside 156

No Nowhere down, inside out, and back to front.  Everything was like a
mirror linage of what it had been when I had entered the budding.

I climbed into my car and sat there frightened.  I knew the names of
the streets and had never had any trouble finding my way around.  But
now just like driving into a mirror image, I found myself, street after
street, at the wrong end, opposite the direction I wanted to go.  I
ended up on the wrong side of town completely.  Instead of driving
toward home, I had, as in a mirror, driven away from it.

This happened on and off for two days.  I became terribly afraid that I
had gone mad.  I realized that, whether I was mad or not, I needed a
job where I was standing in one place all day.

I APPROACHED A theatrical shop.  I had fallen in love with the wall of
feather, velvet, and sequin masks, the wigs of every length and style,
and the huge life-size bear costume that was suspended from the ceiling
by string and stood by the counter threatening customers.  I could
relate to that.

The owner wanted someone with five years' retail experience.  Carol
sold her on the value of an outgoing personality and a terrific ability
to communicate the desirability of the intriguing bits and bobs around
the store.

It was decided that Carol's sheer enthusiasm for the products the shop
offered would help sell the things if anything would.

Carol dressed up in rabbit ears and furry costumes day in and day
out.

Out of curiosity children would drag their parents into the store, and
often the parents would be conned into buying something I was
wearing.

One day I even got into the very expensive bear suit and went dancing
about in the street.  A man came in and bought it to take back to the
bush town he was from to surprise his friends and entertain his
children.

The shop's sales doubled, despite the fact that I had to be told
continually to pay more attention to the customers than to the
compulsive rearrangement of the merdiandise.  One little girl, captured
by the charm of my evasiveness, came up to me and tapped my arm"Are you
a real fairy?"  she asked.  "Yes," I said.

"Can I touch you to see if you are real?"  she added.

"I'm sorry," I said.  "I may disappear if you touch.  me."

There is no doubt a place for everyone, I suppose.

The entire roof of this shop was a mass of fluorescent lights- I was
becoming terribly ill, finding it hard at times even to find the energy
to lift an arm.  I began to wear a sun visor, and this prevented me
from falling asleep under the effect of the dazzling lights.

My boss thought I was completely mad, but I suited the nature of the
shop and my eccentricity seemed to attract customers.

I began to get rheumatic pains again, and my muscles were so tense that
I tore a muscle in my arm simply by reaching out for something.  I
began to Turn bluish, tremble, and then faint.  I had dark &des under
my eyes.  I began to take vitamins, but they chd not seem to help.

I had the same symptoms I'd had as a child; my gums bled, and I bruised
at the slightest touch.  In desperation I once again went looking to
find a vitamin that might patch me up.

I CONSULTED A naturopath, a physician who treats patients solely by
modifying their diet.  Instead of selling me any more vitamins, she
asked if there was any particular type of food I ate all the time.

This sounded like a strange question, and she explained to me that my
symptoms may have been due to a lack of vitamins but that this
deficiency may have been a problem of absorption.  She explained that
it was possible that I was suffering from intolerance to various food
substances and that some of these may have been in the vitamin tablets
themselves.

Additionally she explained that I may have been using up what little
vitamins I was absorbing in trying to rid my body of the buildup of
toxins due to undigested foods.  I explained to her how I would
partially recover soon after getting away from the fluorescent fights I
worked under.  She explained that allergic reactions can have several
components and that the effect of the lights may have been the straw
that broke the camel's back.  She gave me a card with a number on it.

It was the phone number of an allergy clinic specializing in food
intolerance.

In the meantime, I went off some of the foods I was eating so
compulsively.  After dropping potatoes and tomatoes, my rheumatism and
muscular trouble went away for the first time in months.  I dropped
dairy foods, and the dark circles under my eyes and my asthma
disappeared.  I cut down on my high refined-sugar intake, and the
fainting and tremors faded almost completely away.  At the same time I
began to hinge on a whole range of other foods, and by the time of my
appointment with the allergy clinic, I had developed problems with some
of these foods, too.

I eventually went to two clinics.  Both of the clinics were established
and run by medical practitioners who had undertaken their own private
research into the effects of diet on health.

The first of these clinics operated along the lines of Western
medicine, the second along the lines of Eastern medicine.  As very few
doctors were well read on the subject of food intolerance, the
appointments were very expensive and only partially covered by
goverrunent funds.

I had previously spent the last few years on and off asthma
medication-me going off it, and the doctors telling me I was foolish
and putting me back on it.

In previous years the so-called hospital specialists had given me
"scratch tests," whereby drops of a substance are placed on the skin in
order to see if the skin reacts allergically.  On the basis of these
tests I was dismissed as not suffering from allergies.  However, I had
only been tested for airborne allergens.

Intolerance to different foods can cause allergic reactions in
different parts of the body.  In my case my skin was not the "target
organ" for my particular allergic reactions.  It was not until the
clinic used the method of injecting me with various food substances
that it was discovered that I was indeed suffering from extreme
multiple food allergies.

At the first clinic, using a series of blind tests, they found that I
was allergic to all meat except beef, all dairy products, eggs, soy
products, potatoes, tomatoes, and corn- I was also put through a
six-hour blood-sugar test and found to be suffering from severe
hypoglycemia.

What this effectively meant was that I had to eat every two hours in
order to avoid a sudden and dramatic drop in my blood-sugar level.  Any
degree of excitement only exacerbated this, causing me to tremble, Turn
blue, and faint as my nervous system responded to a sudden, dangerous
plummet in my blood-sugar level.  Every step on the way down was a
step-by-step change in my conscious awareness of my surroundings.

Furthermore, in response to this condition, my body was releasing its
own adrenaline, causing me to speed UP, which I usually channeled into
the character of Carol.

I had previously lived on an extremely high-sugar diet.  I was now
required to maintain a diabetic diet.  After three days off sugar, I
had extreme and violent withdrawal reactions.

Though I had rid myself of chronic rheumatism and asthma, there was
still something triggering changes in my behavior.  I heard of the
other clinic and decided to try it.

This c@c used a method of testing that operated along some of the
principles of acupuncture.  They used electronic equipment to test the
effects of food chemicals upon the body's electromagnetic field.  I was
found to be allergic to a group of chemicals called phenolics and
salicylates, which are common to many fruits, vegetables, herbs, and
spices, and almost all prepackaged foods.  In particular, my extreme
intolerance of phenolics was found to be twice as great as that usually
considered to be a high reading.

Although many of those foods contain substances beneficial to most
people, those same substances were slowly poisoning me and robbing my
body of vitamins.  At this clinic I was tested both for the vitamins I
was lacking and for my ability to tolerate them, regardless of the
beneficial properties they may have had for others who were not so
auergically sensitized.

Sticking to this diet was nearly impossible, but work had also become
impossible owing to my ill health, and I was worried about the threat
of homelessness, should I get sick.

I stayed on the diet for a year, avoiding most foods that I knew to
contain the proteins and properties to which I was allergic.  This
meant that my diet consisted almost entirely of homemade foods, mostly
grains.

After the first few weeks, my boss at the costume shop was amazed.  I
had begun to talk carefully and patiently to the customers, even when
they became impatient with me.  My mood swings had -become less
pronounced, and my ability to get along with people improved, too.  I
became far more peaceful and shy than boisterous, manic, and
aggressive.  Still, though this resolved my physical W health and made
me a lot more stable, my deep-rooted emotional insecurity and the @
communication problems that arose from it still remained.

I HAD BECOME a far quieter person.  I was afraid of what seemed like a
new me.  It was as though I had stepped into a new pair of shoes with
an eerie old feeling about them.  I had not yet fully acknowledged that
Donna was finally on her way out into "the world."  I wanted
desperately to escape back into my characters.

I needed to destroy all the security I had built up in order to create
enough stress to bring on the anxiety that had always been the
boundless energy behind my characters.  A friend of mine was going to
England.  Whoever I was, I decided I was going to England, too.  I
packed my things and told Tim and Mary, my old psychiatrist, that I was
leaving the country.

Though Mary had invited me to her house, I had never invited her to
mine.  I decided that, in spite of my fear, I was finally going to
invite her to my place.

Mary arrived, and I darted around the room like a nervous puppy.  I
hardly sat in one place all night.  Nevertheless, I had known Mary for
nine years by this stage, and it was a major achievement for me to have
found the courage to allow her into this now depersonalized flat to
view a snapshot of my private life- At the time, I still found it near
impossible to be myself.  My characters had always been so much more
impressive than I.

Saying goodbye to Tim was another matter.  Tim had long since left the
partner he was living with.  He was as close to me as he had ever
been.

He knew that in calling him up after not having seen him for some time
I was again, in my own way, showing him that I felt something for
him.

The problem was that, as myself I felt too much for everything and
therefore had to run away.  Had I not had the escape of being led off
to England, I would not, under such emotional circumstances, have been
able to face seeing Tim.  I always had to have a door to run out of.

I told both Tim and Mary that I wanted no one to come and see me off at
the airport and told Tim that he was not to come to my house with any
last goodbyes.

Tim ignored me.  He was the only person who knew that Donna didn't
really want to go.  Yet Tim was in many ways like me; he knew I was
compelled to go.

Tim arrived on the day I was to leave.  He arrived at the flat with a
prepared breakfast and a vulnerable look in his eyes.  I felt exposed
and trapped.  Willie snapped at him.  Tim didn't care; this was too
important.

I so admired Tim's courage as he tried hard to ignore Willie's hateful
and cutting remarks.  He was told he wasn't wanted and asked to go.

Tim took my hand and kissed me gently.  He was pushed away.  Tim stood
watching me at war within myself, all because I couldn't stand the pain
of feeling closeness.  He left.  I left for England.

I LOOKED TMOUGH the many bags and tins of little treasures that I had
packed in a tea-chest for the trip.  I piled in the bits of colored
tinfoil, buttons, ribbons, sequins, and colored glass that had been
with me aD my life.

In the end the tea-chest Rd wouldn't go down, and I sorted through all
of my bits several times before weeding out the ones I was least taken
by or attached to.  I folded and packed all the lesser-loved bits
neatly into a carrier bag and thought of who I could give them to.

The places' experiences, and people I had become attached to, my sense
of security, and my ability to make sense of the relafaonships between
things existed within these collections.  I could lay everything out in
categories and grasp the concept of order, consistency, and belonging
despite my inner lack of it.  I could see what role each thing had in
relation to the next, unlike my relationships with people.  Unlike my
life, all my special things had their own undeniable place within the
scheme of things.

No matter how much people told me that I fitted in or was accepted, I
couldn't feel it.  I once wrote: "Words on the wind, when they're
calling you in, the words, have no meaning when the thoughts have no
feel."  When I set out my bits and pieces, I could visually grasp the
elusive sense of belonging I could never feel with people, and through
this could give myself hope that it would one day be possible.  I could
see it, laid out in front of me in categories of things that could be
arranged slowly and gently to blend into one another in some concrete,
observable, and totally orderly way.

I HAD yust had my twenty-sixth birthday.  It was the usual inner
loneliness in an even lonelier place.  After three months in England,
during which I'd supported myself by tamping, my precious bits
arrived.

I spent some time looking through them before closing the he on them
once more.  I did not put any around the room, I did not show them off
or try to explain their individual meaning-my language.  I arrived far
more in my things than I did in my body.  Leaving them packed away,
uncorrupted, meant that they were retrievable later when it would be
safe yet again to get close to myself and my feelings.

My mental state was such that any degree of fear over what I was to say
made it impossible to express myself directly.  The mental tricks I
would play on myself in order to communicate condemned me to be judged
by them.  I was convincing my audience that I was the complete
antithesis of what I truly was.

What they saw as shallow, I experienced as deep.  What they saw as
dever, I found simple to reel off without any personal significance.

While people around me judged me by their eyes and ears, I was
screaming out from beneath the empty facade of my shell to get them to
feel who I was; to dose their eyes and their ears, and to try to sense
me.

I found that people were usually blinded by their own insecurities or
egotism or selfishness.  They seemed so ignorant in their self-assured
black and-white conception of "normality."  Every so often, however,
one of them would wonder whether others had something to learn from me
in trying to understand my differentness.  Some people, like Mary and
Tim, could sense the courage it took to teach myself so many things, to
write the music I wrote with such depth and passion.

I HAD SEEN an advertisement to perform comedy.  I had already dabbled
in this, writing comical mockeries of the world around me.  I met the
manager, who was running the courses in the hope of discovering new
performers.  He found me somehow naturally funny when I was least
trying to be.  We worked together to script some of these things, and
he offered me the course free if I'd do short fill-ins for his paid
comedians.

Comedy was a means of getting people to experience my world.  It made
them laugh where they might otherwise cry.  Comedy is most truly about
alienation.  Both Carol and Willie -my defense mechanisms embodiedwere
right at home with alienation.  The fear of self-exposure was a
mechanism by which I could shock myself.  This fear came mostly from
within.  Armed only with a smile and a comedy script based on my
childhood, Carol took the stage.

The laughs came relatively easily.  Here was a woman, in the image of a
girl, naively and casually relaying a series of horrific and tragic
events from my LIFE, without any element of emotion for the person who
had fallen victim to them, because Carol had no self.  The situation
spelled out my reality cruelly and blatantly.  I was unable to feel
most of the things that had happened to me and of which I had seemed to
be a part.  The audience was, for a change, as alienated.as I was.

They could not believe that what I was saying, and how I was saying it,
was anything other than a joke, yet every bit of it was closely aligned
to reality.  I was trying to show them the hypocrisy of a life without
feeling while confirming my own lack of hope that, even if pushed -to
the limits, I might discover some feeling for my life that I had not
felt before.

Quite simply, it came down to the fact that I had never experienced
"the world" with.the walls down.  The distinction between Carol
standing alone on the stage and the collective, social, and communal
atmosphere of the laughing audience down there summed it up in all its
poetic tragedy: "my world" versus "theirs."

I had not done too badly.  One of the acts had his own venue and asked
if I'd like to do a paid spot as a support act.  I had managed to fall
into my first paid comedy performance.

The reality of it all became a slap in the face.  The whole effort had
been an act of self-expression, a scream at the hypocrisy of my
situation.  The idea of doing comedy as a skill for which I was to be
paid simply cheapened it all the more.  I phoned up the manager of the
show and impersonally left a message on his answering machine telling
him that on the spur of the moment I had gone to Europe.

m THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY no reason to go to Europe except that I hadn't
yet been there.

My job as a temporary secretary had just ended, and with no familiar
surroundings I couldn't imagine being any more lost than I already
was.

Before leaving for Europe, I decided, out of the blue, to go and be by
the ocean.  I ran out of my room, grabbing only my toothbrush, and made
my way to the train station.

I had always been plagued by a terrifying repetitive dream of the
ocean.

Without re@g its significance, something quite unconscious was driving
me to confront this symbolic representation of my dilemma.

"Where's a good place to go, where there is ocean?"  I demanded from
the girl behind the counter.

-You want me to choose?"  she asked, surprised.

"Yes, pick a place," I ordered.

She picked a place in South Wales and I paid for the ticket.

"Where are you going to?"  asked a pleasant old lady sitting next to me
on the platform.

"Don't know.  Can't pronounce it.  It's Welsh," I exp@ed.

I was disturbed at not being able to pronounce my destination and
turned to a stranger sitting beside me, at the top end of the
platform.

The stranger pronounced it, and I tried to memorize it.  The train came
along, and we all got on.  I liked to sit near to the door.  The
stranger had by chance decided to sit by the door, too.  He sat
opposite me, and we both looked out of the window.

There was something about this man's manner.  He was making me terribly
nervous by his obvious shyness and embarrassment at sitting opposite
me.  I could relate to his behavior too well.  I had recognized it as
my own language and began to feel nervous and exposed at someone else
being privy to it.

The Welsh stranger made a series of statements, in a manner addressed
more to himself than to me.  I was alarmed yet intrigued, embarrassed
by how exposing and vulnerable it felt to be communicated with in my
own manner.  Not since my friendship with Bryn so many years before had
I found someone who spoke the evasive language of indirectness so
well..

The train journey took three hours.  Both of us sat there, nervous,
exposed, and embarrassed.  Though intrigued, we both sat poised to run
at the first opportunity.  To have done so of our own volition,
however, would have been too ex@ng, in that it would have indicated
choice.  To one who spoke the language, this would have demonstrated
the frightening nature and realness of the contact we had made.  We sat
there, swapping trivia, talking via objects and events, and losing our
self-awareness in the evasive jargon and complexity of the poetryfike
speech that so often got our listeners lost.

Surprisingly we had understood each other.  There was a recognition of
our shared differentness.  We were both curiOUS.

The Welshman was to get off one stop before my destination.  He
couldn't ask, and I knew how that felt.

"You can get off here if you want," he stated.  I admired him, for in
saying that he had had more courage than I would have been able to
find.  I sat there, shocked in the wake of finding someone who
understood my ways because they were his own.  "I'll flip a coin," he
said.  He flipped it and lost the toss.  "I've got another one," he
stated, with a hint of desperation.

He flipped it, and it dropped to the floor and rolled away as the train
pulled into the station.

He stood at the doorway looking at me.  His eyes and smile, forced in
their casualness, defied the stifled expression of a want that he was
too trapped to express.  "You can still get off here," he stated,
unable to ask.

Though afraid, I made a last-minute decision and jumped off the train
as it ground to a halt.

m "YOU'P.E CPAZY," HE had said, his excitement calling for a need to
create distance.  He had hit upon a sore point by saying that.

"Thanks," I said bluntly.

"It's great, though," he added in a hurried awkwardness.

We were both shaking, surprised at our own gameness.

We went to a cafe.  He sat across the table.  His foot touched mine
accidentally, and I was painfully aware of it.  Yet at the same time,
as it was frightening, I was too afraid to move away as this would have
shown that it mattered.  I let my expression ignore it.  I trembled; my
feelings were screaming for me to run for my life.

He offered to pay for what I'd eaten.  I insisted on paying.  It bought
me out of any obligation and got around the problem of being unable to
accept generosity.  It didn't work.  He worked by the same system.  He
insisted that he then had to buy me a drink later on that night.  A
time and a place were arranged.

I found myself a room in a bed-and-breakfast and, terrified, went to my
room, glad to be alone.  I contemplated escaping, not because I felt
nothing for this man but because I sensed that he knew my way of
functioming too well.  He could get close to me.  Nevertheless, when I
had agreed to something, I always had to stick to it.  I went to the
hotel to meet him.

I waited, petrified.  I bought myself two glasses of wine in order to
calm down.  I hated the fact that there were people around me.  Other
people had no part in this.  What I felt was simply too personal to
allow other people even to glance at me.  Hopeful, I asked whether the
hotel had a piano.

The piano sat alone in a huge and glorious dining room.  I sat at the
keyboard, hoping I would first hear the stranger coming, and hesitantly
began to play.

The stranger entered the dining room.  Acutely aware of how personal it
was to me, I tried convincingly to say that I was no longer interested
in playing.

"Go on," he said.  Obediently I began to play, losing my place and
playing stiltedly as I lost the ability through concentrating too
hard.

The stranger was moved by my music.  We were both shaking and nervous
at feeling so real.

I suggested we leave.

The freedom of wailing made it safer to talk.  Walking was, after all,
one step away from running.  It was that open door I always needed to
feel safe.

We walked for hours in the darkness.  We walked to the ocean, and in my
mind I sang a song to the sea.  I looked desperately at the stranger
and wished that, for once, I had the courage to share this with another
person.  Even deciding this was trying.  Walking back up the shore, I
found the courage to sing out loud, to myself, unable to let even my
own mind know that my singing was a means of communication.

This stranger understood my language.  He spoke it himself.  He never
invaded.  He never complimented.  He never made it obvious that he was
sharing.  He simply stayed within my company, "being."

I felt so "found," I could have cried.  As always, the tears could
never make it to my eyes.  I laughed, and my fear hid behind a casual
facade.

We went walking in the darkness toward the rolling hills.  We climbed
on someone's farm equipment-two @yearOlds in a playground all their
own.

He reached out to give me a hand to climb up.  My heart sank.  I became
partially aware of my inability to combine touch and feeling.

We'd turned back toward the town.  Walking alongside him, I felt a
strange sensation.  The hair stood up on the back of my arms, and we
stared at each other in shock.

Like the little girl in the theatrical shop had done a year before, he
reached out hesitantly and touched the back of my arm.

"Are you real?"  he asked.

Stunned, I managed to say, "Yes.

"It felt like you just walked through me," he said.

"I know," I said, my mind lost in some strange hypnotic state.  "I felt
it, too."

It was as though the wind had blown straight through me.

My eyes scanned my hands and feet, surprised that I did, in fact, have
a physical body.

I had always experienced being touched emotionally as the threat of
death.

The tremors associated with this were equivalent to being in a
near-death situation where the only thing your mind is saying is "Get
me out of here; I'm going to die."  I had finally confronted this fear
of death that washed over me like ocean waves.  I had heard the roaring
sound of silence in my ears and lost all sense of self-awareness as I
stayed with the deathlike fear emotion gave me.  I had found myself in
a state of shock through allowing myself to keep a grip on feeling.

Yet I had survived.  No characters emerged automatically to take
over.

Donna was beginning to win the battle.  This time, however, she was not
fighting to mirror someone else.  She was fighting to come out to
someone who was her mirror.

We sat talking more to ourselves than to each other, allowing the other
to listen in, until the sun began to come up.  I felt I had known this
man my entire life.

All words were irrelevant.  I sensed this stranger's familiarity as
though it were myself sitting next to me.  I had failed to respond to
the fear that seemed to feed on my closeness like a vulture.  In
failing, I had won.

We stood silently watching the waves crashing.  It was noon the next
day, and my train was due in an hour.  I'd come further in the one day
I'd known this stranger than I had in years of meeting those who had no
hope of reflecting me enough to reach me as only I could reach
myself.

There was no hug goodbye.  Not even a handshake.  Even to look at each
other was overwhelming and exposing.  Yet, knowing my fear, knowing
his, and knowing the need to try to learn to ignore it, we made an
unbreakable promise to stay in touch, then I turned without saying
goodbye and ran the length of the street, around the corner and to the
station for the train to take me back to my things in London.

A LETTER MMIVED.  The stranger's words echoed my own feelings and
experiences.  I couldn't believe they were real and that he was every
bit the reflection of me I'd perceived him to be.  I had to see him
once again before I disappeared to Europe.

I arrived unexpectedly at the address he had given me.  His family were
warm and welcoming and didn't seem the least bit alarmed by the
surprise of my visit.

He was in his room.  I entered and stood in the doorway.  I was shaking
like a leaf, and so was he.  Wanting a way out, wanting to be made to
run, so that I had the choice made for me, I asked if I had made a
mistake in coming.

He explained that, had he known I was coming, he would have gone out,
not knowing how to cope.  He said I.could stay.  I was desperately
fighting the impulse to run, feeling like I was drowning in the depth
and intensity of having feelings, but I stayed nevertheless.

Everything was the same as before.  Nothing had changed.  My intipnse
fear was making me talk at a hundred miles an hour.  Surprisingly he
kissed me for the first time.  I broke into tears.  He asked what I was
crying about, and I covered my tracks.  Yet I had been crying because
it was the first time in my life I had really "been there" while I had
been kissed.

His parents were ecstatic.  They'd never seen their son so much or be
so sociable with a friend.  During the day we watched TV, played music,
and hardly, emerged from the insular security of his room.  During the
night we went walking through the darkness of the Welsh countryside so
representative of our own darkness, so rarely fit by the presence of
another person who walked within "our world" and "the world" at the
same time.

After two days we caught the train together that would see us go our
separate ways.  He had to go away for three months.  I had already
decided to go to Europe.

I firmly nailed down the lid of my tea-chest of belongings and left
wondering if I'd return with enough courage to see the Welsh stranger
again.

I was wide-eyed and felt terribly vulnerable as I faced the prospect of
traveling alone throughout Europe.  I was afraid of being cornered by
people I might meet, of their running rings around me and manipulating
me into situations I couldn't get out of.  The stranger had offered me
the opportunity to stay with his parents until he returned.

Frightened, I had desperately wanted to hide in his room full of
security.  Yet the inability to reach out or accept anything still
crippled me, making his offer impossible to accept.

I HAD ALwAys wanted to see Holland, and imagined myself skating alone
on fields of endless white ice.  But I'd missed the ferry to Holland,
and the next one was going to Belgium.  I didn't even know there was a
country called Belgium, but at the risk of sleeping at the ferry
terminal I caught the last ferry to Belgium arriving before midnight.

The stranger had given me an empty bottle that he had filled with
invisible hugs, just in case, in the privacy of my solitude, I might
like to give them to myself.  The vulnerability of remaining feeling
while surrounded by the world of strangers into which I had thrown
myself was too much of a threat.  I got a room at eleven fifty-five
P.m. Alone in my hostel room on my first night abroad in greater
Europe, I opened the bottle and allowed myself to feel the security I
had felt when the stranger and I had locked ourselves away in his
room.

I put my arms around myself and rocked as tears ran silently down my
face.  I screamed deafeningly within my mind.  The bottle of hugs
seemed to mock my inadequacy.  I wanted no one to see it.  I hid it in
the darkness of a corner in the back of an obscure cupboard.  That
empty bottle stood for myself.

I would travel alone without any emotions to haunt me.

I AWO]KE AND went out into the misty morning along the cobblestoned
streets of Ostend.  Ducks on chilly ponds, a horse and cart, shop
windows filled with handmade lace butterflies and oldfashioned
collars.

I walked across a narrow town bridge and laughed at how the buildings
along the canal reached right down into the water.  Where on earth were
the buildings' legs?  I wondered.  What is the way of life here, what
language do these people speak, and what country is Belgium next to?

I went to what appeared to be a small shop and looked for the door.

There was only a window and a lot of very unusual-looking food.  I was
addressed in a language I couldn't understand, and it struck me that I
couldn't even ask this shopkeeper where the door was so that I could go
m and buy something.  Then it dawned on me that, for some strange
reason, these shops in this strange place had no doors for the
customers to go in.  One was supposed to order from the window.  I
looked at the food and wondered what the hell was in it and whether,
with my allergies, it would make me sick.  I reckoned that not eating
was just as likely to make me sick, so in response to the shopkeeper's
gabble I pointed at something and offered him a handful of change I'd
got at the ferry terminal.

Not knowing where to go, I walked toward the station.  Trains took
people places.  Travel was a universal language.  One didn't need to
speak- one 'Ia on to go.  I wou go to find the ice in Holland.

I listened to the voices around me and caught the train to the name of
a place that sounded fan-tihar: Amsterdam.

I arrived in Amsterdam as it was getting dark.  Scruffy people kept
shoving pamphlets into my hands about hostels to stay in.  I stopped
and bought a hot dog at a stall, and a photographer approached me and
began to take photos.  I glared at him from beneath my black hat.  In
my highcollared black coat, black hat, and rucksack, I looked like a
Quaker.  I hadn't understood the photographer's interest till he turned
his camera on some nearby children.  What was it he saw?  Perhaps
innocence.

I was pointed in the direction of a Christian hostel and given some
good advice on where not to stay and walk about alone at night in
Amsterdam.

At the door of my hostel room I froze at the reaction that I would be
in a room with about twenty other women.

The next day I went out to look for a job.  For some reason it never
occurred to me that the rules for any country would be any different
from those in England.  It was simple, I thought.  I'd get some
temporary work as a secretary or a cleaner.  I was very wrong.  I
arrived back at the hostel feeling depressed and disillusioned.  There
was no work for an Australian in Amsterdam-at least, not what I
considered work.  I had only enough to pay for my dinner.  It was time
to find a cash machine and get some money.  Was I in for a shock!

I asked where I could use my card, and my heart sank and i felt sick at
the reply.  There was nowhere in the Netherlands, let alone in
Amsterdam.  The nearest branch for my account was in Paris.  Even with
a visa it would have cost me more than I had to get there.  I used the
last of my money to call my bank in England, and somewhere between
tears, swearing, and mutual ndsunderstanding my money ran out on the
phone can and left me totally penniless in a foreign country.

I went back to the hostel hysterical.  The staff managed to calm me
down and said they'd help.  My room would be free, and I would work in
the kitchen in exchange for meals until my money came through from
England.  They gave me the money to call again.  This time I got
through.

I was told that protocol was protocol and I would have to send them
signed permission to transfer funds to Amsterdam.  It would take
several days, and there was a limit to the amount I could receive.

In the meantime a roommate from the hostel asked if I'd go sight-seeing
around the city with her.  After all, it might cheer me up.  We were
hungry, and I was sick of people supporting me.  I took off my hat,
laid it on the footpath in the main street, and began to sing.  The
money fell like rain from heaven.

It wasn't much, but it was enough to buy some bread and a cup of tea.

A slick, fairly streetwise type approached us and gave us some
advice.

He picked up my hat and shoved it into my friend's hands.  "This is how
you do it," he said, and instructed her to walk directly up to the
passersby with my hat as I sang.  He had been busking for about three
years and was only too willing to tell us how to be successful.  I sang
a bit more, and then we all went for coffee.

Before my money arrived from England I sang for a few hours every day
and learned the best husking places around Amsterdam's city square.  I
bought my roommate and myself bread and tea every day, paid for my
hostel room, and even bought something I'd always wanted: a
tambourine.

My money came through, and my roommate had a wonderful idea of what to
do with it.  She asked me to go to Germany with her.  We boarded the
train for Berlin where she knew some friend of a friend of a friend.

This woman was surprised to meet her, and even more surprised to meet
me, but she was a medical student and a really nice person and glad to
have the two of us suddenly drop in on her.  My traveling companion was
keen to show off the singing and tambourine-playing talents of her
weird friend, and I was glad to latch on to her apparent sense of
destination.  Together we made our way around Berlin as I sang and
bought them bread and tea.  At the Berlin Wall I got some sense of
perspective.  I had heard of it on the news and was glad to be with
something familiar.  We went into East Berlin at the time when the Wall
was still protected by armed guards as those from the West chipped away
at it with rented hammers and sold pieces of graffiti-covered stone
from it.

One night the others went out, leaving me alone in the German woman's
flat, listening to Chris de Burgh singing "Borderline."  My roommate
from Amsterdam met two German travelers willing to give us a ride to
Austria.  She returned and told me the news.  By now I was almost broke
yet again, and it was a relief to know we had a cheap means of
transport.  Together we met the women the next day and headed south.

At Freiburg my roommate decided to travel with one of the women to her
home in the Black Forest.  The other woman was going to a fairy-tale
village in the province of Hesse.  The sound of a castle overlooking a
town full of twisting cobblestoned streets seemed like something I'd
dreamed up.

I FELL IN love with the place instantly.  All the streets were narrow
and cobblestoned, with little staircases cropping up to take you down
to the next street below.  There were hills that seemed to roll on
forever.  I let my mind fly over them.  I cotdd see open space for
miles.

I had not been able to find a place to stay.  I started to hitchhike
and was picked up by a young German man.  I spoke no German and,
thinking he spoke no English, felt fairly safe.  As it turned out, his
English was fine.  He was a residential worker in a children's home and
was on his way to staythere for the next two nights.  He offered me a
room at the horne- I was momentarily stunned at destiny having
presented-me with the opportunity to stay in that horror of all
horrors, a children's home.  Nevertheless, having nowhere else to go, I
accepted.

Julian was an intense though gentle person.  Like me, he wrote poetry
and music within which, like me, he was most truly himself.

As always, the children took to me wonderfully.  They led me about
telling me the names of things in German, which, to their delight, I
would repeat, listening to the sound.

Julian watched me secretly as I watched the children.  He began to
study me.  "Stop looking at me," I snarled, as I so often did when
People tried to study me.  Julian smiled knowingly.  He seemed no
stranger to my behavior, perhaps having geen it in another person
somewhere.  He said nothing and went on observing, at times when I
least expected.

He played music and asked me to sing, never waiting for a response as
to whether I would or not.  He had used the right tactics, as he
continued to play, seeming really not to care whether I joined in or
not.  I began to sing.

"That's great," he said, his head still bowed as he played guitar.  He
had invited a friend over to hear me sing.

As though now more self-assured with his friend there, he all of a
sudden looked straight into my eyes.  My heart sank with fear as I sat
there, abandoned by my characters.

As though my frightened look had confirmed his own preconceptions, he
reached forward and brushed my cheek with the back of his hand, as
though taming a delicate and frightened little bird.  I glared at him
in terror and moved away.  He was tiptoeing through a mine field and
was taking everything a step at a time.  I was an easy victim.

Fortunately, he had no intention of treating me like one.

Julian was intrigued by why I was so totally different at different
rimes, though, unlike most people, he was perceptive enough to notice
that these changes were fear responses rather than true expressions of
my personality.

After spending several days with me and only being able to get close to
Carol, he looked deeply into my eyes and very gently and casually asked
me: "When do you ever get off the stage?"

I was shocked at his perceptiveness.

What would you know?"  I replied.

"It's just that I've never seen anyone with so much energy to keep up a
performance for so long.  Where does all of the energy come from?"  he
asked.

"How do you know it's not really me?"  I asked.

"I'm a performer, too," said Julian, "but you ... you've of too much
energy.  You know, sometimes it's frightening."

Julian was looking deeply into my eyes.  I kept looking away.  Yet,
with each challenging remark, I would glare at him and he would capture
me again.

I finally held Julian's stare and tried not to run away.

ere's some y t ere," sai , re ming to t person I had seen in his
eyes.

"Am I here?"  I had asked genuinely.  "Yes, you're there," said Julian
reassuringly.

He touched my hair.  I pulled away.

"It burns me," I explained.  "All touch is pain."

"I don't want to hurt you," he said gently.

Julian had asked me about my experiences in early childhood.  I had
tried, but couldn't tell him the secrets that held together the wails
that were both my prison and my protection.  I tried instead to explain
things to him in evasive and symbolic terms, then gave up and hid
behind the relating of the tragic early childhood events for which I
had felt nothing.  Unintentionally I was leading him in the wrong
direction for the answers he sought.

JULIAN FELL Victim to My OWn hopelessness, seeing that I was unable to
climb out of the pit he sensed I was in and not knowing how to get the
answers that might help me out.  His frustration and his caring
disturbed me.

I disappeared to a city two hours away.  After two days I returned and
phoned Julian.

"Where are you?"  he demanded.

"I'm here, just down the road from you," I said, and gave him the
details of where I'd been and how I'd now landed a position teaching
English in exchange for accommodation in the attic of a student house
belonging to a local language school.

I took time out to lock myself in my newfound attic room, alone.  I
began again to have night terrors, waking up yet being unable to call
the room back to the image of its true reality.  I watched the events
around me as though in a picture theater watching a 3-D movie.  I was
terrified.  The fear, stuck in my throat, escaped in nothing more than
a series of stifled, whimpering screams.  Nobody else heard.

In one dream, my little brother had been tying up seven small
kittens.

He was tying their legs together so they could not run and then tying
their necks back to their legs so that they could not breathe or move
for fear of cutting their own throats.  I tried to reach out to stop
him as he laughingly threw the first of the kittens over a high brick
wall where I could not get it.  I felt myself pulled from behind.  My
mother was pulling me backwards by the hair.  I fought desperately to
save the kittens, but to no avail, as my head came thumping down upon
the wall.

Whenever I became Carol, my true self had always been symbolized by a
kitten.  This was my sense of self when the real Carol had taken me
home to her house like some stray kitten she had found in the park.  I
had once found a bag of seven kittens dumped by the side of a creek and
had brought them all home where I hid them in the garage, just as I had
slept in people's garages later.  In my mind each kitten was to stand
for a color of the rainbow, and each color of the rainbow was to stand
for the different types of feeling people had, which were so evasive
within me.

The first feelings I had ever had for someone I recognized as a
separate person were for my little brother.  In the dream, Tom's action
of tying up the kittens and throwing them over the wall out of my reach
was an expression of how my fear of feeling had caused me to tie myself
up.  Throughout my life, I had thrown this helpless self out, beyond
the wall, into "the world," under the disguise of Carol.

Willie was the protector of this self, he tried to save the helpless
kittens.  Willie's fighting ability, however, was stopped before it
could save them from my mother's actions, which had left the kittens to
be thrown out into "the world" whether they were prepared for it-or
not.

I was furious at Julian for making me feel.  I had decided that feeling
things was quite dangerous in too large a dose, and I spent more and
more time on my own.

It was too late to undo the ability to feel, and I now found it harder
and harder to hold on to the characters of Carol and Willie.  Since
being on a special diet to avoid food and chemical sensitivities and to
maintain a steady blood-sugar level, I was stabilizing physically.

With this came the loss of the characters, some of the energy for whom
had been fueled by the anxietyprovoking effects of allergic reaction.

I could still act, but I could no longer shut myself out as before.

Though partially controlled, however, my hypoglycemia remained a slave
to my emotions.  However, there was no turning back in the face of a
new realization.  It began to dawn on me that my fear was not fear of
emotion, but a reaction to it.

The feelings brought to the surface by the stranger in Wales were not
going to he down and die.  It was too late to Turn the clocks back, and
Julian continued to stoke the fire.

In a second dream I saw my grandfather.

Since before my grandfather had died, I had had a recurring dream.  I
was walking alone through a void, surrounded by hills.  Suddenly I
heard a roaring sound, and huge ocean waves came gushing fearsomely
over the hills from all directions, covering me instantly without
warning.  I held on desperately to a pole in the middle of the barren
land where I had been standing.  I dosed my eyes for.  I could not
breathe.  I could not scream.  I felt the crushing feeling, and the
immensity of the ocean swallowing me up.  As the tide went out, the,
ocean gushed back over the hills as instantly as it had come.  I clung
terrified to the pole, too afraid to move.  I think that's how my real
self experienced emotion for most of my life.

In my second dream, I was surrounded by a high wall.  My grandfather
was leaving through a hole in the wall, and I reached out to try to
stop him.  I waited until he had left, then went after him.

After I climbed through the hole, I found myself again, as before, in a
barren land.  I called out.  My voice was hollow, like an echo.

Nobody answered.

I ran back through the hole in the wall, and my mother grabbed hold of
me.

I knew that she was going to try to make me stay on this side of the
wall.  I searched frantically for my way back to the ban-en land, but I
could not find the hole and I was trapped.

I woke up unable to shake off the incredible feeling of vulnerability I
felt, and no longer felt so secure being alone.  Whether I liked it or
not, at the age of twenty-six I was being made to stay in "the
world."

SINCE THE NIGHTMARES began, I felt more afraid indoors than I did
outdoors, especially at night.  I began to go walking through the snow
and the leaves up in the hills at night.

Up in the forest, in the snow, it was not as dark as one might think.

The snow reflected a whiteness an around; it seemed more like early
dawn, the time I used to go and visit my grandfather.

I lay in the snow in my raincoat.  My feet were soaking wet where the
snow had got in through the holes in the soles of my boots.  In a quiet
little voice I sang to myself in my bed in the snow and wished I had
the courage to ask Julian to come and sit with me to protect me.  I
thought of the stranger from Wales and wondered how I'd ever go back to
see him again after the huge journey I had made through my own soul.  I
sang some of the songs I had written and bathed in my own sense of
security.

It was time to say goodbye to Julian.  Out of the blue I phoned up late
at night to say I was going first thing in the morning.

"Stay right there.  I'll pick you up," he said.

I arrived at the chddren's home where I had stayed almost two months
before.  Insecure, I kept my coat on and my bag by my side.  I had a
door.  It was safe to try to let myself be there.

Julian touched my hand.  I linked my fingers through his as though this
was my grandmother's crocheted cardigan.  He tried to look into my
eyes.  We were both there.  The rest of the people in the room seemed
to disappear.  Our feet were touching.  I was again painfully aware of
the closeness but kept reassuring myself that it was safe.

This self-reassurance was something new.  Willie had gone from being a
prison warden to a psychiatrist to a genuine mother who spoke my own
language.

I finally felt at home within myself within "the world."

"I've got to go," I said.

"I'll walk you to the door," said Julian.

For the first time, I reached out to hug him.  I stayed with the
feeling, telling myself reassuringly: "It's okay, it's okay, I promise
we can go if it hurts too much."

Julian lifted my chin and looked into the eyes of my peacefully smiling
face.

"I'm here.  Are you there?"  I asked.

Julian smiled.

My fear had got the better of me.  I hurriedly and bluntly said "Bye"
and turned, my gaze fixed to the ground as I started to walk away from
the house.

"It's okay," I said to myself.  "See, I said we could go if it hurt too
much."

1 turned and walked back over to Julian.  I raised my head and looked
sadly into his eyes the way I had looked at my grandfather when I had
felt his realness slipping away from me.  Julian didn't.slip away.

Tears rolled down my face, and I smiled peaceftdly, so proud that I had
found the strength and trust to let him see my feelings and to let them
come out.

"I'll miss you," I said, sniffling.

"Just come back one more time," said Julian.  "Perhaps," I replied.

'Just come back one more time," Julian repeated.

I hugged him once more and walked hurriedly across the lawn to the
waiting car.

MY RuciKsAciK ON my back, dressed in my black coat and hat, I stood at
the corner of the motorway and hitched a lift to the station that would
take me out of Germany.  I boarded the train as I had originally
boarded the ferry-alone-and said goodbye to Germany as the train
crossed into Belgium.

The train stopped across the road from the ferry that would take me
back to the ilK.  I needed to run.  I needed distance.  Julian was far
away now, but the me I'd found and been able to hold on to had danced
in the light long enough to know that this was the way out.

There was nowhere in particular to go, but the ocean seemed like the
place to be.  I'd face my emotions symbolically and realistically and
bring the two realms of awareness together at some point.  I headed for
Wales.

I arrived at the home of the Welshman.  He'd returned to the ilK after
three months away, and I went with his father to pick him up.

It was a very long drive, and his father did most of the talking.

"My son's a bit strange, you know, Donna," he said.

"No, he's not," I replied.

"Please don't tell him or his mother I told you," he went on, "but he's
a funny sort of retarded, you see."

I smiled inwardly to myself, remembering how the Welshman had told me
all of this himself, yet his parents thought he didn't understand.  I
remembered how he'd told me that his father had helped him get into the
job he was in, and about the problems he had with friendships,
emotions, and words.

"He had meningitis as a baby and it affected him," the father
explained.

"Sometimes he does funny things."

"There's nothing wrong with him," I put in.  "He's just like me."

THE WELSHMAN'S NAME was Shaun, and Shaun was quite clearly drunk.

Climbing into the front seat of the car, he hardly looked at me.  He
had known I was coming, and the quick but silent glances he shot across
the car spoke louder than words.

We were stuck in traffic on the motorway, and Shaun got out of the car
without warning.  He was oblivious to his father's shouts and made his
way to the side of the motorway and took a leak.

His father turned to me and said sorry, and it occurred to me that he
thought I must have been embarrassed by his son's behavior.

"What for?"  I asked, for it hardly seemed odd to take a pee when a
person needed one.

"He's a bit weird sometimes, our Shaun," he said, hoping to make up for
the embarrassment, which was his and not mine.

Shaun climbed back into the car as it continued to move along the
motorway but this time he climbed into the back.  He sat there unable
to look me in the eye, and instead of feeling threatened by my having
understood him I now felt the need to say I had.  Silently I said it in
a look, and for that moment Donna had spoken, albeit silently, in "the
world."  We touched hands, and I felt chilled and thought how lucky he
was to be drunk at that moment.  We still didn't look at each other.

BACK AT HIS parents' house, Shaun went straight out.  He returned hours
later drunker than he had left, having hitched a lift back from the
next town.  I had been staring straight at the ceiling and sat bolt
upright as though given an electric shock.  Jolted suddenly from the
secure predictability of my world under glass, I stared silently at the
figure who had entered the room.

Shaun's face stared silently back at me, and in his eyes I saw the same
look I'd given my grandparents many years ago.  It was a look that
spoke of being a thousand miles away with no way back.

Shaun started to leave again, and I told him to wait and take me to the
station.  He had brought some gifts back from his trip, as had I.

Without saying anything, he had placed a stuffed leather camel by my
bag.  I looked at it and thought how this creature drifts through the
desert with no particular place to go or be.  I moved it away and,
picking up my bag, turned my back on it to go.

"Sorry he's like this," said his parents, who seemed angry at their
son's distant behavior.  The fact that he was like this had clouded
these same characteristics in myself.

"It's okay," I said, "I understand."

They continued, and I saw echoes of my own mother's shame and
excuses.

The words "Don't worry about her, she's crazy" rang in my ears, and I
spat out the words: "I understand why he's like this.  It's not him.

It's not me.  It's both of us.  We're both like this," I said.  I
didn't have a translation for this big word this, but I knew it felt
like death.

SILEWLY SHAUN DROVE like a maniac to the station, his eyes riveted on
nothing in particular.  He was rigid and trembled violently.  He hit
the brakes, and his eyes were desperate as he reached for my door and
pushed it open His shaking hands gripped my arm as I went to run from
the car, and he grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a pencil.

He was shaking so much he couldn't write.  The pencil tore through the
paper, and the battle he was having with himself showed in his eyes,
which were fflhng with tears of frustration.

He finished making scratches on what was left of the paper and forced
it roughly into my hand and closed my fist around it.

"Go.  Go before something happens," he said, and shoved me away before
slamming the door and speeding off.

I stood on the platform shaking, afraid to look at the note.  It
crossed my mind to throw it away.  It was all too much.  It was all too
familiar.  It was all too me.

m THE IN WAS going to nowhere in particular as far as I knew.  all that
mattered to me what that I was going away from here.  The colors were
too much.  The lights were too much.  The people and their sounds were
too much.  I curled up in a corner and turned to the wall and let it an
die away, the note screwed up in my hand.

I got to the end of the line and realized I had no ticket.  I crossed
the platform, jumped onto the tracks, and walked along in the darkness
beside a tall wire fence.  "What are you doing?"  I heard myself say.

I answered by scrambling up the embankment with the intention of
finding out where I was and where I was going to.

I stopped at a bus stop, happy to be alone in a quiet place; a nobody
nowhere.  I realized I was still holding the note.

Under the street light, I unraveled the crumpled paper.  The words upon
the page defied the roughness of the writing.  "You were the best
friend I had waited my whole life for.  Stay in touch," it read.  There
was a Shaun in that note.  There was a Donna in that note.  And, little
did I know, there was a word to describe why, that would tell me there
were many more like me out there who may or may never make it down the
path we both had found.  Ours was a path with black holes everywhere
you stepped.  Into each one you could fall down and down for what
always seemed like a deathly forever.  This was a path where we walked
alone and smiled our well-trained smiles as the world passed by and we
looked out from what felt like a world under glass.

I GOT BACY.  in touch with Shaun.  He found it very hard to talk.  He
phoned me back four times, stuttering, breaking off in mid-sentence and
"talking in poetry."  On the fifth call he told me how much trouble
he'd had since he'd met me.  His boss had become very concerned that he
was crazy.  He'd isolated himself more than usual and lived in his
thoughts.

"I've got a problem," he said to me on the phone between lengthy
pauses.

"I'm in love with you," he finany managed, and the line went silent on
both ends.  "The problem is," he finally went on, "I feel it's going to
kin me."

"I know," I replied.

That was the last Shaun had managed to communicate.  I have never seen
or heard from him again.  For some time, neither have his parents.  He
simply disappeared as I so often had.  Perhaps he went to the ocean.

I FOUND A flat in London and a job as a secretary.  It was just what I
needed: the flat on the top floor all to myself, the job with an office
just for me.  I was working in the administration section of a major
hospital for an impossible boss who acted like something out of a
cartoon.  During lunchtime I would look at birds and squirrels on the
hospital grounds, tear leaves apart, and go to the local library.

At home I had bought a cheap plastic typewriter and begun to type.  I
began with the center of my world as far back as I could remember.  The
nights got longer as one page rolled into the next and I relived each
moment, staring straight ahead and letting the words come from my
fingers.

I was searching inside myself for a word for what I had shared in
common with Shaun.  As the pages mounted up, so did my visits to the
library, where I buried my head in books on schizophrenia and searched
desperately to find a sense of belonging within those pages that would
give me a word to put to an of this.

Suddenly it jumped out at me from the page.  It was the first time
since my father had said it four years ago that I'd heard the word.

"Autism," it read, "not to be confused with schizophrenia."  My heart
jumped, and I shook.

Perhaps this was the answer or the beginning of finding one.  I looked
for a book on autism.

There upon the pages I felt both angered and found.  The echoed speech,
the inability to be touched, the walking on tiptoe, the painfulness of
sounds, the spinning and jumpmg, the rocking and repetition mocked my
whole life.  My head swam with linages of the abuse that had been my
training.  The necessity of -creating the characters had torn me apart
but saved me from being a statistic.  Part of me had complied with my
training, the other part had made,it through twenty-six years with a
private, cut-off world intact.

I WMMD AN opinion once and for all as to why I was like this.  I
decided to take @ my book to a child psychiatrist who could read it and
tell me why.  During my lunch break I asked for directions to the child
psychiatry department of the hospital.  I looked for and found a door
with the appropriate label on it and knocked.

"I've written a book," I said to the professional behind the desk, "I
want you to read it and tell me why I'm like I am," I told him.

The psychiatrist was taken aback and asked me what the book was
about.

I told him how I'd been called crazy, stupid, disturbed, and just plain
weird, and that my father had told me people had said I was autistic.

"Well, the way you've presented me this book seems rather autistic," he
commented.  He asked why I'd chosen him to read it, and I explained
that I'd simply looked for a door with the right label on it.

It wasn't long before I heard back from this doctor.  He was quite
taken by the book and wanted a specialist on autism to read it.  He
asked me if he could send it on.  It hadn't occurred to me that it
might be published, and I was scared.  He pointed out that there were
many children who had had experiences like mine and that my book might
be important in understanding them.  I had wanted to burn it.  I had
written it for myself and had wanted just to read it back and see my
life consistently and see that my life had belonged to me.  I also
wanted to know why it had all happened because, although I'd found many
answers, I hadn't yet worked out why it had all happened in the
beginning.

The response that came back was overwhelmingly suportive.  My book had,
it seemed, portrayed what is typically seen in autistic children,
though I had no doubt done better at overcoming my difficulfies than
many ever would.  I was encouraged to send the book to a publisher.

At home my m@and worked overtime as I slept.  The characters were out
of hiding and so was I. My fear of sleep was still strong, and the
dreams it threw me into were almost more than I was ready to see.

I was dreaming.  A mouse ran across the bare floorboards of an empty
attic.  Another mouse followed.  Fighting the awareness of what I knew,
my face remained blank, my expression oblivious.  A man went to kill
them.

"No," I screamed suddenly, "you can't.  They're not mice," I said
finally, "they're kittens.  Please, can we feed them?"  I
askedpleadingly.

He opened a cupboard door, and tins of food fell out onto the floor.  I
opened one of the cans and called the kittens.  He went to touch one as
it approached.

"No," I shouted, "if you touch them, they will die."

As they ate, they began to grow.  I felt torn about feeding them.  What
would happen to them after I was gone and there was no one else to feed
them again?  I thought.  It is better never to be fed than be fed and
have it taken away again.  The man looked at me crouched down on the
floor.

"I must tell you," I said almost in a whisper, "there are more of
them.

There are seven."

I woke up in a sweat and paced around the room.  The words had been
freed by the book, and now their meaning was, too.  I cried and rocked
and told myself it was okay to be.

I went out and got a tin of cat food and sat it on the side table next
to my bed.  Although I had no real cat, it was to be a symbol that I
would commit myself to feed and care for the kittens that represented
myself.  It was a way of showing I meant this commitment in "the real
world,".  not just in mine.

YEARS BEFORE, I had found a small kitten in an industrial waste-bin.  I
had taken it home, but I didn' know how sick it was or how to care for
it properly, and it had died.  I was about to be revisited.

I looked at the tin of cat food in theIamplight and eventually drifted
off to sleep.  I saw myself as a teenage Carol in a corner chattering
away to a,group of friends.  A rustling noise came from the large
waste-bin nearby.

Carol ignored it, talking faster and faster.  There was a sense of
urgency that nobody should take their attention away from her; nobody
should notice the rustling from the bin.  After all, it was probably
only a rat or something.

A dirty little girl of about four in a torn dress emerged from the bin
in a scurry.  Carol turned her back on the group, her body a wall
between them and the little girl.  Looking at the little girl, she said
silently: "You've come home."

The little girl had backed into a corner, her eyes darting, poir,ed to
run "It's okay,'; said Carol.  "I promise they won't come near us," she
said, referring to the group.  "I won't even touch you," she said to
the little girl, and with that she walked away from the group without
looking back.  She walked with her hand held backward to the little
girl and didn't stop to see whether she was coming.  The little girl
ran and took her hand without looking at her.

The little girl's eyes darted back over her shoulder as they walked
away together.

dONNA HAD GONE from being symbolized by a kitten to being recognized by
my own mind as a human being, albeit a child.  Carol had finally come
back to the park and taken Donna home to "the world" after all these
years.  There was no need for the tin of cat food anymore.  Donna would
never again be anything other than a human being.

By now Willie had become a mother and an encourager, and Carol had
promised to keep Donna safely away from groups of people.  There was
one more battle to overcome.  Willie had to accept Carol.

By now I was developing a clear awareness of an "I" and was becoming
aware that I would have to lose my dependence upon the characters as
something separate to myself.  I was, however, not yet ready to Turn to
people.

I came across a ragged little toy at a market.  It was in a pile of
broken toys with missing bits.  It had a ribbon with blue spots on it
and looked like a cross between a sheep, a rabbit, and a dog.  It was
fifteen to twenty years old and cost twenty pence.  I bought it for
myself and named him Travel Dog.  He was to travel everywhere with me
every day, just as the characters had.  He was to become my bridge to
living things beyond the wall of my own body.

UN I NEEDED TRAVEL DOG, but having him physically next to me hurt me
emotionally.  It was a new experience, and I was unfamiliar with
accepting the boundaries of my own body in relation to the world
outside it.  I hadn't been so aware of what this uncomfortable feeling
was until I had become consistently attached to something that
represented the feeling world outside me.  I cried a lot and began to
try to hug myself rather than lose awareness or attack myself with
frustration.

Sleeping had become a bit easier with Travel Dog to keep guard over the
darkness.  But Travel Dog couldn't keep the dreams away, and the final
battle was about to be fought.

WITH TRAVEL DOG propped by my pillow, I fell asleep.  Willie walked
across the floor of an empty warehouse to where Carol stood next to
someone.

"This is my client," said a teenage Carol, referring to the man who
towered over her.  The glib comment refer-red direedy to the sense of
domestic prostitution that Carol had been forced to live with.

"You don't have to live like this," said Willie, "Oh yeah," said Carol
mockingly.  "Where else would I live?"  she went on.

Carol was stuck in time, and not a nice time at that.  It was time to
show her that things had changed and there was now somewhere to go.

"You can come and live with me," said Willie as the male stranger stood
there looking arrogant.

"How would I pay?  I don't have any money," said Carol.

"You can do the dishes," said Willie.

"I can take care of myself," gloated Carol.

"I know you can," Willie replied.  "Just come over and see if you want
to stay.  If you don't, you can go.  The door will be open."  Willie
walked away without even looking at the stranger next to Carol.  Carol
looked at the stranger, then at Willie walking away.  Silently, without
apology, Carol did what Carol did best: she followed.

I WENT TO the old tea-chest and took out my lace, my bells, and my
buttons.  Day in, day out, I sat for hours staring at them and
categorizing them, then mixing them back up again.  I was bathing in
the freedom to be me.  I had a solid sense of home and belonging within
my own body.  There would be no more selfabuse.  There would be no more
allowing anyone else to abuse me.  Nor would I be pushed beyond what I
could handle with my self intact.  Willie would be supportive until I
accepted those skills as my own and applied them to myself.

Carol would talk when it was necessary to hold down a job until I felt
I could accept those skills as my own.  I knew I would one day find
friends in "the world" to replace my attachment and dependence upon the
characters as they faded away.  Until then, I had Travel Dog.  As
Travel Dog became less of a protector and more of a comforting
companion, I myself took on the dual roles of taking responsibility and
being a friend.  The war against "the world" was over.  Nobody had
won.

There was a truce.

THE BOOIK WAS finished and now I had a word for the problems I had
fought to overcome and understand.  The label would have been useless
except that it helped me to forgive myself and my family for the way I
was.  Looking back through photos of myself taken over the years, I
recognized three ways I had avoided looking at people.  One was to look
straight through what was in front of me.  Another was to look away at
something else.  The third was to stare blankly ahead with one eye and
Turn the other one inwards.  This had the effect of blurring whatever
view I had in front of me.  I laid my photos out accordingly and there
I saw just how far back my problems had gone.

There were several photos with this third sort of gaze: a gaze that
left my face looking somewhat divided down the middle.  Unlike those
where I looked through the camera and those where I avoided the
direction of the camera altogether, these were the only ones that
looked as though I'd noticed the intrusion of the person taking the
photos.  The photos had been taken by different people and spanned a
number of years.  What struck me, however, was the age at which "the
look" first appeared.  It was in a photo where I had been propped up on
a chair.  I thought I had been a few months old; certainly no more than
four months.  As it turned out, the photo had been taken by my unde
when I was several weeks old.  The look, however, was unmistakable,
especially in companson with the others like it.  One side of my face
smiled with the eye turned inwards.  The other side was blank and lost,
the eye looking intensely into nothingness.

I wmmd To meet the other autistic people I'd been told about and was
surprised to find out that they were few and far between, scattered
across the countly and across the world.  I was in an even smaller
category.  I had become "high functioning."  Nevertheless, I needed to
meet others.  I could only know where I belonged in relation to others
when I had met the other side of society.  I'd met a world of so-called
"normal" people-the people I'd aspired to be like.

Now it was time to meet people still trapped in the place I had come
from and in some ways still was in.

Kath was a solid personality with whom I felt relatively secure.  Her
voice was rather flat and even and the pace with which she spoke was
easy to follow.

She had long straight gray hair and darting eyes, and though I felt
welcomed by her I didn't feel smothered by her involvement.

She had a son my age, and her son was autistic.  When I met him, he was
running his hands through colored beads.  I didn't want him to say
hello or ask me how I was.  Those were words reserved for those who
wanted to move in "the world," and her son Perry certainly didn't.

I sat on the floor nearby and took out a handful of colored buttons and
glass fruit.  I sorted them into groups, put my hand out to where Perry
was playing with his beads, and without a glance and without a word, I
dropped them.  Perry caught them and did the same back.  I remembered
my first version of relating-mirrors-but this time there would be no
one to say that my version of relating wasn't good enough.  This went
on for a while, and we began to modify the game.  I had a bell that I
jingled to myself and dropped it for him to catch.  Like before, Perry
repeated my gesture but added another noise to the jingle.  I mirrored
him.  We began following one another about the place in Turn, ringing
the bell and giving it over as the game became more and more one
between two people than one where we were merely incidental to the game
we made the objects play.

I sat back on the floor, lining up the buttons in categories' Perry
approached, picked up a button here and there and added them to my rows
where they belonged.  Without looking at him, I knew what he was
saying.  These "games" had always belonged to me.  Now I saw that these
"games" belonged to autistic people.

I hadn't noticed that Kath had entered the room.  She was standing
there silently as Perry came over to where I was, laid himself out,
face down, on the floor in front of me, arms pulled up tightly against
his sides as he shook with anxiety.

"Look at me," I said, reading the same action I'd seen so many times in
myself.  "Look, I'm daring to be touched."  I had looked straight at
Perry lying there as I had said it, tears rolling down my face as I
read his behavior as one might a book.  I had the tremors from head to
toe and wished the Welshman was there to understand himself as I had
come to understand myself.

I turned to see Kath crying.

"I never thought he had any language," she said.  "Now I see he does.

I just don't know how to speak it."  She said she had never seen him
look so "normal."  I had never felt I'd understood another individual
so well.  "We think it is we who have to teach autistic people," Kath
said.  "Now I see it is us who have so much to learn from them."

IN KATH WAS ALSO a teacher at a school for autistic children.  It was
time for camp, and she asked me if I'd come.  I was scared to break the
routine of my usual week.  It was one thing to drift without direction
when one was in total control.  It was another thing altogether to
break with an established routine to take up an invitation I'd had no
part in making even if it was for just one day.  But the offer was left
open, and I was free to come for as long as I was able to cope and then
could go.

I traveled by train, then bus, and then taxi to a setting in the midst
of the countryside of Kent.  The children were inside, and I was
overwhelmed by the number of people.  Kath said she'd tell them I was
coming, but that didn't stop the usual "hello theres" and I gravitated
to Kath and let her talk for me.

Not all of the children at this school were autistic, particularly at
this gathering, but at the dinner table one girl in particular stood
out as very fat.

Anne was eight but the size of a six-year-old, with long blond hair and
pale white skin like mine.  More distinctive was her gaze: one eye
staring blankly ahead, the other turned sharply inwards.  She was
seated at the table with her mouth firmly set around the edge of it as
she explored its surface with her tongue.  I looked at her and felt
somewhat exposed.

Kath wasn't with her, and the other professionals were impatiently
shouting at her in what I felt from her state must have been an
unintelligible mass of noise threatening to get in.  So these were the
professionals, I thought, as I reflected on my mother's own approach.

Looking at Anne, I thought to myself: I know where you are.

Getting Anne to do anything sent her into total hysterics, as one might
expect from a child blind and deaf to the world around her and most
likely also to herself.  Yet something was missing.  She had no form of
comforting herself.

I felt compelled to give her a consistent pattern; something to hold on
to and use to calm herself down long enough for her to open her eyes
and take a look at "the world."  The threat of exposing this in front
of other people seemed impossible.

Anne followed me about, and I headed outside for the space of
unfenced-in greenness.  Anne was chasing me as I avoided her; busy
dancing upon her shadow.

She began intermittently to focus on my shadow, and we chased each
other back and forth in Turn, both of us with our eyes upon each
other's shadow and feet.

I looked up to see a few teachers looking out at us through the glass
of the kitchen window.  Who's under glass now?  I thought.

IT, WAS NIGNfflME, and the children were being put to bed.  Naturally
this wasn't an easy task when it comes to children who aren't used to
being still and are not quite aware of what sleep is meant to be for.

One autisfdc boy jumped up and down in the dark on the top of his
bunk.

Anne screamed in terrified hysterics as one of the professionals sat on
the bed next to her tucking a doll in next to her, which seemed to
horrify her all the more.  Oh, those symbols of normality, dolls, I
thought.  Oh, these terrifying reminders that one is meant to be
comforted by people, and if one can't, one is meant at least to feel
comforted by their effigies.

The woman sitting on Anne's bed was screaming at her over and over
again to shut up and propping the doll back in its place with every
shove Anne made to push it away.  It was more than I could take.

Physically I moved the woman out of the way, moved the doll, and gave
her my brush.  Anne ran her fingers repetitively through the bristles
listening to the soft, barely audible sound in her ear and the
sensation on her hand.  I began to hum a repetitive tune I used to hum
to myself over and over again as I tapped her arm in time to the
hypnotic tune.  Give her something consistent to hold on to, I
thought.

There'll be all the time in the world for the experts to undo it.

Anne's crossed eyes were frozen in a dead stare, and she became silent
between sobs.  I took her hand and made her tap her own arm as I had,
the tune and the rhythm and the tapping held totally constant.

I heard a soft but audible rhythm coming from outside me.  Anne was
making the tune herself in her throat, and I slowly dropped notes of my
humming and, as I expected, she rifled them in as though they were and
had been her own.

Slowly I dropped out more and more of them until she was doing not only
the rhythm in her throat but carrying the tune as she tapped herself in
time.

Then, for a frozen fifteen seconds, in that torchfit dark room, she
completely uncrossed her eyes for the first time since I'd met her and
looked directly into my face as she tapped and now hummed.  I went to
leave several times, only to have to repeat the process.  What was
important, however, was that as I left she continued to tap and hum the
tune between short bursts of fear.

THE suN HAD come up on a new day, and a trip to the park was
scheduled.

Anne's screams came from a small room at the back of the hall.  I
walked to the door only to see the same tactics of trying to calm her
down: screaming "shut up" into her face.

fl wig stay with her," I said coldly from the doorway.

"You're welcome to her," came the reply, as though she were some sort
of unwanted baggage the woman was glad to be rid of.

I took out a crystal I had with me and turned it in front of Anne's
face.

Anne grabbed for it, and I let her take it.  She looked at it in her
hand and I felt I could see glimpses of my grandparents in myself as I
related to her through the object.  I sang the old tune over and over,
and Anne's hand went automatically up to her arm and she tapped herself
to the rhythm and eventually joined in.  We went out peacefully to the
bus.

Someone grabbed suddenly for Anne, to pile her on to the bus.  In the
confusion of children everywhere and verbal garble Anne again went into
hysterics.  Then suddenly her hand went up to her arm and she tapped
herself, hum the tune.  The bus started up, and she allowed herself to
be strapped in.  As she calmed down, the tapping and humming stopped.

Anne was learning she could control her own anxiety and the level of
overwhe@g input.

when we got to the park the same thing happened.  She calmed herself
down and climbed out of the bus.

I walked ahead across the grass.  On tiptoe, Anne half-ran,
half-stumbled as she made her way to where I was.  She took my hand,
and in unison we broke into a skip, swinging our hands as we went away
from the others across the park toward the swings.

We both got on the swings.  As we swung higher and higher, I remembered
another park a long, long time ago and wondered if one day there would
be a little autistic girl who would remember a person called Donna in
"the world" whose hand she had taken to skip across the park.

A A emord ZIJT Ail people like to put things into categories.  I do so
with my buttons, ribbons, and bits of colored glass.  As for people, I
had only ever truly felt there were two categories: "us" and "them."

Most people see things in these terms, too, but with different and more
value-laden definitions.

I do not believe that being sane or intelligent is superior to being
insane or retarded.  Many rimes the insane person has turned his or her
back on the often alienating normality that most people become
conditioned to believe is a real and desirable goal.  Similarly many
retarded people are more in touch with the world, as they sometimes
experience things in a much more sensual way than "normal" people.

They overlook what are sometimes very corrupting complexities, and rely
instead on simple instinctual reactions and responses.

In this sense I am both insane and retarded.  I would add to this deaf,
dumb, and blind; for, although the accuracy of this is being constantly
disproved by what I am able to perceive or express, this was often the
way I perceived myself to be, and behaved accordingly.

I have been with the mentally ill, the backward, and the physically
disabled.  I have also had the pleasure of being with others labeled
"autistic."  This was the only group who I.

198 199 spoke my own language so well that I realized that much of what
I had thought of as my personality was in fact my individual expression
of many of the misunderstood and confusing symptoms of autism.

I do not think I am mad, though at times I was convinced by the beliefs
of those around me that this must be so.  Certainly, however, if I had
the predisposition to become truly mentally W, then my isolation within
my mental prison would have caused enough stress to do this.

At times I have been considered moronic and stupid and, more politely,
naive.  Such was the all-absorbing nature of my world as a means of
coping with my terror of emotion.  Yet these emotions were always the
ones meant to be the most rewarding: the good emotions.  Had my mother
been kind and loving, had she tried to involve me or reach me, I'm sure
I would never have had the freedom to find emotionally detached corners
of the world from which to study and teach myself things through my
characters.  This freedom was born of my mother's neglect and
rejection; yet, ironically, without this I believe I would never have
been able to develop my intellect through the character of Willie and
my ability to communicate through the character of Carol.  It was these
two things that helped me to live independently and saved me from a
life in an institution.  These two things also led me on a journey
through which, piece by piece, I finally found the ability to stand as
a feeling self in "the world."  Thank God my mother was a "bad"
mother.

Everyone has an individual personality and I am no exception.  However,
ci problem-or the solutions to it-is not the same as a personality.

What I know of autism is from my own life, and I cannot claim its
relevance to anyone but me.  That is for others to decide.

Nevertheless, I have some views to@share.

My brother Tom and I taught ourselves everything we know.  In this way
I saved myself from a large part of the accusation of being retarded
because of my mother's neglect and lack of direct loving emotional
approaches toward me.

This is not to denigrate the value of a loving parent in helping such a
child.  Quite the contrary.  If loving parents can try to stand
objectively away from their own emotional needs and relate to such
children always in terms of how those children perceive the world, then
the chflclren may find the trust and courage to reach out step by step
at their own pace.

This, however, ought only to be an interim measure.  Gain the child's
trust and tell him or her that you accept who and where he or she is.

Through trust he or she may develop interest in "the world," and at
first this exploration should be on the only terms he or she knows-his
or her own.  Only once this is firmly established should you take the
safety net away slowly piece by piece.  This is the way to make a
transition from the child's sense of itself as the world to a new sense
of itself in the world so-called "normal" people share.

This method, in complete contradiction to normal interaction, is
indirect in nature.  In this way it is less all-consuming, suffocating,
and invasive.

The child can then reach out, not as a conforming role-playing robot,
but as a feeling, albeit extremely shy and evasive, human being.  The
best approach would be one that would not exchange individuality and
freedom for the parents', teacher's, or counselor's version of
respectability and impressiveness.  At this point I ought to make it
clear that I am not espousing soft options.  One must tackle war with
war and disarmament with disarmament.

I am saying that the war must be thought through, sensitive, and well
paced.

The perceptual problems of deafness, muteness, and blindness are
experienced as very real.  They are, nevertheless, caused by extreme
stress, brought on by an inability to cope with emotion.

Perhaps, as in cases of shock, this very real perception and the
behavior it leads to are caused by oversensitivity triggering
protective chemical or hormonal responses in the brain.  Perhaps in
something of a vicious circle this emotional hypersensitivity in Turn
leads to developmental problems that arise from the inconsistency of
changes in consciousness, and leaves such children functioning on a far
more sensory and subconscious level for most of their waking lives as
well as their sleeping ones.  My tendency to night terrors pointed to
this.  My constantly changing sense of time and space also indicates
that some of this emotional insecurity arises from the drifting in and
out of a dream state.

Certainly my situation was heightened by the effect of multiple food
allergies.  Untreated, severe food intolerances can cause brain damage,
arising from both toxicity and malnutrition due to malabsorption.  At
the same time, metabolic problems may lead to an inability to adjust
adequately to different foods, resulting in the sensitization that
leads to food intolerance.  It therefore works both ways.  Severe food
intolerance can lead to brain damage, but some forms of brain damage
can also manifest themselves in food intoletance.

Phenol intolerance is an example of one form of food intolerance
particularly associated with autism.  Sensitivity to colorings,
flavorings, and preservatives has been found to be associated with
hyperactivity.  Even when intolerance doesn't cause actual damage, it
affects the body's rate of absorption of vitamins, minerals, And to)dc
substances and so affects the functioning of the brain.  Since being
treated for my own intolerances and deficiencies, I have been able to
cope far better with the anxiety that set up a barrier to change,
self-awareness, expression, and comprehension.  I wasn't so much
hyperactive as extremely restless.  Recognizing my food allergies also
stopped me being physically so agitated and restless.  I began to find
some sort of a rhythm and permanence within my own body, and this has
helped in my acceptance of my body as belonging to me rather than
something with a mind of its own, constantly driving me crazy.  I have
recently read that metabolic problems may be the basic cause of
problems in between 8 and 20 percent of autistic people.  The fact that
most doctors have not formally studied the effects of nutrition, food
intolerance, and vitamins and minerals on health has generally led to a
shunning of what this area of health practice may have to offer, and
this is unfortunate.  I was lucky enough to be treated by a doctor who
practiced natural medicine.  However, there are some cranks out there
in the field of natural medicine who don't know any more about this
area than most doctors do and they give a bad name to those who do know
what they are talking about.

HUMAN BEINGS ma made up of three systemswhich in the nominal person are
reasonably integrated: mind, body, and emotions.  In some people, one
of these systems is faulty and makes complete integration
ixnpossible.

Three examples of this are, in my belief, mental retardation, physical
disability, and autism.

In retardation, the mental or intellectual mechanism has broken down,
constraining the normal expression of one's self through an otherwise
healthy body and emotions.

In physical disability, body function is faulty and traps and
constrains the expression of a healthy mind and emotions.

I believe that autism results when some sort of mechanism that controls
emotion does not function properly, leaving an otherwise relatively
normal body and mind unable to express themselves with the depth that
they would otherwise be capable of.  Perhaps before an autistic child
is even born it is unable to receive or make sense of any message that
says there is a connection between itself and its mother.  This
inability to comprehend closeness constrains the formation of
attachments and inhibits efforts to make sense of one's environment in
infancy.  Without this, perhaps the child creates within itself what it
perceives as missing and in effect becomes a world within itself to
which all else is simply irrelevant, external, and redundant.  The
child as a world is no longer a person, and hence the child does not
perceive the absence of emotional attachment until he or she begins to
be imposed upon by a world that expects it, along with the desire to
learn and to be part of things, which usually springs from emotional
attachment and belonging.  Nevertheless, despite the deficits, in the
case of autism there is hope of reaching one's potential and overcoming
some of one's problems, though the means of doing this in itself can
create new problems.

As for the placement of schizophrenia among these three categories, I
would place this at the opposite end of the scale from autism.  A
progression along this scale would range from truly emotionally
detached, through autistic, to shy and distant, to normal, with
schizophrenia placed on the other side of normal.  The criterion for
such a scale would be the degree of sensitivity of an automatic cut-off
mechanism that stops emotional overload.  In the autistic, I believe,
this is underdeveloped and oversensitive and is triggered too easily.

In the nominal person, this probably only comes into action in extreme
shock-producing situations and is shortlived.  Perhaps schizophrenia is
the breakdown of the mind that occurs when this ability to cut off is
not sensitive enough to protect the mind from mental breakdown.  This
is why I believe that, while it may look like it, autism is not a form
of madness.  If anything, autism is an extreme example of a mechanism
that acts to protect sanity.

Basically the solution I found to minimize overload and thereby to
enable my own self-expression was actually to fight for, and not
against, a separation between my own mind and emotions.  This points to
the question of whether we must take this response as an act of sanity
rather than of madness, for it has, indeed, never been viewed that
way.

To do this to myself, I had constantly to convince myself that there
was nothing personal or emotional in what I was doing, and constantly
to hypnotize myself in order to calm down enough to allow some
self-expression; to reduce the stress and emotional resistance to the
"sellout" I felt by admitting a need to communicate.

Perhaps, according to basic definition, this response is schizoid, but
schizoid behavior is not the same as true schizophrenia.  Look around
you.

Most people force themselves to do things against their natural
emotional reactions.

We live in a schizoid society.  This is alienation.  I believe I was
born alienated, and if not, I was certainly so by the time I got left
behind in emotional development at about the age of three.

Autistic people are not mad, not stupid.  They are not fairies, not
aliens-just people trapped in invisible, crippled emotional
responses.

At the same time, it would be misleading to think that such people do
not feel.  A physically disabled person can move, but the messages to
the brain are faulty, resulting in often inappropriate movements.  In
my case, my mind knows that affection and kindness will not kill me,
yet my emotional response defies this logic, telling me that good
feelings and gentle and loving touch can kill me or at the very least
cause me pain.  When I try to ignore this message, I go into what would
seem to be a state of shock, where what's coming in is either
incomprehensible or has no significance.  This state leads to my
emotions committing suicide, leaving me without physical or emotional
feeling and with a purely robotic mental response-if that.

At the same time, subconscious wig to escape this emotional prison is
probably why such people are sometimes thought to be geniuses.  Perhaps
they find a bit of light in the darkness, and clutch at it as though it
were the way out.  If only it was.

IF YOU CLOSE your eyes and try to lose all conception of night or day,
light or darkness, time or space, you may be able to grasp just how
unreal time and space actually are.  They exist within clocks and
calendars and the structures created by people who have been agreed
upon as a shared conception of such things.

Einstein, who is documented as having had learning disabilities, taught
us that there is a point at which all things can be broken down into
the minutest of parts and that it is at this point that something can
pass through a seemingly solid object.  He also believed in the ability
to move through time and space, which made a mockery of the seemingly
dependable idea that there is any sort of absolute reality.

People think of reality as some sort of guarantee they can rely on.

Yet from the earliest I can remember I found my only dependable
security was in losing an awareness of the things usually considered
real.  In doing this, I was able to lose all sense of self.  Yet this
is a strategy said to be the highest stage of meditation, indulged in
to achieve inner peace and tranquillity.  Why should it not be
interpreted as such for autistic people?

I rejected all contact because it robbed me of the security I found in
my ability to lose myself through color, sound, pattern, and rhythm.

This was no great paradise, but it was my ranctuary from the fear of
death that feeling good emotion gave me.  For those who would talk of
alienation, I was, as far as I can make out, born alienated from the
world, and later became alienated from myself in responding to "the
world."

I have learned that the world also makes nonautistic people this way.

Perhaps in some strange way I started at the end and tried to work my
way back.  T. S. Eliot wrote, "In my beginning is my end" and "In my
end is my beginning."  Strangely, it was Bryn who had me read that
poem.  Perhaps he had found answers for himself long before I battled
hard and long to get there.

For what does LIFE teach us but that there are no guarantees, and that
vulnerability is our downfall?  What does LIFE ultimately teach us but
to rely upon ourselves, for in the end we will quite likely be alone.

Through his paintings, Vincent van Gogh tried to capture the meaning of
a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface.  Through his
paintings he tried to teach people to look beyond the surface image of
things and to see the true beauty in the individuality of things so
often dismissed as ugly.  He tried to teach people the beauty to be
found in simplicity.

In the end, it is not knowledge that matters but the nature of a
person's spirit.  Alone, it is not the mind that strives for knowledge
but the spirit that guides it.  Untouched purity, innocence, and
honesty of one's own spirit make up possibly the highest stage any
person could hope to reach.  Beauty in simplicity.

In the world, the emphasis is on complexity, yet it is misleading to
believe that complexity cannot be found in simplicity.  People who
pride themselves on the ability to think complexly with their conscious
mind often still have not found the ability to think in symbols with
their subconscious mind.  In this blind self-assurance, so many
attempts are made by well-meaning people to drag children's
consciousness into the so-called complexities of "the world" without
first asking to what extent that world is worthy of them.

Perhaps this is the real madness, naivete, and ignorance.

mi FOR LANGUAGE To have any meaning one must be able to relate to it.

For me, when the directness of relating is too great, the walls go
up.

This means that under overload conditions any of several meaning
systems can shut down partially or completely, in combination or in
isolation.

Sensorially, this can mean that any one or any combination of the
senses can become extremely acute.  For me, this made some high-pitched
sounds intolerable, and bright light became either intolerable or
mesmerizing.  Touch was as always intolerable.  On a cognitive level,
the meaning carried by intonation and gesture can be completely shut
down, leaving the listener with no emotional cues.  The meaning behind
the significance of social rules can be completely lost (where it had
previously been understood and cooperated with), and the comprehension
of the meaning of words can drop away, leaving the listener lost as to
both concept and significance.  For me, my expressive difficulties were
secondary and sprang from these primary inconsistencies in my
perception of the world around me and in the complex psychological
defense systems I created to compensate, which trapped me even more.

As autism is particularly characterized by difficulties in expressive
communication, I will set out some strategies I have used.

At best, a person in this situation can speak fluently only by tricking
the mind into believing: 1. that what it has to say is not of emotional
importancethat is, babbling; 2. that the listener wig not be able to
reach the speaker via words-that is, jargon or "speaking in poetry";
3.

that the speech is not aimed directly at the listener-that is, speaking
via objects or to objects (this includes writing, which is speaking via
paper); 4. that it is not speech at all-that is, singing an appropriate
song; 5. finally, that the conversation has no emotional contentthat
is, stating hard facts and trivia.

At worst, the stress of direct, emotionally loaded communication either
blocks the brain's ability to retrieve all or any of the words needed
to speak a fluent sentence or won't allow the process of articulation
to begin, leaving the words echoing within the speaker's head.  The
frustration of this can lead, as I de@bed, to the deafening scream of
frustration that may or may not get out of the speaker's mouth.

The comprehension of words works as a progression, depending on the
amount of stress caused from fear and the stress of relating
directly.

At best, words are understood with meaning, as with the indirect
teaching of facts by a teacher or, better still, a record, television,
or book.  In my first three years in the special class at primary
school, the teacher often left the room and the pupils responded to the
lessons broadcast through an overhead speaker.  I remember responding
to it without the distraction of coping with the teacher.  In this
sense, computers would probably be beneficial for autistic children
once they had the skills to use one.

The more predictable and calm the voice, the less emotional fear it
inspires.  Emotional fear, however, is a two-way street.  Mildly
autistic children may emerge as themselves in an environment where they
are able to relax, though not enough to "lose themselves."  I had to
make my way up to this stage.  In my earlier years, I was generally
unresponsive to an unthreatening voice, and if I complied at all it
would be automatically, with very little awareness of what I was
doing.

It was always fear that brought out the characters, and it was through
them that I functioned at school.  Perhaps a more severely closed-off
child would learn to respond to a combination of predictability and
unpredictability in a voice, though there should never be so much
unpredictability as to send a child like this into irretrievable
withdrawal.  This is a double-edged sword.  If it is too predictable,
it will be tuned out, although the child will trust.  If it is too
unpredictable, it is hard to tune out, but the psychological barrier of
distrust will be greater.

Laughing is no indication of response to a voice.  Laughing can mean
enjoyment, understanding, or fear.  It can also be related to the very
literal visualization of something said at some other time, as the
thinking-through of what has been said may be very delayed.  Laughing
can be inextricably tied up with the overload the speaker triggers, at
which point the speaker's words are little more than a meaningless hum
of noise.

As an echolalic child, I did not understand the use of words because I
was in too great a state of stress and fear to hear anything other than
patterned sound.  The need to hide the fear is such that not even the
face is allowed to show it.

The development of my speech was fueled largely by the repetition of a
storybook record and jingles on the television.

When I later used repeated phrases, it was simply because I sensed that
some sort of response with sounds was required.  Mirroring, as with the
matching of objects, was my way of saying: "Look, I can relate.  I can
make that noise, too."  If echolalic children often do better than
others, it is because, in their own way, they are trying desperately to
reach out and show they can relate, if only as mirrors.

In consolation to those who have children who have never spoken,
something I know from creating songs may help.

For me, the words were already in the pattern of the music; they sprang
from it.

When I heard speech as only patterns of sound, my mind somehow read the
meaning of the pattern (perhaps subconsciously or even psychically?)
and I often responded as was expected regardless of not having
consciously understood.

I believe that all thought begins with feeling.  Such children have
feeling, but it has developed in isolation and can't be verbalized in
the usual way, and most people cannot hear with anything other than
their ears.

210

An Outline of Language if in "-My World I am not suggesting that the
meaning behind all of the reseated gestures I made is the same as that
of others who use the same stereotyped gestures.  However, though I
spoke with the words of "the world," my gestures were the more
important language of "my world."

Sometimes these gestures were purely for comfort, security, and release
of extreme tension and frustration.  Although at other times it seemed
such gestures were still complicated self-directed, they were an effort
to manage and make sense of "the world."

This understanding had evaded me as I had not until recently reached
out to it freely with my own good feelings consciously intact.

Expressing myself indirectly and symbolically was the only way I could
dare "say" the things that were "too important" to express in a more
direct way.  Such war, the irony of my situation.

In the event that an understanding of the meaning behind some of these
gestures may help those of "the world" understand this language and
reach similar trapped and frightened people on their own terms, I have
laid out a rough analysis of what such gestures meant to me.

1. The matching or pairing of objects Making connections between
things.  Showing that relationships between two or more things c4an
exist.  Seeing this objectified, through objects, in the most concrete
and undeniable way.  Seeing this and doing this again and again gave me
hope that if the concept was possible, then it would one day be
possible to feel and accept these relationships in "the world."  I was
always within this world of objects.

2. The ordering of objects and symbols Proving that belonging exists
and giving myself hope that I, too, could one day feel this same
special and undeniable place where I fitted in and belonged in "the
world."  Also, creating order and thereby making this symbolic
representation of "the world" more comprehensible, 3. Patterns
Continuity.  The reassurance that things will stay the same long enough
to grasp an undeniable guaranteed place within the complex situation
around me.

As surrounding circles or borderlines, these are set up as a means of
protection from invasion by that which exists outside, in "the
world."

4. Blinking compulsively To slow things down and make them seem like a
more detached, and therefore less frightening, frame-by-frame film.

Switching lights on and off very fast had an element of this, too.

5. Switching lights on and off Similar to above, but the clicking sound
is an impersonal and graspable connection with things outside oneself,
like bells and music.  It gives the pleasure of sensation denied by
almost all touch, and provides security.  The more patterned and
predictable, the more reassuring.

6. Dropping things repetitively Freedom.  Proving that escape to
freedom is possible.  Symbolically this is the freedom to allow good
emotions to touch you without pain, and the freedom to allow them out
and not be so afraid of them from within.

7. jumping jumping from heights means the same as the dropping of
objects, though it is less secretive.  This action also gave hope,
confirming that the concept of hope exists so that the feeling of it,
which is missing, is, in theory, possible.  It is also a way of getting
one's whole body into a rhythm, as with rocking.

8. Rocking from one foot to another I always saw a foreboding darkness
between myself and "the world."  The fact that getting through this
imaginary darkness to the other side would take quite a leap is
possibly also captured by the preparatory rocking from front foot to
back foot so indicative of someone about to take a running leap:
"Ready, on your mark, get set, jump through the darkness to the other
side," probably describes it well.  Strangely, I was always too afraid
to jump when other people tried to get me to.  I once ran straight
through a series of hurdles, letting my legs crash against them, as I
was too afraid to jump them at the last minute.

9. Rocking, hand-shaking, flicking objects, chin-tapping Provide
security and release, and thereby decrease, built-up inner arodety and
tension, thereby decreasing fear.  The more extreme the movement, the
greater the feeling I was trying to combat.

10.  Head-banging To fight tension and to provide a thudding rhythm in
my head when my mind was screaming too loud for me to be able to hum or
to repeat a hypnotic tune in order to calm down.

ii.  Staring past things, seemingly at something else An attempt to
take in what was happening around me whill- escaping my fear by
experiencing a visual image indirectly.  Looking at things directly
often robbed them of all their impact and meaning.  I managed to learn
so much in my final year of primary school in this way, although the
teacher had no idea that this was my only way of taking things in in
any depth.  Similarly, I would lose the ability to play music by
looking at my fingers and thinking about what they were doing.  If I
looked away and switched to "automatic pilot," the music flowed and I
could create.

Ail things must be indirect.  I constantly had to, trick my mind so it
would relax enough to take things in.

12.  Laughing Often a release of fear, tension, and anxiety.  My true
feelings were too well protected to really show any experience of
pleasure in anything so direct and able to be experienced and
understood by others.  Carol laughed all the time.  Carol was the
embodiment of my fear of feeling, presented as a reasonably socially
acceptable, constantly laughing character.

13.  Clapping Clapping has always been a better indication of pleasure
with me than laughter.  However, clapping also indicated finality-the
signaling of the end of one event or activity and the beginning of
another.  It could also be an attempt to try to snap myself out of an
inescapable dreamlike state.

14.  Staring into space or through things, also the spinning of things
or oneself and running in circles A means of losing awareness of self
in order to relax or cope with boredom caused by an inability to
express one's self or feel for the things one did.  In a more extreme
sense, it is a form of mental suicide used when one gives up hope of
being able to reach out or be affected.

15.  Tearing paper Symbolically disintegrating the threat of
closeness.

A symbolic act x)f separation from others in order to reduce fear.  I
often did this when I had to say goodbye to anyone, as though I had
first symbolically to destroy the closeness in order not to feel any
sense of desertion or loss.

16.  Breaking glass Symbolically shattering the invisible wall between
self and others.  Is this the wall between conscious and
subconscious?

17.  Fascination for colored and shiny objects Grasping the concept of
beauty in simplicity.  Also a tool for self hypnosis, needed to help
calm down and relax.  Often closeness to particular people lives within
these objects whether or not they were actually given by the other
person.  A particular color of blue always stood for my Aunty Linda, a
bright golden yellow button stood for another friend, a piece of cut
glass stood for the real Carol I met in the park, tartan stood for my
grandmother, and so on.  I had merely assigned them these connections
because they captured "the feel" of these people.

18.  Hurting oneself and also knowingly doing embarrassing @@gs to
cause a shock reaction in others Testing as to whether one is actually
real.  As no one person is experienced directly, because all feeling
gets held at some sort of mental checkpoint before being given to self
by self, it is easy to wonder whether one in fact exists.

19.  Deliberate soiling For me, this began in a semiconscious state.

It was, I believe, a subconscious drive towards conscious selfawareness
and "freedom to be."

It was an act of selfassuredly breaking free of excessive self-control
through defying that behavior regarding which conformity and
self-control are so demanded and disgust from others is so easily
inspired.  It was, at the same time, an expression of frustration at
having to conform without actually getting any emotional reward from
this conformity.  It is an act of self-determination, proving that one
can let go of self control in exchange for control over external
expectation.  The self assurance of "freedom to be" that one gets from
this act gives one the courage to keep trying to reach out.  I went
through this once, when I again found the courage to try to come out of
my withdrawal, and as annoying as it must be to parents, I must say
that it was an important phase I had to get through in order to
progress.

It is also a way of making one's surroundings symbolically part of
"one's world," which is the beginning of accepting a world outside the
confines of one's own body.  From a body to a room.  From a room to a
house.  From a house to a street.  From a street to "the world."

20.  Safe physical contact That which does not threaten to hold or
consume.  Hairbrushing and tickling are examples of this.  In
particular, tickling forearms is unthreatening, as this is a less
personal and more detached part of oneself.  It is also less socially
valued than, for example, touching one's face.  For this reason, it
carries less social significance for the person doing the touching.

Hair, in this sense, also seems detached from one's body.  Again, this
is as close as one can come to the fine fine between direct and
indirect touching without robbing the recipient of all physical
sensation from touch.  Otherwise, all touch is either experienced as
pain or tolerated as though one is made of wood.  Quite simply, it is
as though the spirit leaves the body there to be tormented by what
others may think is a kind act of touching.

A few hints The best way I could have been given things would have been
for them to be placed near me with no expectation of thanks and no
waiting for a response.  To expect a thank-you or a response was to
alienate me from the item that prompted the response.

The best way for me to have been able to listen to someone was for them
to speak to themselves about me out loud or about someone like me,
which would have inspired me to show I could relate to what was being
said.  In doing so, indirect contact, such as looking out of a window
while talking, would have been best.  This, however would only work
once I had achieved the ability to cooperate.  In this case, this
seeming indifference would actually demonstrate awareness and
sensitivity to the child's problems in coping with directness.

Furthermore, the child will be able to develop more of a self knowing
it has reached out to the other person for the meaning in what is being
said, rather than being in the role of a passive object being imposed
upon at a pace it cannot keep up with when confronted with direct and
often emotive interaction.  After this consistently achieves the result
of gaining the child's attention, met-hods of explaining things'
through visual representation could be slowly introduced.  Called
speaking through objects or use of visual symbols, it is a way of
communicating with personal distance without having to be at such a
physical distance.  This visual representation is particularly
important in explaining social relationships, directions, or abstract
concepts.

For children who have not yet achieved the ability to cooperate by
these strategies, I must, against my own feelings, suggest a
strongly:persistent, sensitive though impersonal approach to teach the
child that "the world" will not give up on it; that it will
relentlessly make demands of the child.

Otherwise, "the world" will remain closed out.  Teaching the value of
whit "the world" has to offer will probably have no meaning or
significance, but the concept of a war that won't go away can force
interaction.

In order to receive pleasure from physical touch, it ought always to
have been initiated by me and I ought, at the very least, to have been
given a choice.  Again, very small children would need to be challenged
to learn that they can choose.

When people didn't touch me I never experienced this as neglect.  I
experienced it as respect and understanding.  When I came to them and
sat in front of them with the hairbrush or put my forearm out across
their lap to be ticided, I appreciated a freely and casually given
response that asked me nothing about what I was getting out of the
action.  To make me aware that I had a want for something was to have
robbed me of it, and my ability to feel and courage to reach out again
would diminish.

When I spoke, it was important that I knew I was being listened to and
that the listener understood the seriousness of what I was trying to
communicate and the amount of courage it took.  At the same time, the
listener should not make me too aware of my own efforts.  I was only
able to do so by letting my conscious mind believe that nothing of any
significance was happening.

In play and symbolic gesture, standing calmly by, without looking
intently at me, perhaps even replaying my actions a few feet away from
me without directing these efforts at me, would have confirmed
understanding of what I was trying to communicate and given me hope and
courage to keep trying.

Allowing me my privacy and space was the most beneficial thing I ever
got.

As much as many of the things I did were dangerous and as much as
people could sense my isolation, this isolation was not from being left
to my own devices.

It stemmed from the isolation of my inner world, and only the
unthreatening nature of privacy and space would inspire the courage to
explore the world and get out of my world under glass step by step.

Most important, I didn't need to be loved to death, but at the same
time I'd never recommend violence (which I see as quite different from
punishment).

My problems thrived on violence, which told me I was safe and no one
could get close to me.  The degree of violence required actually to
change my behavior constituted serious and dangerous abuse.  This
causes damage to the abuser, who is the very person the child needs if
it ever "comes out."  I could therefore never recommend it.

Nevertheless, if love won't work, try persistent, detached, nonviolent
war.  War must be met with war and disarmament with disarmament.

Love and kindness, affection and sympathy were my greatest fears.  It
was great that other people had them waiting for me, but the
frustration of trying to live up to their urunatchable efforts only
compounded my sense of inadequacy and hopelessness.  Pity did
nothing.

Love, despite the fairy-tales, would only be thrown back and spat on
for good measure.  Caring would have been useful had it been channeled
into an informed understanding of how to bund a world I could have
trusted enough to reach out to.  Sometimes people must love you enough
to declare war.  The jump itself through the darkness to the other side
was something I had to find the courage and ability to do on my own.

As much as one might want to, one cannot save another's spirit.  One
can only inspire it to fight to save itself.  if love can't inspire it,
external fear greater than one's inner fear might, but I suggest one
try love first.

Above all I would encourage those who have strived to help people like
myself that their efforts are not useless.  Responding in an indirect
or detached manner is not synonymous with indifference.

				the end.