SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE

Also by Donna Williams

Nobody Nowhere

SOMEBODY
SOMEWHER-E

Donna W*11.1*lams

1
Doubleday

I,ONI)ON . NhW YORK IORON-
FO . SYI)NIY . Atl(Ki,ANI)

SOMEBODY
SOMEWHERE

Donna W*11.1*lams

1
Doubleday

.     1 ()R()" 1 ()     -    11~ 1)111 K[~^11)

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD
15-25 Helles Avenue, Moorebank, NSW 2170

TRANSWORLI) PUBLISHERS (NZ) LTD
3 William Pickering Drive,
Albany, Auckland

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS LTD
61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

First published in Australia and New Zealand in 1994 by Doubleday
a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd
Copyright @ 1994 by Donna Williams

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Williams, Donna, 1963
Somebody somewhere

ISBN 0 86824 538 0

1. Williams, Donna, 1963- .2. Autism - Patients
Biography. 1. Title.

616.89820092

A] I rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publishers.

Typeset in Garamond by
Chippendale Type Ltd, Otley, West Yorkshire
Printed in Great Britain by
Mackays of Chatham, plc, Chatharn, Kent.

W       ICIPAL L[~
,~VERLEY i,iU!4

miwep---

To my younger brother and all the gadoodleborgers
who never forgot how to simply be, and to all those
who did who may one day rediscover the few things
that did come naturally to them.

On the edge I ask myself, what will I lose,
To have lived in the depths of 'well below zero',
I grasped the tools to climb out,
And scream loudly to the world,
That I was all that I was, before never enough,
That with all I was, I . t wasn't fair enough
That I stayed there; a nobody nowhere.

AUTHOR-'S NOTE

THIS IS THE story of how one picks up the pieces after
a war. It is a story of disarmaments, peace treaties, and
reconciliations. It is a story of learning how to build
a somewhere out of a nowhere and a somebody out of a
nobody. It is the tale of a journey to find how to build
castles                                    in the air and make them real, of building bridges
between the dream to fly and the being able to do so. It Is
the story of somebody somewhere.
Within each of us there is a stranger (or strangers) lurking
in the shadows of our own subconscious minds. They know
Of us but do not know us. And the only thing that keeps them
'back there' is a sense of self (self-possession). Not all of us
are born aware we have this.

SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE

1

A COPY OF the manuscript lay on the floor as I packed
the tea chest. Nobody Nowhere, the story of my life
and my life's lives, was something of an epitaph. It
marked the end of an era and the start of a life I could now
begin to own freely.
That manuscript, those sheets of paper, had been both my
best friend and my worst enemy. They had both saved me and
destroyed me. A copy was in the hands of a possible publisher.
Another copy would come with me back to Australia. back to
the place of its roots. The other copy of the manuscript would
live in my tea chest here in London. My stomach twisted as
I put it into a big brown envelope, sealed it up. put it in the
tea chest, and used almost a packet of nails to close it. The
manuscript was on the verge of being made public to the world
and I was still paranoid that someone might look at it.
Letting anyone read it had been a desperate move. Exposed
to the enemy, what I had known as 'my world' would never
again be free from the contamination of its exposure.
'My world' was a spiritual body. It had been my home, my
self, my life, my entire system of making sense of that bastard
place called 'the world'. I had felt compelled to disown or
reject any part of 'my world' exposed or touched upon by 'the
world'. This was my law, a sort of decontamination procedure
or safety valve for the maintenance of sanity within the confines
of an inescapable cage. If I had a crystal or other knick-knack
I considered part of my world because I had genuinely chosen
to like it, and if it was then seen or touched upon by anything
in the world', I would no longer own it. This law went so far
as to govern my every smile or look, my own articulation and
accent, my tastes, my own way of moving, thinking, wanting.
and my entire perception of who Donna was. Once seen or
touched by 'the world'. these self-expres s ions became instantly
disowned. What was left in their place was the nothingness of
denial or yet another addition to an endless repertoire of 'the
world' fa~ades. I could share only so long as nothing I shared
or the way I shared it was 'me3.
Yet I had come to see that I could no longer stand life in
my gilded cage, my straitjacket of knots within knots within
knots.

I

I had confronted my fears one by one and thrown them
to the wolves to prove that I was bigger than the fears that
compelled me. The ultimate daring of all fear would be to
throw 'my world' into the jaws of 'the world'.
'My world' was contained in the pages of that manuscript and
though the exposure would be a sort of self-inflicted soul-rape.
I knew that after its publication I would be compelled to
disown not just part of 'my world' but all of it. I knew I could
never accept 'the world' without walls until I had thrown down
my weapons. My possessiveness and secrecy of 'my world'
were the greatest weapons I had, weapons so strong that when
I threatened to expose 'my world' it would run from the grasp
of my own conscious awareness and expression. Rejecting 'my
world' was like amputating my own limbs one by one without
anesthetic, but it would have to be done.
After twenty-five years of wondering what sort of stupid.
mad, or disturbed person I was, I had stumbled across a word
that helped explain 'my world'. That word was 'autism'.
All I knew of the word had been the dictionary definition
'withdrawn'. So what, I had thought, knowing I had been
withdrawn throughout much of my life.
From library books, I found a handful of conflicting theories.
Throughout the ages, autism had gone from being seen as
being caused by everything from possession by fairy spirits
to bad parenting. From psychosis to emotional disturbance.
From retardation to a sleep disorder. and most recently as a
developmental disorder occurring either before or shortly after
birth that affects how the brain uses incoming information.
There is a bit of truth in most theories. but the total truth
is probably to be found in none. Theories weren't relevant
to me. What mattered to me was how my difficulties crippled
and tied up the me inside.
Autism had had me in its cage for as long as I had ever
known. Autism had been there before thought, so that my
first thoughts were nothing more than automatic, mirrored
repetitions of those of others. Autism had been there before
sound so that my first words were the meaningless echo of the
conversations of those around me. Autism had been there before
words, so that ninety-nine percent of my verbal repertoire

was a stored-up collection of literal dictionary definitions and
stock phrases. Autism had been there before I'd ever known a
want of my own, so that my first 'wants' were copies of those
seen in others (a lot of which came from TV). Autism had been
there before I'd learned how to use my own muscles, so that
every facial expression or pose was a cartoon reflection of those
around me. Nothing was connected to self. Without the barest
foundations of self I was like a subject under hypnosis, totally
susceptible to any programming and reprogramming without
question nor personal identification. I was in a state of total
alienation. This, for me, was autism.
I guess I had been one of the luckier ones. I had been both
echoialic and echopractic, able to mimic sound or movement
without any thought whatsoever about what was heard or
seen. Like someone sleep-walking and sleep-talking, I imitated
the sounds and movements of others - an involuntary
compulsive impressionist. This meant that I could go forward
as a patchwork fagade condemned to live life as a 'the world'
caricature. Others called 'autistic' who were neither of these
things sometimes paid the price of being incapable of any
sound or action at all. They, at least, probably maintained a
sense of self. Ironically these people, and not those like me,
were the ones who were labeled 'low functioning'.
The 'post-operative' debris now lay around my feet. The
echoes of the life I had lived as the characters I called Carol
and Willie (my 'the world' fa~ades) stood as pathetic reminders
of just how expensive cheap acceptance had been in 'the
world'. Buried behind these fagades, I had been suffocating
in a self-made mind-house with defenses to cover defenses to
cover defenses. This was 'my world under glass', a place with
reinforced invisible glass windows, a self-made womb to replace
the womb I had now outgrown and through which I had been
able to view 'the world' as it sat back and enjoyed the show.
But the windows of 'my world' had been broken and I was left
rawly exposed to the enemy. In my vulnerability, I had used
my final defense. I had laid myself bare at its feet. In doing so
I had shattered the impenetrability of the characters, an impenetrability
dependent upon the self-deception that I had no self
beyond these stored repertoires. I had shattered the image, and

3

-~A
m
in doing so threw down every weapon that had kept me safe for
twenty-five years. The cold wind of the unknown was blowing
in brutally through the holes in my broken glass walls.
What I had known of closeness were the memories of a tapping
upon glass, the glass of my own rock-solid, invisible walls.
I had had a compulsion to outrun emotion. The compulsion
had led to a way of life where my best friend was my mirror
image, the only person with whom I could be my real self.
I had also created a theoretical 'the world' family; a collection
of selective memories that made my family look like the Brady
Bunch. 'This family' hid the realization of the horror story that
was 'the real reality', and allowed Carol's repertoire to include
the role of being somebody's darling child.

Roses hung over the fences of the long London street I now
walked along on my way to the house where my tea chest
lived. Listening to the sound of my feet, I reached out, picked
a petal, and shredded it. The wet strawberry color covered
my fingers as I broke the petal apart, rolled the bits, and
gathered them in the center of my palm. My nose zoomed
in on them like a camera taking a photograph and I took
a long breath. I was swept up in the smell, becoming part
of the rose it had come from.
Too aware of the world around me now, I was such a step
up from oblivious. Yet now I felt inhibited, too inhibited to
make the bits snow by throwing them over me. My hand down
by my side, I let them trickle onto the ground as I walked along.
They would be a path for any others like me to recognize there
was another like them who had come this way.
I was scared to walk alone now. It had been different
when Willie was around. I always knew Willie would take
over if I couldn't handle things.
Carol and Willie were my 'more real' inner family, the characters
I had created and through whom I had lived two-thirds
of my past twenty-five years.
Willie was a walking textbook, a fact accumulator in a world
of facts. The first member of my self-contained, untouchable
mobile family, Willie played the prison warden of the invisible
cage I was safely locked into. Sometimes I would be let out

for good behavior, but always on my jailer's terms. Willie was
amazingly strong and afraid of nothing. Although I was only
five foot two and little more than a hundred pounds, Willic had
used my skeleton of a body to lift wardrobes and refrigerators
by himself, heaving them on and off roof racks with the finesse
of a professional mover. He was impervious to pain - physical,
mental, and emotional. He was always in control. I could
always withdraw into my prison, leaving him to function on
automatic pilot. He would speed-read piles of books, memorize
lists of facts, and impress people with stored-up factual garble
until it was safe enough for me to come back.
Willie started life as a pair of green eyes under my bed when
I was two years old. I was afraid of him, but I was more afraid
and confused by what was happening in my house.
A pillow was pushed down upon my face day after day.
You never knew when it would strike. You had to pull your
jaw and bottom lip in in anticipation of the pressure on your
mouth. 'Calm down, have no need to breathe.' The feeling of
fabric forced into your mouth would trigger the response to
vomit. But vomit was not allowed, nor was fear. Home was
the place where spastics and retards 'deserved to die'. Me? I
would play 'normal', even if I didn't feel it.
The smell of smoke and alcohol, the screaming and swearing
and smashing of things and people were general sounds of
domesticity. The rhythmic moving of bodies before eyes too
young to understand was part of education lying in wait.
This was a 'motivating' environment. In the absence of a
want, you learned to perform one.
Steam rose from a tub of boiling hot water. The sound of
fear in your own ears, a silent screaming. No words. No 'no'.
Who knew what words were for? Fear fought for domination.
Learning to 'disappear' had its advantages. Cigarettes seared
flesh, and the belt buckle hit something again and again. 'Cry
and I'll fucking kill you.' The reminder that the cost of crying
would be death made fear irrelevant. Fear was my worst
enemy.
I felt secure in 'my world' and hated anything that tried to
call me out of there. I needed no rescue from the heaven of
living death. Without 'motivation' I would have stayed there.

People, no matter how good, had no chance to compete.
My reflection in the mirror, with its total predictability and
familiarity, was the only person who came close. I would
look into her eyes. I would try to touch her hair. Later I
would speak to her. But she was stuck forever on the other
side of the glass and I couldn't get in.
Sleep was not a secure place. Sleep was a place where darkness
ate you alive. Sleep was a place without color or light. In the
darkness you could not see your reflection. You couldn't get
'lost' in sleep. Sleep just came and stole you beyond your
control. Anything that robbed me of total control was no
friend of mine.
'The world' could force compliance even if it couldn't touch
you. A mind that hadn't yet reached out for anything was
being force-fed with what others called 'life'. The subconscious
mind began to store meaning that my conscious mind had
not yet learned to reach for. I was still in a state of pure
sensing without thought or feeling. Feelings that had not yet
met conscious awareness were being triggered. There were
no words for them or even knowledge of where they came
from. What poured in just sat there. The feelings were not
ready.
There was a rip through the center of my soul. Self-abuse
was the outward sign of the earthquake nobody saw. I was
like an appliance during a power surge. As I blew fuses my
hands pulled out my hair and slapped my face. They pulled at
my skin and scratched it. My teeth bit my flesh like an animal
bites the bars of its cage, not realizing the cage was my own
body. My legs took my body around in manic circles as though
they could somehow outrun the body they were attached to.
My head hit whatever was next to it, like someone trying to
crack open a nut that had grown too big for its shell. There
was an overwhelming feeling of inner deafness - a deafness
to self that would consume all that was left in a fever pitch
of silent screaming. And somewhere in that inner screaming,
Willie became my refuge and escape, a way to relieve the
overload without self-expression. Somewhere in there Willie
and I became inseparably two.
The fact that we shared the same body never seemed unusual

6

to me, although I faced accusations of possession. I had no
reason to believe we were only one person. How could we
be? We were so different.
Willie developed superficial emotions. It was good to be
caring so in spite of his indifference, Willie cared. It was
good to be interested so in spite of his lack of curiosity,
Willic was always interested. It was good to be responsible
so in spite of his detachment, Willie was responsible. But the
only heart-emotion Willie had was anger. This he channeled
into fierce determination, his motivation an ever-clinical, everlogical
sense of justice and equality.
Carol came along a year and a half after Willie. She took possession
of the object that was my living-corpse body and shared
it with 'the world' in exchange for acceptance. Based on a little
girl I met only once in the park, Carol could be seen in my
reflection. My face had glowed with the discovery of a friend
with whom I could feel safe and understood. Again and again
I had walked into the mirror trying to get into Carol's world,
but Carol would not give away the secret of how to succeed.
Unlike Willie, Carol had been all that people wanted her
to be: a smiling, social imp who could hide the child who
ishould be put to death' or 'sent to a home'. If Willie waged
war with 'the world', Carol assumed she was part of it. Not
knowing what a role was, Carol thought she was a self. With
language echoed from storybook records, TV commercials, and
stored conversations, Carol could buy my way through life,
albeit recklessly and obliviously. She played every role from
domestic prostitute to stand~up comedienne. She was obsessed
with being treated like everyone else and compelled to play
the role of the eternally adoptable. It took this cheery, living
fa~ade more than twenty years to learn that to 'function' was
not to 'experience' and that to 'appear' was not to 'be'.
For my first three years I had moved freely within 'my
world', observed incomprehensibly by 'the world'. Progressively
Donna was seen in smaller and smaller snapshots until
there was no longer anything visible left of her.
My awakening to 'the world' became the dawning of my
own inner integration. I didn't need Willie and Carol anymore.
I needed Donna. I said goodbye to the characters who had

7

sustained me for so long and welcomed the me I wanted to
know better.

Stuffed to the brim with second-hand clothes, my cardboard
suitcase was heavy and ready to fall apart. One and a half years
ago it had left Australia and traveled ten thousand miles with
a me who wasn't yet me. It was about to do another round.
I said goodbye to my tea chest and walked to the bus stop.
I was lopsided with the weight. I got off the bus at the train
station with my suitcase and guitar, and caught the train that I
hoped would take me to Heathrow airport. The plane was due
to leave at II a.m. and it wasn't going to wait for me.

My hand on the smooth, cool surface of the train window,
I tapped the glass as the scenery sped by. Tinkle, said the
sound of the glass in its own special way. I smiled, among
familiar friends, thoughts of the thirty-hour trip to Australia
ten thousand miles from both my body and my mind.
It was time to go back. It was just too easy to hide in a foreign
country, a person detached from the past. Europe had been my
present and the turning point, freeing me to have a future as
myself, but I could not hide in the womb of anonymity. I
needed to return in order to have faith in my own strength.
I could not fully trust in me until I saw that I could hold onto
me in the face of entrenched expectation to be otherwise. Like
the Indian who goes off into the wilderness to find out who
he is and will be, to know his own strength of self, I would go
back and face those who had tried to know me and those who
had exploited the characters. I would go back to face and own
the closeness I had run from, the anger I couldn't accept, the
fear I had hidden behind laughter, and the sadness I had felt
too vulnerable to acknowledge.

The guitar and I boarded the plane together. It had been a good
friend and right now a friend was what I needed.
The plane took off and I wondered if I'd be there when Tim
met me at the other end of this journey.
It had been four years since Tim and I had stumbled upon
each other. He had fought harsh criticism during the four years

8

he had spent trying to unbury the me he had only seen hints
of. He hadn't known Carol and Willie by name - nobody
had - but he had seen them sure enough. Tim had walked
the boundaries between 'my world' and 'the world', not quite
Cone of them' but also not quite like me, either. He knew what
it was to live as a mirror, to become other people. He had
known there were different 'Donnas' but, most important,
he had known there was only one real one ... the one he
could not hold onto ... the one he had been able to touch.
if only briefly, through music.

I was in the residential version of what the unemployed some
times call 'being between jobs'. I had no particular plac
to go. I was at home within myself now but still feeling
no external place of belonging.
I had only been back in Australia for two months, but
already my book and its prospective publication seemed as far
away from me as the United Kingdom itself. I had come back
because I needed to go forward, and before fear and compulsion
would let me walk free, I had to pick up the pieces of my
twenty-five-year war. Those pieces were scattered everywhere
at the feet of so-called friends, in the faces of so-called family,
and in the bedrooms of so-called lovers. I had a 'the world'
dictionary of control disguised as caring, of lust disguised as
love, of uselessness disguised as charitable martyrdom, and
of cheap entertainment disguised as acceptance. I couldn't go
forward with the old definitions. But to build new ones - my
definitions - I would have to face the old ones and tell it like
it was. I had to shatter the myths that had me tied in knots
upon knots until my selfhood was immobile within a mental,
emotional, physical, and social straitjacket.
Homelessness had always been a Carol mode. It was Carol
who had made light of living in the black duffle coat she
had nicknamed her 'mobile home'. It was Carol who had
sat casually at the train station watching the last train go
before saying, 'Oh damn. Missed the last one.' Me? I hadn't
been there. I had been a stray cat that Carol had to find.
Stray cats have no homes to miss.

Tap, tap came a knocking of a tiny hand at the door as it got
dark. Not even three feet tall, she stood there drenched as the
rain continued to pour down. A band was on the handle to let
her in. 'Leave It out there,' came the voice, referring to the
child. 'It went out there. It can fucking stay out there.' Tap,
tap came the knocking at the door again. The adult's hand had
moved away from the handle, too afraid to defy the voice and
let It in. It went and sat under a tree in the company of the cat
It had gone out to play with.

What the hell was I supposed to do with this feeling? I didn't
even know what it was called. I needed something but couldn't
find it because I didn't know what to look for. Where was Carol
now, Carol of the cat-collecting?

'Hi, Don,' said Tim as I came through the arrival gate after
getting off the plane. I caught the gentleness in his smile,
smiled quickly, and turned my eyes to the floor as I began
to fade. 'It's okay,' I said to myself, tuning in to the rhythm
of my feet. 'At least I'm here.'
It was easier to look at Tim before when I had been 'dead'
most of the time. Carol could have looked at him and laughed.
Willie could have imparted his latest store of interesting information.
But now I was very much alive. It was too much
to share, but at least I was there. Tim wasn't a piece of
walking slime. He didn't push or try to hug me. Look I
thought, I'm here. Tim smiled.

It was good to be at Tim's place in the country. I was among
the familiar: the fence, the curve of the fields, the trees, the rock
garden, the cottage windows, the huge mirror in the hallway,
Tim, and the piano - all the same. Tim sat at the piano and
began to play.
I told Tim about Carol and Willie and about the book. After
so many years he was relieved to know his instincts had been
right. Trying to make me stay present in company had been
like trying to touch a fairy. I had forever 'disappeared' at
the first sign of acknowledgment. The directness of a compliment,
the first inklings of spoken encouragement, killed me

I0

off each time as surely as if I'd been stung by a scorpion.
Tim and I stood silently in the kitchen as I handed him the
copy of the manuscript. He disappeared into his room to read
it. I disappeared into the spare room and traced the pattern of
the patchwork quilt upon my bed.
I walked into Tim's bathroom and stood before the mirror.
There was a gentle vulnerability and honesty in the face looking
back. I could no longer see Carol within those eyes. There was
no deadness, no manic smile, no head cocked cutely to the side,
no 'Ideal child' photo pose. I saw me, and it moved me.
I could feel my own heartbeat and wanted to get in there
with me where I would be safe and in company. 'Take me
home. Take me home,' I whispered mentally to the face that
held the sense of belonging only found in such addictive
familiarity. 'It's too hard out here. It's all too hard out here,'
I said desperately in the silence of my mind. I looked at
the hands upon the familiar cold, flat, mirrored surface that
I associated with 'touching feelings'.
'Donna, do you want a drink?' came a voice from the
corridor. 'Black tea, no milk, no sugar,' came the response
from my mouth as I stood lost in the eyes of my reflection.
It didn't matter a damn whether I liked tea or not.

Tim and I ran over the curves and I*umped over the furrows of
the fields. We smelled the different plants and bugged trees and
fell into the branches andfoliage that were their arms. Tim had
spent five years waiting for me to join him in his world. Now
he was tryz . ng to meet me i . n mine.

'Donna,' called Tim from the kitchen. We'd collected the colored
foil wrappers from a box full of chocolates. I took some
and smoothed them flat, laying them out in a repeating pattern.
I was getting lost in the colors until I was the colors.
With a pair of scissors, Tim began to cut a wrapper into
tiny strips and then tiny squares. I took my squares one
by one, crimped them in the middle, and made bows out
of them. My pile was getting smaller.
'What are you doing?' I asked, watching these shiny foil
extensions of myself become disintegrated by Tim.

II

Tim got a jar, scrubbed the label off, and brought it over to
the bench where the sparkly bits were. One of his big hands
swept the bench clean, and the sparkly pieces of him and me
fell together into the glass jar. He put the lid on this world
under glass and shook it. The bits of him and me danced
around and touched each other.
For my first three years I had moved freely within 'my
world'observed incomprehensibly by'the world'which moved
around me. Progressively Donna was seen in smaller and
smaller snapshots until there was no longer any freedom to
be a self within the grasp of 'the world'. In my teens the walls
had cracked and I was back for a few silent 'my world' months.
But the walls had been patched up, not with bandages but
with steel doors and solid concrete. At twenty-two I had met
someone else like myself for the first time in my life. Without
tools, I began to smash my way out with my bare hands but
gave up. At twenty~five I had met another 'my worlder' and
I was handed the tools. I attacked - with everything I had the
walls I had built so well.
In writing the autobiography, Willie, Carol, and I each began
to become fully aware of who each of us was and what each of
us had lived. A self must have a past. The book was the only
place in which that past was strung together as a whole, but
it was a start. We had foundations to build upon.
In the solitary confinement of a London flat, the entire story
had been spewed onto paper in the course of four weeks. There
had been no thought or planning. There was only obsession
and compulsion that what was begun had to run its course.
More than a book, it had been an exorcism. Writing it had
been like a fever before the waking.
Words had attacked the pages, my fingers striking the keys
of the plastic typewriter with such speed and ferocity that the
manuscript felt like it was written in braille. There was little
awareness of what was being written. It hadn't been rewritten,
reviewed, or revised. The first awareness of the words came as
they were read from each page. In four haunting weeks, Willie,
Carol, and I came closer to living together simultaneously
than we had in twenty-five years.
As we read the final manuscript we each laughed and cried

I2

and feared and burned with anger for parts of each other's lives
we had been unable to control.

LOOKED AT Tim and wondered whether he would be part
of a new future or whether we were somehow drinking
a toast to the past. I was a bird newly freed from a
cage. I had too much yet to discover and needed no reminders
of a life before freedom - even at the cost of leaving
my would-be rescuers behind.

0N WHAT SEEMED like the edge of the earth, I sat
alone, perched on a cliff above the incoming tide of
a familiar Australian beach. The night was a midnight
blue and the moonlight danced wildly in sparkles upon the
waves. My fingers ran through the grass as the summer's-night
wind ran its fingers through my hair. My hair was full of the
wild, free smell of the ocean wind and it streamed out to the
side as I turned my face into the breeze. I was an albatross on
the mainland. I was alone but whole.
Facing into the wind, the distant city lights mockingly reminded
me that although I now had a whole self there was
something still missing that seemed perpetually unreachable
and lover there', always just around the corner.
Turning back toward the sea, I balanced my bare feet on
the edge of the cliff and looked outward into the darkness.
My position seemed to stand for the future: a place and time
of mystery without lights to show the way and without roles
to hide behind. Another wave broke. A new year had begun.
The sound of leaves fluttering in the wind punctuated the
feeling. Was this aloneness? Carol had always saved me from
the incomprehensible and overwhelming things I knew as 'tidal
waves'. Carol could laugh in the face of emotions that could
not reach her. I had been abandoned to the arms of emotions
I had no understanding of. They were still overwhelming but
at least I now knew what category they belonged to. I decided
to go and find the real Carol.

I3
I

I
I went to the park at the end of the dead-end street. I had
lived here when I was three. Carol must have been about ten.
I couldn't really remember what she looked like because I'd
spent most of my life thinking my reflection was her. I vaguely
recalled that the real Carol had short, dark, possibly reddish
hair.
I stood at the base of my favorite tree and looked up at the
strong 'arm' of my friend who lived in the park. He wasn't
my tree because he belonged to me. We had a belonging with
each other. I was as much his as he was mine. We belonged
with.
I had swung from this branch twenty-four years ago. I
ran my hand along the tree trunk and smelled the leaves.
Hi, old friend, I said silently.
Swinging from his arm I had made an upside-down world
swing backward and forward with me. It had felt good to
own 'the world' in those magic years before 'the war'. I
stood beneath the branch where Carol had stood watching
me so many years before. Like all those years ago, I wondered
how to bring her back.
I had a rough idea of where she had taken me. It was
the street whose fence backed onto the park, but I couldn't
recall walking around the park to get to it. Had Carol and I
somehow walked through the fence?
Facing the fence, I saw that gates now seemed to emerge
from it. My mind changed gear and suddenly the gray wooden
line and its components made sense. I now knew why I had
thought I could get into Carol's world by walking into the
mirror. The mirror, tall and rectangular, gave the impression
of a door to the place on the other side, just as the gates did.
I thought about the mirror at my childhood house. It was
a full-length mirror. You couldn't see behind it. It appeared
to be an open doorway but you couldn't walk through it. I
had thought that if I only believed hard enough, I could walk
through the mirror into Carol's world just as I had, once upon
a time, walked through one of those gates in the fence. Things
were changing. I was understanding.
Like Alice in Wonderland, I wondered which gate to choose.
After more than twenty years, I couldn't remember which gate

it was. They all looked so much like the fence itself. The only
thing to do was to walk around the other side and knock on
doors.
The neighborhood had always been fairly elderly and most
who were around then weren't around anymore. Even the
young people who'd grown up here had mostly moved on to
other suburbs. Nobody seemed to recall anyone called Carol.
'Red hair, red hair,' said an old lady in her seventies with
her hand on her chin. 'Could have been the eldest of the
jeffrey girls.' The jeffreys had lived on the street and their
back gate was part of the fence bordering the park only fifty
yards from my tree. They'd left about ten years ago, and most
of them had moved to the country. No one was quite sure
where. I'd asked every walking history book on the street,
and it seemed there was only one who could have told me for
sure about a girl named Carol.
An old man who had kept an eye on the children playing
in the park for decades knew the names of all the various
children. He'd have known Carol. But he'd passed away a few
months before I'd returned to Australia. Ironically that was
around the same time I had finally exposed Carol's existence
after two decades of secrecy.
Perhaps Carol was someone who had just stopped over
in the area; perhaps her name was not Carol at all. It was
possible that unless she'd told me her name, I'd simply given
her one. It was possible I'd borrowed the name from the TV
or one of my stored-up conversations. At least I was sure of
one thing: Carol was not me.
I went out and bought Carol something as a way of saying
goodbye. Having no sense of self to inhibit her, Carol had
forever loved to wear bright colors. I loved the colors but
had no desire to wear them. I bought Carol a multicolored
sequined hat, hung it on the wall, and looked at it as one
might the fading flowers after a funeral.

PEOPLE BUY A parrot and they think they teach it to
speak. In spite of teaching, the parrot learns (maybe he
is bored out of his mind or learns he gets rewarded for

I5

I
performing). The people are impressed because they now have
a 'clever' parrot. Their parrot can 'do things'. An expert comes
along and says the parrot only appears to speak. The expert says
he actually hasn't got language, only speech. But the parrot did
have language. Beyond cheap tricks, the parrot has always had
language. It had and always will have its own.
Like the parrot, the characters Willie and Carol handled
the survival issue. I had waited in the shadows unable to
identify with the compliance and behavior I had to exhibit
in the absence of its comprehension. The things that happened
in the name of chasing 'normality' could never have been
derived from interest or understanding. The appearance of
Cnormality' meant survival. Unless you eat, breathe, sleep,
and shit 'normality', you will be treated as less than zero and
possibly not even survive at all.

My employment record was impressive if one was looking for
variety but it was a total write-off when it came to proving a
stable work history. No amount of compensation or channeling
of abilities had been able to cover the cracks in the pavement
of my personality. As time went by people would always
discover one crack and then another and point them out. I
would become so afraid of their shattering the image that I
would run out on everything.

Zzzz, said the machine under Carol's bands as she ran the
fiftz*eth shirt cuff under the foot of the sewing machine. At
seventeen, i . t was her twentieth I*ob in two years and one in
a long string of machinist jobs. She had lasted a while at
this one - almost two months.
Suddenly Donna looked at the hands in front of her unable
to make sense of them as her own or to understand why she
was there. The material was familiar but what it was for
now evaded her. She looked up at the rows and rows and
rows of bright overhead lights and squinted. A face shoved
z . tself quickly into the vicinity of her own. 'Get on with it,
Donna. We don't pay you for nothing,' said the face. The
words meant nothing. Carol was out of the factory, down the
stairs, and outside the door before anyone realized what she'd

I6

done. She bit her lip. Cub-Oh,'she thought. Willie would hav
to go for yet another z'nterview.

I was getting a grip on things. I was becoming able to cope
with ongoing situations well enough not to have to drift or
run away. Ironically the presence of the self in the words I
used, and the mind and emotions they came from did nothing
for my fluency. I stood in the full light of my own humanity,
and it choked my words, clogged the pipeline to my views, and
made me look hardly responsible enough to cross a road.
I went for job after job. They wouldn't take me. It was hard
times in Australia, where only the tough or impressive went to
the front of the line. Willie and Carol abandoned me ruthlessly
to the open arms of unemployment.
I considered going back to the university. Taking courses
had always been a safe territory. But for whom? Willie was
the scholar. Carol was a repertoire of stored-up 'social' skits.
Who the hell would I be?
I considered becoming a teacher and began cautiously by
trying for work as a teacher's aide in the special schools.
It wasn't so much that I wanted to teach as that it was
something I had found I was good at. Over the years I had
taken on work as a private tutor. Compared to the social worker
image I had chased in my early twenties, tutoring had been far
more clinical. I didn't have to develop a stored repertoire of
performed saintly empathy, been-there-done-that emotions,
martyr-like understanding, or high-flying, well-brought-up
morality. I didn't have to convince people that I was social
and caring by waving references of valor for voluntary work
I had taken on for far from unselfish reasons.
In my early twenties I had tried to untie the knots within
me. I was afraid of the unpredictability of alcoholics, so I had
surrounded myself with them. I was afraid of the helplessness
and vulnerability and disrespect that came with homelessness,
so I had volunteered to work with the homeless. I was afraid of
the realness of children, their spontaneity, honesty, and the way
this made my walls shaky, so I had volunteered to work with
children. I was afraid of the threat and accusation of insanity so
I had volunteered to work at a mental hospital. I just wanted to

I7

show my fear who was boss so I could one day steer my own
chariot without it dragging me along for the ride. Instead I was
praised as the martyr I was not. My fear of self-exposure meant
no one ever knew my true motivations. (Yet I did manage at
least to say that I didn't believe in charity because the so-called
charitable are always getting something back.)
For me, teaching stood for the mere imparting of knowledge.
And that knowledge was about all there was among
twenty-five years of stored-up, unchosen crap that I was willing
to identify with. It may not have been my choice to
accumulate ninety-five percent of the stuff I had absorbed
on automatic pilot. In a sleep-walking state I had taken it
on without learning, but it was still my memory bank that
stored it. It seemed less of an act of prostitution to exploit
the stored mental knowledge than it had been to exploit stored
social, emotional, or physical repertoires.
I never saw a role for communication in teaching, for closeness
or physical contact. I just figured I would smile in some
of the right places, know what I was there to teach, and study
the strategies of holding children's attentions.
I got out the yellow pages and landed two positions. I never
told these employers about my autism. I wanted a job, not to
have to try to justify to them why I felt capable of working.
It was only temporary work, a few days here and there.
It wouldn't hurt them to scratch their heads and wonder
what planet I had come from.

I was assigned to a teacher and entered a classroom full of
children with special needs. 'We don't do much more than
babysitting here,' said the woman in charge of the 'classroom'.
The word 'expectations' seemed to be written in very small
letters here. The 'dis' in 'disability' seemed written in letters
ten feet tall; it cast a shadow over the fact there was any ability
at all to be found in that word.
When people think of brain damage, they generally think
of the whole brain. If we say leg-damaged, we ask which
part of the leg. A lot of ability can get swept aside in that
big . . . 'Ohhh, I see.'

I8

'You have to talk s-l-o-w-l-y to Donna, she's a I-t .-t-t-l-e b-z'-t
s-l-o-w,' teased my older brother, speaking to me like a 45
record switched to 33. He would put his face up patronizinœ,lv
close as though I were not only slow but blind as well.

I was angry. Anyone who wears glasses or has a hearing
weakness is, by definition, brain-damaged. People with nervous
tics, weight problems. and trouble sleeping can have these
problems because of neurological problems and by definition
be brain-damaged. The brain is made up of many different
parts, containing many different abilities. just because one area
is affected doesn't mean others are, too. Retarded people are
not necessarily physically disabled, and vice versa. The ability
of the brain to compensate for damage by using functions that
are still intact is often overlooked. Too often, also, those who
have trouble linking thought to action or words, or vice versa,
are thought retarded or disturbed, when the problem may not
be in the capacity so much as the mechanics.
In this well-intentioned teacher's classroom. I was unable to
say any of this. Here in this hygienic, laminated, playschool
atmosphere, I stood watching 'the babysat'.
Vegetables grow in gardens, not in classrooms. It seemed
inexcusable to get paid to watch vegetables grow when attempts
could be made to help them realize a little more humanity as
human beings. Years pass too quickly, and those assumed to
be vegetables sometimes fulfill low expectations and do not
grow up to live as human beings.
I entered a classroom for special-needs adults. Robbie seemed
to me to be a shining example of someone who had won in
terms of a battle to keep the world out and convince everyone
there was nobody home. He was twenty-two, six feet tall, and
clad in nappies.
'He's severely retarded and autistic,' said the member of the
staff quietly. Robbie's pale blue eyes stared hypnotically into
nothingness. I felt he 'wasn't home'.
Robbie was being regularly toiletted. This constituted most
of his 'education' five days a week, and my job was to take
him to the toilet at regular intervals. It was hoped that after
twenty-two years Robbic would realize the system and do

I9

it for himself. It was just as likely that he'd already developed
another system they'd taught him; that of living up to
unbelievably low expectations.
It was dinnertime. A tin of baby food was opened and the
yellow-brown slop was spooned into Robbie's expressionless
face. The slop soon covered his chin and nose. Watching him
slowly swallow the mulch was like watching a tree grow.
Apparently Robble could not hold the spoon. Apparently
Robbie could not hold anything. At home, Robbie was kept
in nappies and hand-fed.
His crystal blue eyes staring straight ahead into nothing, his
face totally expressionless, a haunting dead smile fixed upon his
face. Robbie's hand went to jelly as he was handed everything
- a master of the art of non-being.

My older brother's sz'x-year-old band had hold of my wrist. He
shook my hand in front of my five-year-old face. The waving
band would attract my attention. Slap. My band was smacked
I . nto my face to the sound of laughter. 'Here, make your hand
all floppy-woppy again,' came the excited voice of the one still
holding my wrz . st. TO him it was nothing more than a child's
game meant in 'fun'. Slap came the sound of my band hitting
my face like a limp, wet fish. It was thought hilarious. How
could I be so stupid that I didn't learn the consequences of
letting my hand go floppy? I thought I was 'disappearing'. I
dt*dn't connect the feeling of 'disappearing' with its effect upon
my body or appearance. The fact that my hand went floppy as
a result was entirely irrelevant.

My hand stretched out in Robbie's direction. My eyes were
fixed on a distant spot on the other side of the room, well away
from where I was, as though I were entirely unconnected to
the hand approaching him. My hand let go of the object it
was holding out. My face expressed no recognition of my
action. This was 'giving' according to 'my world' definitions.
I was a passing machine, an object passing object after object
to someone who was not there.
To the amusement and surprise of the two other staff present,
Robbie took the things my hand dropped in front of him in

20

the same way I had 'handed' them to him, his eyes staring
straight ahead into nothingness. He was using peripheral
vision. Robble was peripheral.
Object in hand. Robbie paced in an apparently aimless, sleepwalking
way. Was it possible that my 'not being there' allowed
him to be there enough to hold the objects passed to him? In the
system of 'all world, no self' versus 'all self, no world the rules
were simple. Take away awareness of the world, and the overload
on the self is drained. The self can dare to come back.
With each new object I handed him, I took away the last
one, always without looking at him. I looked only into the
distance or fixed sharply upon the object itself. It didn't matter
what I handed him. The more impersonal and less obviously
interesting the better: a dolly, a block, a sponge, a plastic fork,
a tea towel. Dumping them, I turned sharply and walked away,
with every expectation and assumption Robble would hold
them, and with no need to watch or wait for confirmation.
There was no look of anticipation, no expression of excitement
when he met my expectations. We spoke a silent dialogue.
Pacing up and down, Robbie began to wander in and out
of a small side room, appearing all the while as if it were just
part of the general nowhere to which he was going.

Don't wake up the mind. Don't tell it what you are doing.
Otherwise, the band wt'll not be allowed to grasp, the eyes
will never be allowed to look. Do not show an expression
or have a thought, or your mind will know you are there
and send 'tidal waves' to drown you. Effect, when it breaks
through mile-bt'gh walls, bits with the impact and devastation
Of a sudden 'tt'dal wave', an emotional fit.

Robble's face was as dead and bland as a McDonald's hamburger
as he ambled into the small room holding the latest
object I had passed him. For an instant on his way back out,
I had caught him smiling as he glanced momentarily for the
first time at one of the objects he had been given. It was a
book, and he had smiled as he glanced at the colorful cover
just before the curtains were drawn once again across his face,
returning him to his 'the world' face: a nobody nowhere.

2I

-LELI
laughed inwardly to myself and expressed nothing. I had
seen a Robble in there. If only for a day, Robbie had dared to
accept. If only for a minute, he had dared to have an interest.
If only for an instant, he had dared to have a self. If only for
one day in his life, it was worth it.

Entering the infant room, I saw a girl about four years old
curled up in the dark interior of a crate. Her eyes were
sharply crossed, her fists clenched into balls. The staff had
been advised that in the safety of her self-controlled isolation,
she might begin to explore her surroundings. Hung inside the
crate were various mobiles and objects.

Fabrics dangled in front of me in my dark cupboard, the security
of my chosen darkness. Here the bombardment of bright light
and harsh colors, of movement and blab-blab, of unpredictable
noise and the uncontrollable touch of others were all gone. Here
was a world of guarantees, where things were controlledfor long
enough that I could calm down and have a thought or become
aware of a feeling. I reached out to touch the fabric in front of
me. I ran my band over the silky surface of the patent leather
shoes at my feet. I picked them up and ran them across my
cheek. Here, there was no final straw to send me from overload
i . nto the endless void of shutdown.

The two supervising staff were excited by the novelty of their
ideas and the equipment for the little girl. Like overenthuslastic
relatives on the first meeting with a newborn child, they were
half in the tiny crate with her. I stood there feeling ill as
bombarded her personal space with their bodies, thel r breath.
their smells, their laughter, their movement, and their noise.
Almost manically, they shook rattles and jiggled things in front
of the girl as if they were a pair of overzealous witchdoctors
hoping to break the evil spell of autism. Their interpretation
of the advice seemed to be to overdose her on experiences
that they, in their infinite 'the world' wisdom, would bring
to her. I got the feeling that if they could have used a crowbar
to pry open her soul and pour 'the world' in they would
have done so and would never have noticed that their patient

22

had died on the operating table. The little girl screamed and
rocked, her arms up against her ears to keep their noise out
and her eyes crossed to block out the bombardment of visual
noise. I watched these people and wished they knew what
sensory hell was. I was watching a torture where the victim
had no ability to fight back in any comprehensible language.
I stood almost numb with shock. She had no words to put
to what was happening, to analyze or adjust to it as they
did. As far as introducing her to a safe, peaceful, consistent,
and controllable place in 'the world', it looked like a
shattering first impression. It was medieval. These people had
been told to use something that might work but no one had
told them why or how. No one had given them the set-up
instructions or rule book. They were surgeons operating with
garden tools and no anesthetic.
I felt shattered. The logic of the situation seemed so selfevident.
Yet it was the child's behavior that was termed
'bizarre'. I stood there full of dread, knowing I would hardly
be able to get two words out before being forced to argue my
case. Verbal argument was a stored skill, but one I knew I
couldn't use consciously as myself. It could be triggered but
not used consciously. I could have trusted that the words
coming from my mouth would have made sense, even if I
couldn't hear them with meaning, but the feelings were too
true, too 'self' to be sold out by something on automatic pilot.
It would be five times removed from what I'd have said with
conscious effort. So I said nothing.
I thought about the war zone of my own environment.
Every strategy had been met with counterstrategies. I felt
stunned by the impression of what things might have been
like if I'd grown up somewhere else.

jenny was ten with big, round eyes and a forced smile upon
her freckled face. 'Severely retarded with autistic tendencies',
said the teacher accompanying me. 'Hello, sweetie,' said the
freckle-faced kid. Carol's 'adoptable image' came to mind.
jenny had been with the 'school' for some time. They
had been teaching her every day to do a sorting task with
plastic knives and forks and spoons that might one day get

23

her employment in a sheltered workshop. jenny busied herself
by ro--king across the room.
There was an 'education' plan for jenny. As the assistant
there, it was my job to follow it. When Jenny misbehaved she
was to be firmly put into a chair in the corner of the room
facing the wall.
Like a gun going off, jenny's hand flew out, suddenly
striking one of the staff sharply across the back. It was too fast
to be other than an automatic response and looked more like a
nervous tie than naughtiness. jenny seemed to have no idea of
what she had done wrong or that she had done anything wrong
at all. Into the corner she was sat again and again and again.

I stood in the rubbish bin of my thz*rd-grade classroom being
pelted with chalk to the sound of laughter. This was the price
to be paid for trying to save some dignity. The punishments
made no sense. They weren't logically connected to the actions
they were meant to address.
I had had no idea of what I had done wrong. The best thing
I could do was try to work out what 'good girls' were like and
try to make myself one of them. There were enough examples
around to mirror, examples that were forever shoved in my face
but had too many bits and moved too fast to make sense of. The
'bad'behavior continued but I smiled more and more. I studied
TV sitcoms compulsively and watched TV people like their TV
children for doing dishes and giving gifts. I polished Carol's
tadoptable image', putting my head to the side like children
who were thought of as adorable did. 'You think you're so
fucking cutesy wootsy,' came a 'the world' cutting snarl Slap.
My head now flew sharply with the hand, no longer cocked to
the side lookz'ng 'cute'. If only I lived with the Brady Bunch, I
bad thought. On the TV, 'cute' seemed forever likable. Maybe
my version seemed haunted and forced, some perverse mockery
of the evasive child I truly was.

The concept of discipline commits the crime of assuming that
the misbehaving one stands there asking oneself, why? I lived
in a 'what you see is what you get' reality. So many people
merely proved and re-proved that there was no point in trying

24

to penetrate their incomprehensibility. Such is the making of
high-functioning (albeit, smiling) robots.

I visited another school. It was a specialized school meant
to address the needs of autistic children. I was at my most
polished, having borrowed from memories of Willie's apparent
impressiveness. Inside I was shaking.
I ferried about the school on the standard visitors' tour.
Here one sits through a video and sees some empty classrooms.
Later, theory and philosophy are served up pleasantly with
biscuits and tea, and one is allowed to put one's name on a
list for emergency teachers' aides.
About to leave. I decided to explain my situation to one of
the senior workers there. She told me about monthly gatherings
they had at a respite care house they ran. She gave me some
numbers through which I might be able to meet some others
like me.

I entered the room full of chatty school mothers who had
gathered at the respite house. Coffee cups, coffee, sugar, and
milk lined the kitchen bench around which mothers hovered
and discussed everything from educational toys to tantrums.
I found myself tracing the frosted glass pattern on the living
room mirror. Act normal, I shouted silently to myself and
went to stand in the kitchen. Step by step I became drawn
like a fly to the corner of the room.
Only one person knew who I was - the staff member from
the school. She had told the mothers I was coming and there
was some excitement about meeting one of the five to ten
percent of autistic people who had 'made good' as a 'the
worlder'. Not having all met each other, the mothers did the
rounds, trying to find out which one I was.
'Do you have children at the school?' one of them asked.
'No,' I answered, 'I am just interested in doing some work as
an emergency teacher's aide at the school.' 'Really,' this woman
replied, 'you know, I work at the school, and I'm looking for
two people to do some emergency work there on the school
holiday program. Do you have any experience with autistic
children?' I remembered the camp I went on in the United

25

Kingdom. 'Yes,' I replied honestly. 'Here's my number,' she
said. 'I'm sure I'll be able to find you some work.' She started
to walk off (possibly to seek out the autistic woman she'd
heard was there somewhere among those in the gathering).
'Oh, there is actually another reason I am interested in working
with autistic children,' I said. 'I guess I should mention that
I have been told that I'm autistic.' The woman faltered a bit
and it looked like her face might fall on the floor. 'I hope that
doesn't change the offer,' I added. 'Of course not,' she said,
but she didn't look too sure.
I called the number again and again to confirm the dates.
'Well, we're not quite sure yet,' said the woman Id spoken
to. 'You'll have to phone me back.' On the fifth call I was
told that the plans had changed at the last minute. I'd been
promised three weeks' work. It was now only possible for me
to have a few days.

The dates arrived for my work at the school for autistic
children. There were seven children there for the school's
holiday program.
I was barely through the door when I received a familiar
welcoi,ne.

'Donna, come and say bello to Ert'c,' said my mother.
A fire consumed me in a flash and my head moved straight
i . nto line with Erlc's stomach as myfeet ran atfull charge toward
him. I was a thirteen -Year-old steam train. He moved out of the
way at the last moment to avoz'd the head butt. My head crashed
z . nto the wall and I saw sparks just before the lights went out.
'She's crazy,' my mother had explained for the umpteenth

I couldn't help it. I had felt emotions.
An eleven-year-old had greeted me by sinking his teeth
deeply into my arm. There was a funny sensation to which
I didn't know how to respond.
The boy jumped away from me like something possessed. To
his shock and horror. I hadn't reacted. The other two workers
were surprised at his reaction. 'Take a look at that,' said the

26

worker who'd hired me. 'He can't make sense of your reaction.
Didn't it hurt you?' 'I think so,' I responded, not quite sure but
sure from their responses that it should have. You should have
said "ouch", I reminded myself silently. People say "ouch" if
they get bitten.' I told myself I'd remember to say it next time.
The children arrived in a trickle. Among them was jody,
who walked on her toes and was small for her age and whose
blue eyes looked nowhere. Upon entering, she turned herself
into a table: feet and hands flat on the floor underneath and
behind her, stomach facing upward to the ceiling.
'This one's very retarded,2 said the worker who'd hired
me. 'More a case of retardation than autism,' she added. An
image flashed through my mind.

Staring into nothingness, I had casually propped my legs and
feet behind my head. There was nothing wrong z . n lookz'ng like
a Frisbee. It felt good to tt*e myself up in knots: self~contat*ned,
in control.

There were two other children whose ways seemed similar to
my own, and an eloquent, social, and very verbal little hyperactive
whirlwind who reminded me of my younger brother.
It was difficult for me to be there. I felt exposed. I spent all
my time with the children at the swings and on the trampoline.
The two staff members stuck together, making the sort of
small talk that for me was still another language. I knew
the meanings of the words they used. I could even make
meaning of many of their sentences. I could have tried to
make a match with some information I had linked to key
words they used. But I didn't understand the significance
and I was not nearly so uninhibited now that I was aware
of how much I didn't understand.

jack flitted about the yard like Peter Pan. His movements
were petite, sharp, and precise, his eyes never stopping long
on anything. The wind blew jack's long wispy blond fringe
as he effortlessly walked the tightrope across the top of the
playground climbing frame.
It was lunchtime, and the children were brought over to the

27

table. jack was being drilled in the art of saying 'chocolate'
in order to be given some. At the age of six, jack was just
beginning to use words. (Mozart didn't speak until he was
four.) A system of reward and punishment was being used
to encourage jack to speak. Sound by sound, jack forced
out the word 'c-h-o-c-o-l-a-t-e' and was rewarded accordingly
with small pieces of chocolate held out in front of
him as if before a begging dog.
jack broke away and came over to where I was. He took
my hand in his little hand. I was afraid but didn't 'disappear'.
My hand sat stiffly in the space he had made for it. 'Toilet,'
he said, looking up at me with one of his flitting glances. He
led me to the door that supposedly led to the toilet.
I began to shake. I didn't know where this door went to. I
felt out of control being led into a room I'd not yet seen or
chosen to explore.
ways were painful in their familiarity. I felt rawly
exposed and my emotions climbed to a sky-high pitch. My
knuckles went up to my face and were held in the grip of my
teeth. Emotions are against the law, snapped a mental voice
from within. My hearing became more and more acute. A
panic attack rapped at the gates of my conscious mind, a
Ctidal wave' on its way. 'I'm in control,' I reassured myself,
breathing rhythmically and slowly. I would stay composed
and not break off and run away.
jack stopped and suddenly looked up at me. 'Don't worry, I
will come with you,' he announced with a crisp, clipped clarity.
I was shocked out of my own panic by the sharp contrast between
this and the boy who could barely speak minutes before.
He had spoken with such clarity, directness, and control.
It seemed painfully ironic that it was jack who was going to
help me cope. Was it empathy that caused him to find the words
without prompting, without chocolate, and without behavior
therapy? Or had I somehow triggered a stored sentence and
(the real jack' couldn't speak nearly so easily?

The Welshman's words rang in my ears, 'Are you real? It
felt like you I*ust walked through me.' For that moment it
was as though we were no longer confined wz"thin ourselves.

We had touched one another without touching. Perhaps I was
him for that moment and be was me. Perhaps, for a moment,
who we were was irrelevant.

I returned. The two workers were busy trying to feed jody.
One had the girl on her lap and was holding jody's arms down
in an attempt to stop her from tapping herself and rocking.
The other worker aimed a spoon at jody's face. Somewhere
between bit and miss she managed to get some of the strained
baby food into the six-year-old's mouth. jody turned her blue
eyes sharply away from them. She held her breath, ground her
teeth rhythmically, stiffened like a rock, and continued to try
to tap herself with her hands held down.
'Does she have anything else to eat?' I asked. 'She's got
sandwiches,' said the worker, 'but she can't feed herself.' 'Can
I help?' I asked.
I was welcomed to. The staff busied themselves around the
table with the other children. I sat beside jody on the bench
seat. Her Vegimite sandwiches sat untouched and wrapped in
plastic a foot or so in front of her.
I began to hum gently. The tune was short, rhythmic, and
hypnotic. I went over it again and again and again. jody sat next
to me staring intently into nothingness. She held her breath and
rocked, tapping herself and grinding her teeth.
My humming went on and on and she stopped grinding her
teeth. I continued, repeating the tune over and over and over
again. I began to tap her shoulder in rhythm with the tune,
always the same: continuous and predictable. jody stopped
tapping herself.
Her hands were now free for her to use. She reached across
the table, grabbed her sandwiches, tore them open. and stuffed
them into her face. jody may not have been the most elegant
of eaters but at least she was independent and she could eat
her own food.
The worker who had hired me was watching. She asked
me about what I had done. I explained that I did what I
myself would have needed. Grinding my teeth kept disturbing,
unpredictable, and meaningless outside noise from coming in.
Singing a repetitive tune and humming continuously did the

29

same. The tapping gave a continuous rhythm and stopped the
unpatterned movement of others from invading. I had simply
replaced all these things for her so that she was freed up to do
the next things down the scale of what she needed or wanted
to do.

Swimming was on the agenda for the day's activities. I loved
swimming, but unless it was swimming away from them,
I hated swimming with other people. Generally I felt too
aware of their invasiveness, their unpredictability, and their
proximity. Most of the children there that day were far from
intentionally invasive.
Only one staff member was required to be in the pool
with the children. I volunteered. The others sat on the seats
nearby.
One of the children in the swimming group was very social.
He had no trouble with touch and found my avoidance amusing
or perhaps noninvasive enough to be safe. He kept coming after
me. He was a strong swimmer and when he caught up with me
he tried to clamber all over me.
I froze, going underwater like a sinking deadweight. It
wasn't long before I realized that a swimming pool is no
place to 'disappear'. I swam away from him. The worker
who was aware of my situation told him to leave me alone.
I had a category for practical touch and could cope for short
periods when it was necessary for safety or instruction, but this
social touching was scary. In performance, touch is somehow
numbing and devoid of self. Outside of performance, I found
it sensorially and emotionally quite beyond me.
jack ran up and down the length of the pool. He looked like
he wanted to jump in but couldn't. He seemed really frustrated
by not being able to win himself over. He continued to return
to the edge and finally he put his feet in. Surprised at his
own efforts, he seemed overwhelmed by the awareness. Fear
overcame him and he ran away again.
jody sat on the top step of the pool staring into the pattern of
waves she was making on the surface. The water she flicked in
front of her face moved to a constant rhythm. The pattern and
its consistency were lightly musical, each curl of water falling

30

with a dainty tinkle. The glisten of the curling water was art
itself.
I thought about the cost of not existing, of 'disappearing'
and keeping the world in control. I reached my hand
across and into the water pattern jody was getting lost in
and interrupted the pattern: war games. Sometimes you have
to care enough to declare war. I was on the side of fighting
to help her join 'the world'.
jody glared at me lightning fast and busied herself again, her
face now even closer to the pattern, attempting to get lost. She
was fighting a war to keep 'the world' out.
Again and again we played these war games, until the war
games themselves were as consistent and predictable as the
pattern the water had made. Every time jody glared at me,
I looked calmly into her eyes and smiled as if to myself. I
smiled only as I would to myself in a mirror.
I took jody's hand and pulled her very slowly around on
the step until she faced the rest of the pool. Her other hand
continued to make her pattern and slowly she wound herself
back to face the wall. Again and again, I pulled her slowly and
silently around to face the pool. Each time I let her pull me
back in the direction of the wall, too. I was determined she
would be forced to experience herself as making a decision that
affected what another person did.
Who was on which side got lost in the pattern until the war
itself didn't matter - both sides belonged to jody. Holding
her hand I pulled her gently outward into the pool. She
pulled herself back, tapping herself wildly and looking down
into the water with ever increasing intensity. I watched her
experience her power to decide and to take control over her
own actions and affect mine.
I tugged her arm quickly. She seemed stunned momentarily
out of her apparent self-hypnosis and glared at me with her war
face. I looked calmly into her war face and smiled to myself.
'Hello mirror,' I said silently.
Back and forth we tugged each other. Eventually, of her
own accord, she jumped off the step and into the pool holding
my hand. She paddled a few feet or so - a terrified expression
on her face - looking up at me as if for confirmation that it

3I

was all okay and that she would survive. Then she looked
intently into the water and panic came over her. I tugged
quickly on her arm and she looked up at me suddenly. There
was a vague trace of a smile.
I let her lead me back to the step. She stood on it tapping
herself and surveying the monster she had almost conquered.
And yet the monster was not the pool. The monster was autism
- an invisible monster within, a monster of self-denial.
Holding her hand we went through the tug-of-war on the
step again. She again decided to jump off. She was shaking
violently and continued to try to get lost in the surface of the
water for safety. In its bottomlessness she could find nothing
but a source of further panic. In her fear, she became ill.
I continued to tug her out of her blind panic, and eventually
she remained focused upon me as we paddled around
the pool. As we came around again in the direction of the
steps, jody was smiling to herself in full view of the two
workers sitting by the edge of the pool. Her eyes were alive.

It was the end of the first day at the school. Parents came for
some of the children. A bus came for others.
The bus driver ran the respite house where I'd been offered
the work. She looked surprised to see me and looked at
the worker who'd hired me with the same surprised look.
Perhaps she wondered how I could possibly manage to work
with such 'difficult' children?
In some ways they were right, but these children were
far less difficult for me to comprehend than many so-called
normal children would have been. Was it possible that part of
the reason these children seemed incomprehensible was simply
because many people didn't know what it felt like to be like
them?
Out of the blue came a few more days' work and an offer
to come to the respite house and talk to the parents.
The extra days were outside the school, working with a
twelve-year-old boy named Michael. He had to be picked
up from home. Going to Michael's house with the worker
who'd hired me, I was afraid of his parents' reaction. An
autistic person working with another one would have been

32

the last thing possible on their minds. Few people knew or imagined
any autistic person to be that capable. Michael's parents
turned out to be gentle, genuine, and caring people. They
had five children altogether, including another of Michael's
brothers who was also autistic.
Michael had a charming personality. He was big and as jolly
as a nonverbal autistic person can be. Though his movements
were big and loud, he had an air of gentleness and understanding
about him.
As a child I had been echolalic and had had difficulty learning
the purpose and significance of language. Michael didn't use
spoken language at all. He had a vocabulary of several signs,
mostly to do with his favorite topic and obsession - food.
Michael arrived at the school's holiday program he'd been
accepted for. It was run at a regular local school and Michael
was the only autistic child there.
Michael stood out from the other children. They were several
years younger than he was and the fact that he was a very big
twelve-year-old walking on the tips of his toes didn't help him
blend in. Nevertheless, he seemed happy enough to be there.
Some of the other children were curious about Michael and
why he had someone with him. They had only one teacher
supervising the lot of them. I introduced them to Michael and
tried to help them understand why he didn't speak to them and
explained that he, nevertheless, understood them.
Michael walked around watching the children playing in
small groups. They threw balls to him. The balls hit him
and dropped to the ground. The children called him over.
Michael stood frozen to the spot.
I helped some of the children play simple games with him.
I showed them how to build their games up step by step so he
could understand them without floundering in the overwhelming
pace of change.
I handed a ball back and forth with Michael, who seemed
to be torn between shyly enjoying himself and trying to 'disappear .

I clapped and asked for the ball. Michael responded by letting
it go. It rolled along his legs where he sat and rolled toward
me. Nothing too deliberate. Nothing too direct. Can't let the

22
I

mind know anybody's home. Can't afford the cost of overload.
Can't risk the void of shutdown.
Step by step the game had been built up to the point
that Michael was throwing the ball back and forth with me.
Gradually I had managed to include two other children in a
game of catch. Michael smiled to himself, alternating between
looking at the kids and staring once again into nothingness.
Other children were skipping rope. Michael walked into
their games again and again with the same apparently aimless
wandering I had seen before in Robble. It was clear that Michael
wanted to join in but couldn't show it directly, even to himself.
The other children became annoyed.
I found a rope for him. Without expression, excitement, or
expectation. I helped him through the motions of skipping step
by step. Michael got the gist of it and seemed fairly pleased with
himself as he went around the grounds throwing the rope over
his head and stepping over it as it landed in front of him.
Michael began to teach me. He took my hand, and my heart
sank. I was afraid and yet curious as to why I didn't 'disappear'
when I was with him or jack or jody. I felt strangely safe
and familiar with him. His touch had no expectation. He was
almost as avoidant of it as I was.
He put my hand in front of his face, spat on it, and broke
into cheeky, secretive laughter. Michael seemed to think this
was hilarious. At first I didn't.
Michael expanded on his game, making strings of sounds
as he held my hand in front of his face: CK,k,k,b,b,b,t,t,t.'
Suddenly it occurred to me that he must have had speech
therapy. He wasn't spitting on my hand after all. he had
been demonstrating the letter 'p'. I chuckled quietly to myself
thinking how irrational speech therapy must have seemed to
him, some perverse game where he was taught to blow and
spit upon the hands of a stranger. He had, at least, found
entertainment value in what might otherwise have been a
meaningless session where he was expected to make sounds
without ever being told why. Even if he wanted to, who would
know to explain all this to him? Who would know to explain
why on earth he would want to use words according to his
own value system? Who would even think he was listening

34

or understanding when he found it too difficult to express
his awareness, even to himself?
Together inside of a Hula Hoop, Michael and I went for a
walk - with Michael leading. We stopped at the playground,
climbed out, and played follow-the-leader until neither of us
could tell who was the follower and who was the leader. We
made musical patterns out of the sounds made by tapping
various wooden beams and metal pipes, and filled in each
other's tunes, composing. We went to the sink and played
with the drink taps, splashing the water about.
Two girls came by chattering with each other. They shot a
strange expression in our direction before detouring to play
several feet away. Michael stood stock still like a shop mannequin.
His smiling face grew solemn, his eyes stopped smiling.
His fist came tensely up to his chest and he glared at me.
In a loud, deep monotone, he hit himself with each syllable
as he announced, 'NOR-MAL'. I looked at the girls and
looked back at him. 'Yes I said, 'Michael and Donna
are NOR-MAL.'

HAD CONTACTED one of the two people whose names I'd
been given when I first visited the special-needs school. One
was a resource center for people like me. The guy who
met me there talked for some time with me and reassured
me that while most autistic people were not as capable as
me, there were a few he'd known who were fairly capable.
Then he asked me if I wanted any help. I looked at him
like he was nuts. He suggested the name of someone. It
was a Dr. Someone and in my books that spelled headshrinker.
Oh shit, I thought. This guy thinks I'm crazy.
I had seen a psychiatrist for two years, from age seventeen
to nineteen. It did plenty for teaching me to act and think like
her, and it got me back into education, but it didn't help me get
'real'. Willie went from prison warden to shrink. Carol went
from street kid to sophisticate. And both learned to obsess
on the topic I was encouraged to: family problems. That
psychiatrist had been the most well adjusted, caring mirror
reflection I'd ever become, but it was still part of running from

35

.I
--n

the self. Shrinks were something to hide behind and that was
not what I thought I needed.
'No thanks,' I said hurriedly. 'I don't need any help.' 'He's
not a psychiatrist,' said the man, as though he had read my
mind. 'He's an educational psychologist. He has worked for
a long time with autistic people.' I looked at him cautiously,
took the number, and left.
A week or so later, I rang the resource center again. 'I spoke
to Dr. Marek since speaking to you,' said the man running the
place the second time I called. 'He said he would be interested
to meet you.' I had no desire whatsoever to meet anybody
unless he or she was going to lead me to the people I thought
I'd find belonging with. Finally I figured that if anyone would
know some, this doctor-person might. I called the number.
Dr. Theodore Marek had heard I had written a book and
that it was going to be published. He assured me he wasn't
a shrink and said he might be able to help me and that he
wanted to do some tests. I figured that 'helping me' meant
he'd help me find the other people 'like me'. As for the
tests, no reasons sprung to mind why I didn't want to do
them. But then no reasons sprung to mind why I did. The
word 'test' just hung about upon the air meaning not much
at all.

The date arrived for the appointment with the doctor. The
staircase wound up floor by floor to the top of the building.
There were columns of photos of people who had something
to do with the university. I took in the pattern of the seats
around me and the curve of an ugly, chaotic sculpture nearby.
There was a fish tank and deep-green algae, and I watched
for a system in the way the fish swam around the tank.
Without recognizing what I was touching, I picked some
sparkly tinsel from the Christmas tree and twirled the bits
in my fingers. Embarrassed, I realized what Id done and put
the bits in my pocket.
A short, round man with big, round eyes came around
the corner. Calm and predictable, his movements precise, his
voice rhythmic and patterned and in no way overwhelming,
he seemed like some wise old owl.

36

On the way to an office was a standard drink machine. It
was the kind you find in psychiatry places that sells disgusting
powdered orange tea in smelly plastic cups. Linoleum made
a path under my feet. It was the sort that led to a multitude
of look-alike fluorescent-lit offices inside of look-alike
multistory buildings full of look-alike people with look-alike
jobs and sound-alike blah-blah voices. It seemed the sort of
place where one can get easily lost and each person asks
another person to help you until you are surrounded by
helpful people and you just run blindly through corridor after
corridor.
Stop it, Donna, you're winding yourself up, I reminded
myself on the verge of panic. I breathed deeply and rhythmically.
Through a glass corridor, I looked out at the
sunshine. 'Goodbye, sun,' I said to myself, as though seeing
it for the last time. I kept breathing. 'Relax,' I ordered myself. '
You'll come back out. He's a psychologist, not a brain
surgeon.'
Dr. Marek chose an office. I felt awful. I hated having no
idea where I was going and I was too intact to 'disappear'.
The office was narrow and I felt closed in, a rabbit in a
cage. It was too much like being taken into those little offices
in high school where you felt like a bug being observed
under a microscope, as exposed as being nude onstage under
floodlights before an awaiting audience.
I reminded myself there was no threat. I was busy taking
in the contents of the room. The window, the blinds, the
view outside, the number of floors in the building I could
see through the window, the surface and color of the walls.
the position of the seats, the marks on the floor, the surface
of the table, and, of course, the placement of the door.
Dr. Marek spoke. It was hard to grasp what he said. I was
too busy adjusting - to the new surroundings and new person,
both at once, and to the feeling of being observed, as well.
Where was Willie?
Willie would have sat there like a well-dressed, polished
quiz-show contestant calmly seizing upon key words and
elaborating upon them with the refined posture and tone of
a respected fellow colleague, a role refined largely in two years

37
I

I

I

I

I

A

I
of psychotherapy. I was not so impressive but I was relatively
whole. I had feelings intact even if they were painful.
Dr. Marek had some games and papers with him and wanted
to do some tests. There's no war here, I said silently in
response to rising agitation. The book had already exposed
everything that the war had protected and defended. The war
was over.
Puzzles, strings of numbers, categorizing and matching
things, finding patterns in things, and dictionary definitions
of words. I was being given tests on the things I could do
blindfolded. I didn't mind too much.
Then came comprehension tests for novel-type stories and
the arrangement of pictures that had no pattern to them. I
knew these sort of tests all right. These were the sort that
made you look like an idiot. These were the sort that made
you feel stupid and ai-igry at the people who gave them to you
to do. I looked at this doctor. So you weren't on my side
after all, I said silently in response to the feeling of having
been sold out. There are no sides. I corrected myself. There
are no sides when there is no war.
'What do these things tell you?' I asked, finally having
found the question. They were some sort of intelligence test,
but instead of just showing an overall intelligence level, they
showed which areas a person was intelligent in. It seemed I
was exceptional in some areas and very backward in others. I
was both genius and retarded.
The highs dragged the lows up, the lows dragged the highs
down, and the final figures showed I was of average intelligence.
Dr. Marek explained that extremes in ability in these particular
areas were typical of autistic people.
I felt guinea-pigged. I also felt relieved. I could finally
understand why I felt this way and had been treated sometimes
like a genius and sometimes like an idiot; I was, in fact, both. It
also threw new light on the creation of Willie. In the months to
come, Dr. Marek would help me understand more and more
bits of the puzzle. A million things came to mind.

38

February I99I
Dr. Theo Marek,
When you first gave me those ability tests, I didn't
really understand their significance outside the things they
reflected. What they showed had little personal significance.

When I grasped what you told me the results meant,
I was pleased with myself that I could understand this
but I didn't put it together with many other things.
For example, when I asked you about wanting to do
teaching and you replied that it was a bit unrealistic, I
agreed with you deep down but I really didn't understand
why.
In my book I had an intuitive understanding that I was
in some ways very old and in some very young. . . . I
knew I was clever and also stupid and that I was stable
and also mixed-up. What has begun to dawn on me now
is how I can use this understanding to plan for a future
where I will not feel torn apart by being asked too much
or having no opportunities to express and help develop
my less brilliant parts of me.
Whenever I had a job, I tried to run it and make it totally
systematic. Whenever I had an intellectually demanding
job, I kept falling into 'holes' all the time. I now know
these are holes in the consistency of my own abilities on
all levels.
I could never reconcile (nor could employers or friends)
why I wanted to work as a cleaner or clerk when I had
abilities that could be used in higher-skilled jobs, but
now I understand that in order to hold it together my
ultimate aim ought to be to find a comfortable place that
falls somewhere in the middle of my abilities.
Teaching would stretch a few of my abilities to cover
for the ones I don't have (a lot of bluff and shortcuts to
do with reading and understanding). Socially it is way
beyond me and I stick out like a sore thumb.
Still, I think, in the future when I have some security,
I will be able to afford the luxury of telling an employer
the score to do with my abilities and difficulties so I can

39

really feel okay to stay in a job and others can feel okay
with me, too.
I have thought too short-term before and didn't realize
how obvious some of my difficulties can be after a while.
I also thought it was better to feel 'on the run' than tell
others what was happening (and I didn't know how to
explain what was happening). Needing work badly also
meant I had to try to really impress people why I should
get a job, but they never lasted.
From writing to other high~functioning autistic people,
I understand some of them are working for employers
who understand their difficulties and they get a lot more
patience and proper help that way. I think I can now
accept that I am disabled, with a very big abled and still
quite a dis. (Smiling works wonders though - smile, and
people think you can do almost anything, you know.)
Anyway, what life is about is finding a place where
you can be comfortable and safe and it doesn't mess
you up or use parts of you while leaving the rest to
rot . .
That's it,
Donna.

MOVED TO the country to live with my father and his
girlfriend. I brought in my cardboard boxes of things
and put them out along the wall in a row. There were
things that needed to be hung but the cupboard was full of
my father's girlfriend's things. She had shown me the bit of
space I could have in the cupboard but as I stood there with
some clothes draped over my arm, I could hardly bear what I
would have to Inflict upon them.
Her clothes didn't smell like mine. Her clothes didn't look
like mine. Her clothes had never lived with mine and yet they
were meant to be cooped up in the same wardrobe together.
My things were symbolic extensions of myself. If they were
touched by others I would have to disown them as non-me.
I felt choked with impending claustrophobia. 'Sorry clothes,
I said, as I put one of her coat hangers into a )acket and hung

40

it up. I moved her things aside. Not far enough. I thought
of what to put between them. Other people's things always
seemed contaminating, merely by virtue of being theirs; 'my
world', tthe world'.
I drew back the sheets. They were a trendy in-between
color. I wished I had sheets. Then I wished I had a bed.
Then I wished I had a room. Then I wished I had a home.
Then I got depressed and gave up.
These sheets, whether they were on my bed or not, were
not in any way mine. They didn't smell like me. They had no
patterns with which I was familiar, under which I could lie in
the morning light, safe and enclosed, the sheet a tent over my
head. I didn't like the 'lovely' sheets.
just as I got used to them, I drew back the covers one day to
find my father's girlfriend had changed them. Trying to control
the tension in my voice, I asked, 'Have you washed the sheets?'
'Yes,' replied my father's girlfriend authoritatively. 'I don't like
to wash them,' I informed her. 'Well around here you do,' she
said crisply and invited no response.
I went to the room and sat on the floor, screaming silently in
my head. No words came out but I felt deafened. I felt trapped,
my life taken out of my control. I wanted out of this prison.
This social claustrophobia was an old pattern. It drove me
crazy and I knew it wasn't good for me. I tried to think of
whether leaving was a logical response or not. I tried to imagine
why this woman might be upset. I thought about how I might
feel if someone responded to my changing the sheets on one
of the beds in my own house if I had had one. I wouldn't have
done it. I did a lot of deep breathing.

I had peed in bed again. I was nine and too old for this. I could
hold on for days when I was awake but something within me
wasfree in the land of Nod, where I couldfly andpee with equal
ease. In the land of Nod there was no fear of losing control.
Carol climbed down the stairs with the sheets and a smile
and went to the washing machine. 'Put those fuckt*ng sheets
back on that bed or I'll break your neck,' said the snarl in
the kitchen. I had already seen the kittens go to God in the
laundry room. Crack, came the noise each time as they went

4I

to God at the hands of the snarl who stood next to the washing
machine. 'Stop bringing fucking cats home,' the snarl had said.
But Carol never remembered. There were no cats. To Carol,
the cats were symbols of me. She was bringing me home and
tryz . ng to prove again and again z't would one day work.
Carol climbed the stairs with the pissy sheets and put them
back on the bed.

My father's girlfriend had a high-pitched voice that hurt my
ears, and my body language must have made her feel like she
had the plague. Every time she entered the room I disappeared.
I discovered I could use cotton wool in my ears in order to
try to tolerate the pitch and intonation of her voice but it still
set my nerves on end so that I kept feeling I was going to
explode.
I could drive past a row of trees and focus sharply upon one
leaf of each tree, down to the detail of the contrast in the width
of each vein. That was the way it was on automatic pilot. Like
a handful of other autistic people, I could drive, paint, compose,
and speak several foreign languages, all without thought or
effort, but while I did I would be tuned out and everything that
happened or was taken in in the course of these actions came in
without being filtered. It was like having a brain with no sieve
but the consequences of my 'success' and 'high functioning'
were shutdown, overload, dissociation, and losing time. There
are two ways to be a nobody nowhere. One is to be frozen and
unable to do anything spontaneously for yourself. The other
is to be able to do anything based on stored mirrored repertoll,
es without any personal self-awareness yet being otherwise
virtually unable to do anything complex with awareness. And
then there are different combinations of both.
It gave me a headache when my senses got flooded like
this; it was like watching a cartoon in fast motion. Driving
by the shape of the road, stored rules on road dots and
lines, stored responses to curves and obstacles, I had driven
home many times with only the dream of how I got there.
Sometimes I drove the same route in a circle several times.
having got the role but lost the intention. If a familiar road was
changed, there was a repertoire for that, too, and many times I

42

found myself repeating the drive of a strip of road somehow
subconsciously assuming a reconstruction would 'fix up' the
reality and restore it to how it used to be.
In eight years there were eight accidents and no one but me
ever got hurt. I had done every manner of automobile acrobatics
but still considered myself a good driver. I guess you can be
anything in your dreams and I had lived continuously in and
out of one. I guess Willie was my driver in any stressful situation.
Yet it seems far from normal that after flipping, rolling,
and landing the car upside down on an unlit mountain bend that
anyone would merely unbuckle the seat belt, drop to the roof'
unwind and climb out the window, run down the road to flag
down oncoming lights, and then sit on a rock saying 'shit' over
and over without a tear, without a shake. Rainman may have
freaked out in a traffic jam, but on automatic pilot in a state of
self-denial and a step away from consciousness and awareness
'I' was sometimes so normal it was chillingly abnormal.
For so long this tentative balance of denial had been the
best compromise I had found. But the price tag was too
high; to merely function was no longer such a good exchange
for 'to live'. The choice was not an easy one though.
I had to accept the harsh reality that to live would involve
being so much less than I could seem and be so much more
difficult than sleep-walking. Everything was too colorful, too
invasive, too constantly changing. I could switch off emotion
and self, it would be tolerable; a film of someone else's life
with my body cast in the leading role. I could hold onto self
and emotion and awareness and overload under the weight of
everything coming into a mind with no sieve. Listening to
the girlfriend's voice was the auditory equivalent of this. I'd
be tuned out to cross the room or eat a meal or talk, and at
the same time my ears would take in every minute detail with
a clarity that sent my head spinning.
Generally the girlfriend was a nice person and she tried hard
to be nice to me. But it was like putting a cockatoo in a cage
with a finch; she was very present and I felt cornered and
overwhelmed.
I needed order. I needed a system. I began compulsively to
tidy and sort all of her cupboards and drawers. Things were

43

out of control and I wanted everything in its place. Making
everything line up, putting things in categories, and facing
things in the same direction put me at peace - a symbol
that a controllable world of guarantees is still possible in
the agitating presence of chaos.
I thought of it as a favor. The girlfriend found my behavior
very irritating. I sorted, cleaned, tidied, and ordered when she
wasn't in the room. Her reaction made no sense. Didn't people
think of this as being helpful?
My father came home to a frosty atmosphere. His girlfriend
sat there with his daughter, the familiar stranger. I was glad to
see him. He was familiar. He spoke my language and didn't
impose.
'You'll have to do something about her,' my father's girlfriend
complained.

'Wow, look what I've got,' my father announced to himself at
the kitchen table when be finally got home. He had something
in his bands that he turned around and around, focusing closely
upon it. It was another Of somebody's misplaced objects he'd
recovered when cleaning. 'Wow, what a "specz . aly",' he said
out loud, to hz*mself. I was eleven and in my second-to-last
year of primary school. I drifted over near to where he sat,
my gaze wandering from one thing to another, occasionally
landing seemingly at random upon the tiny object he turned
i . n his hands, still unable to show even to myself that I was
i . nterested. I looked at him looking at the object and he caught
me. 'You know what this Z*S?' he said to himself, his eyes fixed
agat . n upon the object. 'It's a "spect'aly".' The connections too
direct - hurt. My gaze flitted again from thing to thing.
settling occasionally on a spot upon the wall. 'No, you don't
want to look at this. This i's an Angus Buldarum Blackarse
Brookenstein Spect*aly,' be said to himself. The words intrigued
me. They weren't words in which the meaning had fallen out.
They were words in which the meaning was still yet to be
found. The meaning was in finding out what this thing was.
I grabbed for it. His band closed sharply around it. 'It's mine,'
he said matter-of-factly. 'It's mine,'I said back, looking intently
at his band. 'I'll let you look at it, but only for a second,' he

44

said, opening hi's palm. I grabbed it and took off with it to MY
room. My father gave me lots of 'specialies'.

My father came to me. 'Can you please try to act normal?' he
asked. 'What have I done?' I asked.
He explained. 'You've ignored her friends. You leave the
room whenever she speaks to you. You go out and sleep in
the car whenever we try to take you out with us . . . ' His list
went on and on. I could see no crime in any of it. According
to my rules, I had been entirely unimposing. I had treated her
with the same kind of respect I would have appreciated.
The request to 'act normal' disturbed me. Mockingly I put
on a disturbing minute-long medley of action replays of Carol
smiles, poses, and witty lines. I dumped them upon my father
to remind him of the monstrosity he had had a hand in creating,
all in response to that huge request to 'act normal'.
He was torn between understanding me and needing to
impress his girlfriend. I no longer gave a damn about the
empty value of trying to 'act normal' and he was getting the
message. He tried to explain how it was for her. I tried hard
to hear with meaning and empathy.
I had some things to ask my father, too. I wanted to ask
him why people had said I was autistic. I asked him whether
I had been seen by any specialists when I was small. I knew
my younger brother had. He had been diagnosed as severely
hyperactive when he was three.
My father said he thought he remembered me being in a hospital
for observation when I was about two but he wasn't sure.
'You know what it was like, he said. 'When was I ever there?'
I had remembered tiny fragments of being in the hospital
when I was small: the olive green walls, the smell and the
uniforms. Again and again and again in later years I had
asked why I had been there. For years I had been told this
was because I had been taken for tests. It was thought I had
leukemia. I bruised when I was touched, my gums bled, my
eyelashes fell out, and I was pale and sort of bluish. jokingly I
had been called 'the Frog' because of my color. Sadly, looking
back, I realized they were probably sitting about ignorantly
joking about the results of a lack of oxygen.

45

_m
I had given my book to my father to read - my life and
theirs, spewed out to the world on two hundred pages. My
father had been the first member of the family to read it. You
could almost see him squirm.
He seemed relieved that I had left him with most of his
privacy intact. I had written about the family only where it had
been necessary to writing about my own life. There had been a
knife edge to the seemingly blas~ attitude of the family toward
reading the book. They knew by experience that the only way
I'd willingly hand over something personal was if I thought it
totally unimportant to them. Otherwise I couldn't risk a potential
discussion or response. Every reaction, good or bad just
led to a triggered stored reaction in me. I preferred the stability
of self that came with relative indifference from others.
Since writing the book, things had changed. My pipeline to
information suddenly seized up. Memories of family members
went suddenly rusty and those that were left were polished
up to look as good as the sitcom images I had emulated.

The father who had dared to allow me to believe I was sane
now denied all accounts of what I had been told throughout
my life. It had been okay to tell a nutcase daughter who no one
would believe, but if she was actually sane and people listened
to her, what else did she remember?
Every day I hounded my father with a desert thirst for
self-confirmation. He wanted the past to be past. He felt it
only hurt, worried, and angered people to bring up the past.
Everyone had different lives now.
get on with mine?
Finally he told me what I was like as a child. When I was
around twelve months old, my legs were very thin and I
couldn't support my weight properly. I began to walk at
fourteen months but I couldn't seem to focus. I had had
remarkable balance but continued to walk into walls and furniture
well into my second year. 'You used to take off across
the lounge room,' he said, 'and sure enough, every time you'd
go straight into the wall and miss the doorway.' Perhaps it
was me who walked into walls while that automatic someone
could walk a piece of string or find a pin in the grass. Perhaps
couldn't I just go and

46

I might have got to my destination if not for a contradictory
bombardment of mental messages from my out-of-control
defenses.
' You screamed all the time,' he said. 'But it was not like a
baby crying. It sounded frightening, like you were sick and
in pain.' Also, I had begun about the age of two, to cough
compulsively, speckling the pillowcase with blood. People
blamed it on domestic violence. From the time I was six
months old, the house had shaken with rage and the smell
of gin. A mother in need of help got none.
Professional assistance had come in the form of uppers and
downers. In the sixties male doctors generally weren't so
good at counseling on women's issues. Community support
came in the form of a non-English-speaking mother
who accepted looking after the tot left in a stroller by her
gate. She didn't have enough grasp of English to ask why
or refuse.
Later there was the welfare center with bodies that walked
back and forth past open doorways, and a frosted-glass window
with criss-cross wire running through it up above the cot.
Later, community support came in the form of blue uniforms
and closed blinds.
'The hospital kept you for two days I think,' said my father.
He couldn't remember which one. 'Where were you at the
time?' I asked. 'I don't remember,' he said. 'That was over
twenty years ago. I'm not even sure if it was you who was
seen or 'I'oiyi.'
Nevertheless he went on to tell me what he remembered.
The doctors had found that I was tensing up my stomach
muscles and coughing against them over and over to the point
of coughing blood. They had found nothing physically wrong
but declared that I was doing this to myself and didn't seem
to feel the pain. I was also tested for deafness.
Although I could memorize and mimic entire conversations
with the accents of the people in them, I hadn't responded to
being spoken to. My parents experimented with loud noises
next to my ear without getting so much as a blink in response.
They thought I was deaf. I was not. Unconvinced in spite of
my huge vocabulary, my parents took me for tests again when

47

I was nine. People had no concept of being 'meaning-deaf'. In
terms of the effect on one's life, it largely amounts to being deaf.
One is robbed not of sound but of the meaning of sound.
'If you ever mention any of this, I'll deny ever having
told you,' my father finally warned. 'After all,' he went on
smugly, 'I remember nothing.'
I couldn't understand. Of all the injustice, this support for
denial is possibly the only part I find unforgivable. What
was the crime? Is guilt, shame, or responsibility so hard to
bear? I looked at him as though he had been a passive copersecutor.
Refusing to acknowledge what was under his own
nose erased the need or responsibility to do anything about
it.

Denial was a family game. 'Don't talk to her, she's fucking
mad,' 'she's a wongo,' 'leave It alone, don't talk to it,' 'look
at the spastic' - The phrases play and replay like scratched
records and I try to make sense of them. When I was growing
up, the price of this had been to convince me almost daily
that I was mad, bad, stupid, or not human at all. Though my
father was not the perpetrator, I don't know of any action
he took to stop it. Being too busy is no excuse. If his own
leg was laying across the railway line as the train came,
nothing could have made him too busy to move it.
I used to delight in my memory, which was acute, sometimes
perfect to the finest detail. I could set off one part of it and it
would run like a serial as I described the pictures, became the
narrator of a silent movie, the verbal animator of a recorded
soundtrack. This was part of what I considered conversing
and I felt proud of it as a sign of ability and, therefore,
intelligence. I had no 'talking with', but at least I had 'talking
at'. With almost every memory I had been told that this
was not my own life that I was remembering. I was 'sick
in the head'. I was 'possessed'. I was to 'shut my fucking
mouth before it was shut for me'.
I came to mistrust my own perceptions, and the fear of
expressing them as myself was intensified. At the same time, it
had totally Justified the compulsion to be everyone else except
myself. The words came out even if I remained oblivious to

48

them as 'self-expression'. They were emitted more than spoken.
They came from a stored mental repertoire of a 'theory self'.
A kind of composite mental script of the part played by
someone people called Donna.
By the age of seventeen, when I had first gone to see
a psychiatrist, it was as though I actually had no memories.
Though my self was around somewhere I had lived in
a state of daily, if not hour-by-hour, spiritual suicide and
rebirth.
Each day was unconnected from the last except for my serial
memory. Even this could only safely continue to remain if all
of my memories were thought of as dreams. Here, there was
no future and no need for real dreaming. In the company of
others there was only the moment.
When this first psychiatrist had wanted me to speak about
my memories (and Freudians are inclined to take this angle),
this seemed to me a bizarre and dangerous request. Some
months into our appointments, it had been finally confirmed
that these were not dreams, but memories and that the memories
were my own, whoever I was. I looked at my father.
No, for this, I could not forgive.

'Is there anyone else in the family like me?' I asked him. My
father smiled to himself. 'There is?' I prompted. 'Yes, there
is3 ) he replied, a bit embarrassed. 'You have a cousin who
was a bit like you. She hardly spoke and hid behind her
hand till she was about eight.'
My father had been fifteen when he babysat his sister's
children. My cousin was one of the youngest of the seven
and stood out from all the others.
'Why didn't you ever tell me?' I asked. 'Your mother would
have said it was to do with my family,' he replied. 'Do you
think it is something in your side of the family?' I asked. 'No,'
he snapped quickly. 'Her mother used to bash her. That makes
)em like that.'
'It's not true,' I said to him. 'There are children like this born
into families who never lay a hand on them, and children who
are not like this who have been abused just as bad.' 'Anyway,'
he went on, 'the abuse caused it.'

49

I

I
Easy for him to say, I thought. His role as father had barely
extended beyond bringing in the money to support us and
remembering our names and faces.
The outdated idea that abuse causes autism came from a time
when most men had little to do with the day-to-day care of children,
and women's place was thought to be in the home. It was
a time when children's problems were blamed on upbringing
before genetics (for which fathers are half responsible). It was
a time of the blame-the- mother syndrome.
There were victims of this syndrome. But I think most
of them were mothers. Autistic children probably suffered
indirectly from the effects of societal ignorance and lack of
community support. Mothers who did seek help from these
kind of professionals were often scrutinized and left to feel
shame and guilt. If they admitted to shouting, shutting the
child in its room, tuning out to try to relax, or even just
getting respite care, these were taken to be reasons for their
children's problems rather than the consequences of handling
a difficult child without support. The other way left open to
mothers to handle the problem was to try to deny it or get
rid of the evidence and institutionalize the child.

I found a job picking apricots at a local orchard. I had no
shorts, and the summer days were scorching hot. It was over
one hundred degrees.
My father's girlfriend gave me an old dress of hers. Armed
with a few bottles of ice water, a transistor radio, and peanut
butter sandwiches, I set off at sunrise each day to work.
The boss was a chauvinist pig who said he didn't usually
hire women. He said he had made an exception for me and I
was grateful for the work despite the fact that there were no
toilet facilities and I had to go in the orchard. bush-style.
The boss hung around like an old blowfly. He stood beneath
the ladder I perched on in my apricot-stained dress.
I was confused about the intentions behind the things he kept
asking me about: boyfriends, marriage, being pretty, and sleeping
with people. These were factual questions requiring factual
answers but I recognized some kind of system to his questioning
and felt uncomfortable about the type of topics he found

50

interesting. I told my father about it. He set me straight.
'Stop annoying me,' I told the boss. He took me off the
job I was doing and put me on the hardest job in the place:
repicking. Repicking involves carrying the tall metal ladder
from tree to tree, row to row, in order to pick about five
to ten apricots from each tree. Payment was by the crateload
and it took about six times as long to fill a crate this way.
I watched the men picking full trees in the rows nearby. I
choked on the inequality, the dust, and the heat. I emptied
my last apronful of apricots, cashed in my tickets, and left.
Sometimes, no job is better than 'any' job.

I cleaned my father's girlfriend's house and rode the bicycle
my friend had loaned me around the dusty clay roads. I
collected leaves and pebbles and feathers and studied the fall
of shadows created by dead old gum trees at various points
in the day. I walked through fields of dried grass and hovered
around the hay shed smelling the hay and watching the
sun set slowly behind the barbed wire fence of the paddock.
I took photos of cows and of i-ny own bare feet, walked
tightrope along the white paling fence at the back of the
house, and spun the clothesline, watching the wind make
the washing flutter. I listened to nature play a symphony,
caught up in the patterns of fields and hills, the play of light
upon grass, the rush of the wind past my ears, the crystal-like
dewdrops hanging upon barbed wire in the early morning,
the thud, thud, rhythm of my own feet running over clay
and scratchy dried golden grass that scratched my freckled,
sunburned legs.
Inside the house the feeling between my father's girlfriend
and I was icy cold. If only she didn't have that high-pitched
voice, I could have stood listening to her. I knew it wasn't her
fault and tried my best to remind myself of that every time
anxiety soared.
My father had tried to talk her around. I had given her
a copy of my book to read in the hope it might help her
understand that I was trying.
'You're not autistic,' she declared, almost spitting out the
words in disgust. 'My friend's sister has a daughter who is

5I

-I-7
autistic. She lives in a psychiatric hospital. She goes to the
toilet anywhere and can't even feed or dress herself.'
Was I was meant to conform to these pathetic expectations
or accept that I simply 'wasn't trying'? I wanted to scream at
her that it was probably because I was obsessive about trying
that I had progressed in ways this other woman had not.
A letter arrived in the mail. It was from Kathy, an autistic
woman from America.
Kathy was six months younger than I was. Like me, she
had gone to regular schools. Like me, she had a degree (history
and politics). She lived on her own in an apartment, worked
part-time and studied part-time.
'So, autistic people can't feed or dress themselves, and pee
everywhere,' I thought as I read her letter. 'Obviously, not
all.'

I suffered from food allergies, vitamin and mineral deficiencies,
and a blood-sugar problem called hypoglycemia, all of which
my father's girlfriend seemed to tolerate with gritted teeth as
a load of fancy hoo-ha. Among these difficulties was a severe
allergy to everything containing milk.
'I don't believe in all this allergy business,' she said, dishing
me up ice cream. 'I really shouldn't eat this,' I told her,
'it's made from milk and it's got sugar. I'm not meant to
have sugar.' 'A little bit won't harm you,' she said as she
spooned it into the bowl with the best of intentions. In a
way it didn't harm me but she certainly wore some of the
effects.
It was midnight and my mood and behavior were at the
mercy of my messed-up biological state. Unable to keep it
up) I broke down, or perhaps I broke through (I had probably
come down from a sugar high or the allergic reaction
wore off or both). As I came back down to earth I felt
defeated and ashamed. I gathered up my cardboard boxes,
packed my things, and drove for three hours through the
countryside toward the city lights.

I didn't really know where I was going. There really wasn't
anywhere to go. I parked my car outside my younger brother's

place and eventually went and rang the bell. A tall, smiling
figure came to the door. 'Hi sis,' said Tom.
My little brother had grown from being a seriously undersized
child to a tall teenager and an even more towering young
adult. He had become more popular, more 'cool'. Outdoing
even his own image, he had become almost a caricature of
himself, a white Michael jackson and probably just as undercover.
The dancing that had been in his eyes at age three
reappeared in rare glimpses but mostly there was a deadness
so sadly reminiscent of Carol at her best. The grimace of
infancy had become the smile of childhood and was now
part of an ever- ready- to -entertain comedian's language; quick
jokes, clever lines and a smile - always the smile.
Tom was sharing the house with a friend, and my mother
slept there on the couch. The house was something of a drop-in
center. Newspapers, clothes, soggy towels, cold abandoned
baths. dishes, containers of half-eaten take-away food, ashtrays,
and beer cans dotted the place. Not a lot had changed.
The TV ran day and night here and it seemed there were
always as many lights as possible burning, whether everyone
was asleep or not. Unpaid bills piled up and overflowed into
a collection of spools of thread, matchboxes, empty cigarette
packets. and discarded cards from various birthdays long gone
for which no one had bothered to find a special place. I went
and found the tea bags and began to tidy.
It had been thirteen years since my younger brother and I
had been accustomed to seeing one another around the place.
He had been eight years old when I had left home for good
at the age of fifteen. He was now a young man trying hard
to hold onto time and to not acknowledge his own impending
adulthood.
Tom's ambition was to die before he turned twenty-one.
Perhaps there wasn't a lot to be ambitious about in that
atmosphere. As he put it, 'It's hard to soar like an eagle.
when you're surrounded by turkeys.'

The backyard was littered with spray cans and half-finished
works of art. With only a skeleton of an education. Tom had
become accomplished in art and dancing. He'd made sums

53

large enough to earn pride though not enough to keep up
with the cost of living. Unlike me, Tom's ability to write
was generally limited to graffiti murals with one-word sentences
ten feet tall. Captured by color, pattern, and image.
he slept through the daylight hours, coming to life at night
like a vampire. Like a modern-day van Gogh, he seemed
tormented by the impression that his art was never good
enough.
For Tom, art was a world that was never real enough. His
paintings reached out and grabbed the viewer, wrapped them
up in an explosive experience of color, and dragged them in.
But Tom couldn't cross the bridges he painted across deep,
treacherous caverns. He couldn't reach the solid ground of
cliffs painted invitingly in the distance.
Tom sat across from me on the floor with one of his paintings
in front of him. He pointed to his own head. 'You don't
know how crazy It is In here, he said, his voice dead calm.
'Because you can't make them real enough to climb into?'
I asked. 'Are you as crazy as me?' he replied half-joking.
'It must run in the family.' Tom hadn't yet read my book.
Perhaps if he had he might have known these feelings had
nothing to do with craziness.

Tom cooked spaghetti and everyone was talking fast. He
handed me a bowl. 'Smile, will you. just be happy,' he
said, flashing me a press-the-button, made-to-order example
of a Cheshire Cat grin. It clashed brutally with the deadness
in his eyes. I felt ill. What a crime I would commit if I
encouraged him to accept this as reality.
'How's this one?' I asked him, a mechanical. production -line,
look-alike smile appearing on my own face. 'That's better,' he
said casually, and turned away.
I burned with the injustice of having been taught to put a
smile on the face of hatred. I raged silently with the memory
of how others justified what they'd done as long as I did as
I was told and smiled, always smiled. They almost could
have sawed my arms and legs off, and as long as they made
me think this was normal I would probably have tried to
smile. Facial expressions had everything to do with learning

54

to perform and nothing to do with feelings. Something inside
now told me this was wrong.
The bowl of spaghetti was raised high into the air. 'Look
at me, I'm soooo happy,' came the stored-up phrase from my
mouth. The bowl tipped over in my hands and fell with a crash
and a splatter into the sink. I was having a healthy response to
a sick situation.
Suddenly I was out of my head. My hands pulled my hair
and hit my face, unable to accept that I couldn't just act
normal that I had feelings that demanded expression, that
I could express none of them 'properly'.
I was too overwhelmed to be aware of anyone, including
the me possessing this thing called a body from which I
wanted out fast. The commotion and the movement toward
me spelled one thing only: a threat.
Tom approached me. Irritating emotional tones rang out on
meaningless words and arms opened to capture and engulf me
like a giant pair of tongs. I had no time to connect who I was,
let alone who these extra bits belonged to. They belonged to
Tom, but who the hell was Tom? Tom was my brother. But
what the hell did that mean? I was in a state of overload that had
triggered a shutdown. The bottom had fallen out of meaning. I
was falling fast into a void of Big, Black Nothingness.
I curled up toward the flat solid surface that was the wall
and gripped the gentle furry thing that was the velvet curtain.
I cried hysterically and hyperventilated in panic as the
moving, fleshy, noisy thing that was my brother tried to
swallow me up in what is called 'holding'. Between squeals
and gasps and tears, I smacked at the ominous, fleshy. pink,
moving things that were his hands coming near me. I tried
to bury myself in the curtain.
'What's wrong with her? What's wrong with her?' Tom was
demanding. He was shocked to see his big sister reduced to
a frightened animal. His hands raised in surrender, his face
a picture of shock. 'I'm out of here,' he said as he backed
away.
I scurried away as though he were a rattlesnake about to
bite. I looked at this man's stunned face - Tom, my little
brother. Tom. I remembered how he'd once held my leg,

55

I
crying for me not to go. Was this man the same person? Logic
told me yes. Perception told me no. One couldn't cancel out
the other, so nothing connected and the riddle was aborted
as unsolvable.
'Sorry,' I spluttered. 'Can't stand being held,' I said to
the person I knew in theory was my brother. 'That's your
problem,' Tom replied. 'You should have let someone hug
you.

LATER I SAT on the floor in the bedroom looking through
photographs. Tom walked in.
'What do you remember of the time before I left
home?' I asked. 'I don't remember anything,' said Tom sharply.
'I was just a kid.' I tried to jog his memory. He told me that the
things I mentioned didn't happen. He told me I had never had
any difficulties; I had had dancing lessons and owned dolls.
I threw image after horrifying image in Tom's face. No
reaction. He didn't remember. I threw some of the images
directly involving him. 'That was the old man's fault, he
said, referring to my father. MY mother, as far as he seemed
concerned, seemed to symbolize an almost brave. flaunting
re)ection of accepted social norms - the tough deserted wife
who had managed to bring him up on her own. The truth was
that he had brought himself up.
I pushed Tom closer and closer to the edge. Images of
abuse were met with his own macabre impromptu stand-up
comedy. 'Hey but wasn't it fun?' he joked. 'I think of it as
home entertainment.'
Then Tom was saying, 'Look, it's okay, I'm laughing.'
I shouted at him, every sentence another picture. Tom
shouted back at me, 'Why do you have to do this? Why
do you have to try to make everyone remember things? You
always have to make us feel.' What sort of crime was that? I
wondered.
Tom got up to leave the room and paused at the door.
The smile was gone from his face. A chilling realness and
vulnerability was in its place, as though he had suddenly
taken off a mask. Tom had been about to make his stage exit.

56

Suddenly he stood there without his costume. 'I do remember
he said finally. 'I remember everything.'
p

GOT A letter. I had been accepted for the course in teaching
junior school children. I had applied for it on a whim
when I'd first returned to Australia and found there were
no jobs to be had. Besides, the university was a social climate
I already knew, and the teaching course would take only one
year. I had to stay only two weeks at Tom's house before
the course began. The end of that two weeks would be my
open door, my escape route. I wanted to overcome my fear of
closeness. I decided that if there was one safe person with which
to try to learn to cope with touch, Tom was that person.
I covered myself completely with a heavy quilt and approached
Tom. 'Hug me,' came my muffled voice from under the cover,
'but stop when I say.' Tom hugged. I trembled from head to
toe and I tried to stay with my feelings.
,Stop!, i shrieked after a few seconds. Quickly I went into
the other room. My body was shocked and shaking, my
hearing was painfully sharp. It was one thing to deal with
touch as a performance or dissociate from it all as an object
of someone else's tactile infliction. It was altogether different
when inner defenses had to stomach the awareness
that touch was emotional, self-initiated, and personal. My
senses were overloaded and I was frightened and dizzy.
There was a vague hint of gladness at having attempted to
attack my own fear. It was damned hard to be touched when
I had a feeling self intact. It had been so easy to dissociate.

By the end of the two weeks, I felt I couldn't stand being
there anymore. Though he accepted me now as myself, I still
felt Tom wished I would perform again and make him laugh. I
couldn't blame him. The atmosphere there made the place feel
like a room full of gray rain clouds.
Image meant a lot to Tom and even though it seemed he
was reaching a new understanding of me, it was as though
this threatened to call into question his own life, which he was
not at all ready for. If Tom was not the image, who was he?

57

Unlike me, perhaps his self was not lurking in the shadows,
re-emerging whenever he was again in isolation. Perhaps he
had left his self behind so long ago he had forgotten when,
where, and even who it had been.
'Get real,' I said to Tom. 'Get real before it's too late.'

Y MOTHER WAs hardly around and even more rarely
awake. I avoided her like the plague. Not a lot had
chaneed in my communication with her.
m
I hadn't lived with her for more than ten years. For three
of those years I had heard from her only a few times a
year, when she managed to track down my latest change
of address. I had called her sometimes the year before from
the United Kingdom. Somewhere locked within her mind
I was sure she had some memory of an opinion or a label
that would help me find why I was neither stupid nor
crazy and yet still not 'normal'. I had called again and again
and again, pleading to know, in a way that would make
some sense, why I was like I was. This person was giving
me no answers now. If she had them she would die with
them. Perhaps the answers had already died along with a
memory that couldn't battle almost three decades of swimming
marathons.
Before. I had answered her in Italian. Now it was German,
which she did not understand. When she insisted on an intelligible
response I answered her like a mechanical answering
machine giving out one, two, or three
word answers. She met
my questions with fury, obscenity, ridicule, and even more
confusion.
'You're from outer space,' she said. 'You're not from this
planet.' She told me I'd learned to be how I was from all the
time I'd spent with my father's mother, who was thought to
be 'deaf' and 'dotty' and 'not all there'.
My father's mother was a private family joke. She was spoken
of as though she were somehow not as good as other people.
'lar*ties between me and my grandmother were used
The simi I
as an attack upon my father's worth, a way of reminding him
that my problems came from his side of the family.

58

It was true that my grandmother was like me and also had
blood-sugar problems. It seemed my mother had a grab bag
of theories about my condition, any of which would do as
long as none of them pointed toward her. When she wasn't
denying my difficulties in total, my mother was as guilty of
passing the buck as those who'd passed it to her. Everything
from lead poisoning to the mercury in my amalgam fillings
to my being the reincarnation of a tormented soul had been
used to account for why I was like I was. According to the
reincarnation theory, I had not lived the life I remembered, I
was remembering the life of someone else who had possessed
my body. Nothing I remembered about myself or anyone else
was true (a very handy theory given the nature of my family),
and my mother had certainly never laid a hand upon me in her
life. My father gave me a speech on the effects of alcohol
on the brain and why it was sometimes pointless to
argue or ask anymore questions.

I stood before this person who was my biological mother and
tried to see who she was. I was looking at a jigsaw puzzle
for which many pieces had been lost and some others were
just put back together any old way. I knew her in glimpses,
just as she knew me in glimpses.
The regrets I had were not regrets that she was my mother.
They were regrets about just how far ignorance can go with
others turning away. What's gone wrong when a fourteenyear-
old is already drinking and even encouraged to drink
from the age of three? What's gone wrong when a teenager
thinks that being the sex toy of a man who drives a big car
means she is special? What's gone wrong when a pregnant
nineteen -year-old still thinks you get pregnant from kissing?
What's gone wrong when this human being thinks of domestic
violence as a normal part of a relationship? What's gone
wrong when a woman goes for help and comes out year after
year after year with bottle upon bottle of pills? Where were
all the high-flying, save-the-world martyrs? Where were the
moralizers and those who talk of human rights? Where were
all those who would talk so easily of the rottenness of my
mother?

59
.h

~g
I stood before a brutal woman and a crumbled one. One
does not know how sad 'the world' really is until one sees it
kill one of its own. Chewed up and spat out, what now stood
before me was a human shipwreck.
Yet this was the same woman who once brought me potted
plants every few months for a year. The woman who
brought home fabric remnants for me to cut up, sew together,
or do with as I would. The woman who told me the
names of all the different garden plants whether I appeared
to listen or not. The woman who brought home dolls and
wished her daughter would play with them as she would
have, had she had them as a child, the same woman who
thought if she could make me dance I would be all she ever
wanted for herself but never got.
I stood listening to the woman who was never given a
chance by me just as she seemed not to give one to herself.
I asked myself who my father would have become in the same
circumstances, whether in her place he would have been my
(monster' instead of my mother. I asked myself what this does
to a person day in, day out, to be treated as a contamination,
an invader, and an outsider. I thought of what it might have
been like for my mother in her social isolation, to look forward
to someone bringing the world
home after work each night
ut cing greete y a us an with little more than more of
the same she got from me or the same patronizing, charitable
efforts upon which I came to choke in later life.
I left without a thank you or a chat, a goodbye or forwarding
address. As always I treated my mother as though my present
and future were none of her business.

I S'r0OD BEFORE the housing boards at the university in
front of identical advertisements for apartments. I needed
somewhere to live.
I had been ripped off again and again, paying in flesh, in
labor, in money, in possessions, but most of all in trust. In a
defensive state I rarely put any two events together to form a
conclusion or a future plan of action, I had gone into each new
venture with the niivet~ of a newborn. I didn't want another

60

disastrous living arrangement. I asked the housing worker for
help.
'I can't tell who to trust from who not to,' I said. The issue
of trust was finally now relevant. 'I don't know how to judge.
I generally end up in trouble, sharing a place.'
'What do you think you want?' she said, seeming very
understanding. 'You haven't got what I wanted,' I replied.
'What would that be then?' she asked. 'I want a flat or a
bungalow on a property with lots of land, like a farm, not too
far outside of the suburbs. I want a place with a garden and
animals and children, so I can feel I can trust the owners.'
The woman left the room and returned with a card that had
not been put up on display. 'These owners are looking for a
very special tenant,' she said. 'Someone quiet who keeps to
themselves and likes animals and children.'They lived on a farm
in the surrounding suburbs, where they had a flat to let on the
property. My face came to life like the sparkles of a chandelier.
I was overjoyed. 'The world' wasn't always such a shithole.

I got the flat. The floor was red and the walls and roof were
white. Red made me excited. It would be a place of high
motivation. There was a wall-to-wall, white-louvred wardrobe,
a mirror in the bathroom to say hi to each day, and a view of a
gum tree outside my window.
I had nothing to move in so I went out and bought a green
fold-out couch-bed, a coffee table, and a yucky orange desk
from the Salvation Army for seventy dollars. The people from
the house loaned me a bar fridge, and it wasn't long before I
found a rusty, moldy, but nevertheless functioning fridge of
my own for another seventy dollars. I got a big, cheap, clunky,
green typewriter second-hand, and I was set. I put my
postcards up on the wall along with notes to tell me to
remember various things like eating. I unpacked my cardboard
boxes of things and I had myself a home once again.
It was summertime and I awoke to the morning sunrise
breaking through the branches of the gum tree and to the
sound of birds. There were kookaburras, rabbits, and I even
heard a snake slither past my doorway in time to turn and
see it. There were horses down in the fields and there were

6I

trees, shrubs, and flowers of all kinds. At the base of the horse
paddock was a tiny forest of pine trees, where the ground was
orange with dead pine needles and dotted with fallen pinecones.
There was a soggy compost heap full of mega-long earthworms.
There were fluffy red bottlebrushes, and bankslas, but best
of all, there was a rose garden.
I ran with the horses and lay in the sun in the long grass.
I played with the stringy bark from the gum trees and made
tiny weed bouquets from the different types of grasses. I
went walking in the rose garden: red. yellow, Pink, orange.
white. I moved among the colors.

HAD ARRANGED to see Dr. Marek every three weeks or
SO. He thought he could help me find different ways to
tackle various problem situations. I couldn't really see
how he could help, though. I would learn how to tackle a
given situation in one context but be lost when confronted
by the same situation in another context. Things just didn't
translate. If I learned something while I was standing with a
woman in a kitchen and it was summer and it was daytime,
the lesson wouldn't be triggered in a similar situation if I
was standing with a man in another room and it was winter
and it was nighttime. Things were stored but the compulsive
overcategorization of them was so refined that events had to
be close to identical to be considered comparable.
What I wanted from Dr. Marek were rules I could carry
around with me that applied to all situations, regardless of
context. I wanted rules with no exceptions. It was like saying
I would only be able to tell right from left if we did away with
left.
I didn't want to change my personality. I had had enough
cosmetic surgery performed upon my personality. I simply
wanted to know what pieces or concepts I was missing that
stopped me from being able to change my own behavior and
use my own resources.

62

Dr. Marek,
... As far as the original idea of giving me solutions to
specific situations, my difficulties generalizing mean that
it is better to begin with generalizations (I like to find
rules and guarantees and remember them).
This is difficult for you I suppose because you'd have
to choose your words really carefully for me not to spend
the next ten years saying, 'It's true because you said it was
a rule.'
I felt a bit disappointed that when you explained things,
I couldn't understand them in the right way very easily.
If people like me were easy to teach, we wouldn't have
so many problems I suppose.
I guess you, like many people, think that because I
can talk well through language. I learn from others by
reflecting them and can learn from them by their reflecting
me (I've probably spent too many years in front of the
mirror). Otherwise, I try now to learn by recombining
what information I've got, but I don't have the ingredients
necessary for some of the answers.
One good thing is that I don't have to say 'yes, yes, yes'
when I talk to you and so I can say, 'Sorry I don't get it'
and 'Can you say it another way?' You also don't talk too
fast and speak with a fairly consistent tone and rhythm
(which is less distracting and confusing). You should give
talking lessons to some of my lecturers.
The other thing which has helped in our appointments is
a sense of responsibility to answer for my own progress. It
helps me not to give in to my own defenses. It's like a rule
that, once made, can't be broken (only new ones can be
made to overrule old ones). It is also a way of keeping time.
One thing, by the way, is I'd like you to outline
what things I will need to accept that won't change and
what things will (if you know). . . . I push myself to
the breaking point and beyond, too much, I think. I
can't get off my own back ...
Thanks,
March I99I

Donna.

63
I

I

I considered all the things I was missing that other people
seemed to have and made a list:

ù connectedness to my body, my feelings, and my past
ù attachment, trust, and familiarity
ù friendships in which I would feel equal and not aware of my
differentness
ù an ability to stop combatting and withdrawing into myself
ù an understanding of when to give up and who to give up on
ù a place I can belong without withdrawing into myself
ù acceptance of 'the world' without guarantees
ù a knowledge of the future without what others have

I took out my list and Dr. Marek seemed to laugh a bit.
'What's so funny?' I asked him. 'Nothing's funny,' he said.
'What you did was very sensible.' Why, I wondered, would
someone find it so amusing to be sensible?
I wanted to know why people laughed at me. I knew I
was funny but I didn't know why. 'Give me an example,)
said Dr. Marek. I gave him the example of a reaction to
my reaction over a pair of shoes.
They were shiny patent leather and cost five dollars. I
thought they were wonderful. I loved the smell, the smoothness,
and the shininess. They looked edible. I had smelled
them and brushed the smooth surface along my cheek. I
carried them in my arms looking at them as I walked along.
The person with me watched.
My companion looked sort of sad but smiled a bit. 'Are they
your best friend?' I was asked. I thought about that strange
expression. I came to wonder if this person somehow felt sorry
for me and I wondered why she would.
A year earlier, I wouldn't have wondered at such an expression.
It would have required only to be mirrored. Carol
would have acted as if she understood what the expression
meant, as though acting were no different than actually knowing.
I had felt it was others who were missing out by not seeing
things the way I did. Right now, however, a feeling began
to crawl over me like ivy, choking me into recognition and

;~4

awareness. I had begun to wonder if it was not others who
were missing out, but me. If it was true, what was I supposed
to do about twenty-eight wasted years?

The chair fell over because I walked into it. Logically this
was proof that it had felt me knock it. I sat on a chair and
the cushion went down. The chair clearly knew how heavy
I was. I felt sorry for sitting on a chair sometimes. It was
as though I was imposing. My feet made indentations on the
carpet as I walked across it. It obviously felt I was there. 'Hi
carpet,' I said, glad to be home.
My bed was my friend, my coat protected me and kept me inside,
things that made noise had their own unique voices which
said vroom, ping, or whatever. Windows looked outside at the
day, curtains kept the light from coming inside, trees waved, the
wind blew and whistled, leaves danced, and water ran. I told my
shoes where they were going so they would take me there.
A tin came down from the shelf. I laughed. It looked like it
was committing suicide as it suddenly jumped away from the
wall. Things never thought or felt anything complex but they
gave me a sense of being in company. I felt secure in being able
to be in company in 'the world', even if it was with things.
There was space in 'my world' for the awareness of people
but people were always third-person; they imposed upon an
already present sense of company.
Everything had its own, if limited, volition. Whether a
thing was stationary or movable depended more on the thing's
readiness to move than on the person's decision to move
it. Statements like 'it won't budge' only confirmed this assumed
reality. It had never occurred to me to ask myself how
objects knew or felt, nor was I interested. For me it had been
an unquestioned assumption.
The assumption had begun long before I knew the words
'know' and 'feel' were more than combinations of sounds.
The words 'know' and 'feel' were like 'it' and 'of' and 'by'
- you couldn't see them or touch them, so the meaning wasn't
significant. People cannot show you a 'know' and you cannot
see what 'feel' looks like. I learned to use the words
'know' and 'feel' like a blind person uses the word 'see'

65

and a deaf person uses the word 'hear'. Sometimes I could
grasp these unseeable, untouchable concepts, but without inner
pictures they would drift away again like wispy clouds. Until
I could see 'know' or 'feel', the question just didn't arise to
ask what had 'knowing' and what had 'feeling' and what
didn't.
Carol had asked questions to make people say what she
wanted to hear. There seemed no point in asking questions
about things you didn't know when you couldn't hear consistently
with meaning: 'Well Donna ... things ... and when
... see ... and then ... you understand.' 'Yeah, sure. That
really clears things up. I never thought about it like that. Can
you suggest any books on the subject?' (Thanks for assaulting
my ears again with noise and blah-blah. God, I am a hopeless
deaf shit. What an idiot. Act 'normal', just act 'normal' and
they won't know.) Asking questions seemed as pointless as
the totally blind person saying, 'draw it for me in color,' or
the totally deaf person asking to listen to the sound of your
voice.
Questioning was also a strategy to avoid answering any of
their questions (the jump-out-the-cupboard-before-they-openthe-
door-on-you strategy). Questioning was more of a game
than anything else.
Dr. Marek challenged my logic, my belief system, my world.
He was tackling what to him probably seemed like language
and behavior problems. In fact, he was treading upon my
very perception of my self, my relationship to my body and
everything around me. He was challenging my entire reality,
past and present, in order to change the course of its future.
He threatened to throw me headlong into a reality I had
never even known was there. I had given up my war, but
he was asking me to disarm myself.
Dr. Marek didn't have to disarm himself. It seemed very, very
one-sided, almost foolish and irrational to believe disarmament
should happen on one side only. But others hadn't been at war.
I liad.
MY head was swimming and I felt nauseous. A part of me
must have been on the verge of understanding. Was there a
whole pile of stored knowledge I had not been able to make

66

sense of that was just sitting there waiting for a new system
by which to translate and utilize it?
Writing the book had made my hold on 'my world' brittle
and fragile in its raw exposure. Slowly there was less and less
to turn to. Having given up Carol and Willie, all that was left
were things, a world of objects.
This world was the place from which I had begun. It was
the place before the creation of the characters. I was like an
ingrown toenail. I had thrived in the wrong direction. In
order to go forward, I had to first go backward to where I
had begun; as T. S. Eliot writes, 'In my beginning is my
end.'
In one great swoop, -ny perception got knocked off its feet
and I fell into a perceptual black hole. Dr. Marek gave me
a rule with no exceptions. He explained that things need a
nervous system in order to think or feel.
Back in my apartment, I tapped the wall. Every time I held
onto a curtain, every time I looked at my shoes, a new perception
of objects as dead things without knowledge, without
teeling, without volition, nagged at me. I felt my own aloneness,
with an intensity I had always been protected from. Willie
wasn't there to help me understand, depersonalize, and deny.
Carol wasn't there to make me laugh and pretend nothing mattered.
Everything around me had no awareness that I existed.
I was no longer in company.
I felt trapped by an impending acceptance of a new logic
my mind couldn't continue to deny. My infantile emotions
could not bear it. I wanted to run back into 'my world' but
it had been bombed. Blocked, unused inner knowledge and
understanding I had not made use of screamed for recognition.
Upstairs in the brain department, the rusty cogs began
to turn. I felt torn in two. This time, though, both halves
would be within my control.
I paced like a lion in a cage. Since writing the book, I had
made a rule neve,- to attack myself physically again. Somehow
it used to relieve the anxiety. There was now no other
way to express it than through tears. In my room of dead
things, I hit the floor, which had once been aware I was
walking on it. The floor I had sprawled my body across,

67

the carpet I had run my fingers through, my special sunny
spot in the middle of the room, were all dead and always
had been and I hadn't known. I realized I'd lived my life
in a world of object corpses. God has a curious sense of
humor.
I had been about three when all the people around me 'died'.
They had stopped being thing-objects. I was like someone on a
departing boat who thought it was the shore that was pulling
away. I had watched people slip away and abandon me. I
now realized it had been me who couldn't keep up with
them.
Eventually I distinguished people from things and nature, and
came to think of them as people-objects: second-rate, distant,
difficult to comprehend but usable. I learned to function.
Right now, 'my world' was being turned upside down and
inside out. I felt abandoned, not by people, whom I'd written
off long ago, but by things. There was no comfort in sight.
There was nothing in sight but the gradual guaranteed destruction
of all I turned to for security, and abandonment
into the arms of the unknown.
Leaves didn't really dance and pictures didn't really jump off
hooks on the wall and furniture didn't really stand around me.
Damn 'the world'. It was an empty and ugly place. My God,
I thought, do they know what they have done? I had trusted
them. They had nothing to give me and I had trusted them.
I had given up my secret war and the security of 'my world'
that rested upon that secrecy. In return I had been condemned
to an empty void. I was double damned.
I made a rule that there would be three things immune to
this new logic of objects; my travel companions, two stuffed
toys called Orsi Bear and Travel Dog, and my reflection.
I stood before my mirror looking at me. Logic told me that
I was not actually in company with my reflection, but the
perception of this other moving being defied the logic. One
could not cancel the other out and I could not reconcile the
t   0.
If I had known pretense, then I don't think I had known
it well and certainly not consciously. Pretense was too much
of a self-expressive creation, too out of control, too exposing

68

of the self it came from to be allowed. Now, though, as
the security of my world crumbled, conscious pretense as a
weapon against loneliness was born.
Orsi Bear never growled and Travel Dog never barked.
They had no imaginary thoughts, they made no imaginary
statements. I spoke to them. I shouted at them. I cried on
them. But they had nothing to say. They were simply being.
Even if trees and grass didn't wave and leaves didn't dance,
they too were still alive. I spent time hugging trees and lying
in the long grass instead of my sunny patch on the floor. The
trees seemed all the more wise and protective than before the
elephants of the tree world, with trunks.
I had been given a set of keys to many unexplored corridors
within my mind. My view of 'the world' began to change
dramatically. My letter to Dr. Marek captured this like a
reflection of surroundings in a lake:

To Theo Marek,
April I99I

... As for the fast progress of things, I can't bear being
stuck in the middle of learning. If it weren't for it being
on the way to solutions, I couldn't bear it.
It is much harder than where I've come from. I still have
the spots (air particles), buttons, and lace. The characters
are safer now as memories and abilities that I try hard to
accept as my own, and Travel Dog and Orsi Bear are the
bridges to an external world.
... In my apartment I feel 'normal' and like part of
(the world'. I have turned to something outside myself
for security and wake up with a sense of belonging that
goes beyond my own body (I know stuffed toys aren't
real but turning to something outside of myself in an
affectionate way has taught me the concept.) Before, most
of my ob)ects were there for 'protective-defensive' value
- I felt no belonging, so sleep was sometimes like a form
of torture. Now sleep is a nice place ...
... There is still music and art and poetry but what's
changed is that I acknowledge 'the world' as potentially
for me now. It's not some great sewer with a few misfits

69

i

who I thought had mistakenly got into it (the people
I liked). It's not a place with two-dimensional cut-out
figures without any realness or anything to offer. It's a
real-feeling world with a future to give me and I just
need to work on the skills to reach out to it and accept
it reaching me without fear.
I think my mind is too big for 'my world' and my
emotions and social skills will have to grow into 'the
world' but the people I have around me now have the
patience I think, and I think I can trust them (trust in
their knowledge). I can look in their faces and see that they
know what they are saying about what they have (they
can't honestly say they know what it feels like to be me
but I can see they are happy being part of 'the world').
That's it,
Donna.

In response to the gradual crumbling of 'my world', I constructed
another removed world for myself. It would be a
bridge. A way of distancing 'the world' enough to take things
a step at a time without shattering.
This was a world rich in language, though none of it English.
I banished the verbal language that had brought understanding
and shattered the security of my 'my world' perceptions.
English was in exile. I listened to it, thought in it, or spoke
it only outside of my apartment, out in 'the world'.
I found a foreign language library and borrowed videos,
song and story cassettes, and illustrated storybooks. My most
recently acquired language had been German. This seemed as
good a language as any, particularly considering that few people
I had met in Australia seemed to speak it.
I watched TV, but only when foreign language programs
were on. I listened to the foreign stations and programs on the
radio. Outside of reading for my university studies, all reading
had to be in this foreign language. Large poster sheets went
up on my walls and door. This was to be for communication
with myself, all of which had to be in German. I wrote letters
to some people Id met during my stay in Germany and
I read the German dictionary.

70

Nobody noticed. Few people knew where I lived and those
who did were rarely invited. I would maintain control and
visit them (the jump-out-of-the-cupboard- before- they-open th
e-door- on -you- strategy again).
The immersion into German had an advantage: I was able
to enroll for the foreign languages component of a teaching
degree, which would mean I would only have to teach in
English for part of my course. It would be so much easier
to teach in a language that was not my own and represented
no direct expression of myself.
The postgraduate course taught people how to be teachers
of both junior and senior school students (with the emphasis
on elementary).

T WAS THE first day of the Diploma of Education course.
There were fifty of us, students between the ages of twenty
and forty from various backgrounds. We were separated
into two groups and given timetables and various bits of
bureaucratic garble on paper. Some had arts degrees, some
had science degrees, some had psychology degrees, or degrees
in journalism. All were here to learn about teaching what they
already knew and learning how to teach what they didn't. Staff
members were introduced and the staff managed get-to-knowyou
and get- to - know-the-course games.
It was a different sort of course right from the beginning.
It had been easy to be anonymous in a lecture theater with
a few hundred other students and go to tutorials every other
day, where you hid in anonymity behind the security of tables,
topic knowledge, and characters.
Other students and the staff were watching constantly to find
out if you were balanced enough and well adjusted enough to
become a junior school teacher. No one wanted to be respon~
sible for entrusting fragile egos to anyone who was not quite
what the education department needed.
My focus was sharpened. I took my cues from what everyone
else was doing. Despite the pressure, I felt relatively safe in
the structured setting of class, with its clear beginnings and
endings, its set topic, and its more overt social rules. Like

7I

9
everyone else, I spoke briefly about why I took the course
and about my own education.
The first of the classes broke up for lunch. I was relieved
and yet afraid of lunchtime. Without Carol to buzz around
manically mirroring people and ad libbing o.-i their lines, I had
no idea how to conduct myself socially. At least now I would
lia\-e lialf a chance of experiencing my own life, choosing the
direction and motivation of my own words, and being able
to feel what I said and did, provided I could get a response
out.

'Tell me to shut up if I'm being annoying,' I told one of the
lecturers. 'Your comments are very welcome') she said. 'They
get people thinking. They add life to the class.'
I either spoke one-to-one or addressed my comments to
no one in particular, so I had no way of measuring the degree
to which I dominated the class. When I spoke, there
simply was no class, there was only a topic or a sentence
that had triggered a comment, and people around me who
happened, by coincidence, to be there.
One of my classmates, joe, singled me out as a sparring partner.
His comments were fueled by an ego that needed constant
victories. My comments were fueled by a fight to stay on track,
to make connections, and to comprehend something.
I made a comment. joe took it as a personal invitation to
have an argument. My comments were being turned into a
two-ring circus at the expense of the class.
'Break into groups', 'form pairs', 'brainstorm'- the lecturer's
phrases punctuated almost every lesson. Carol's and Willie's
ideas were easily triggered. I came up with Ideas in isolation.
All of us had had the concept of talking Cat, 'in front of'
and 'to', but the concept of 'talking with' was lost on me.
I was like a deaf person who could talk; when someone
else spoke, I either said nothing or spoke over them on my
own track, an express train, stopping at no stations until the
end.
I was afraid people would see I wasn't keeping up so I
tuned in to key words and tried to find things to comment
on. I was the verbal equivalent of a dyslexic person who

carries a newspaper but complains that she's misplaced her
reading glasses. I had always tried to fit others' expectations
but I didn't know why they had them in the first place and
it never occurred to me to ask.
I felt damned annoyed at this brainstorming. Without affect
it was an interrogation where someone asked you what you
thought or felt about what they'd said. Nine times out of ten
I had neither felt nor thought anything.

ARRIVED AT my latest appointment with Dr Marek. 'Am
I being unrealistic to think of being a teacher?' I asked. 'A
bit,' he said.
My life had always been an obstacle course. I recognized
most of my obstacles but I lived around them and in spite
of them. I never saw them as some impassable wall. Perhaps
that's the sign of an optimist.
If I couldn't hear with meaning, I could always comment
on the things around me or create my own topic. If I couldn't
make social chitchat, I could always talk shop, flick through
books, act busy, and appear super-conscientious. I could focus
on picking out key words and play word association
games with them in a way that passed for agreement and
conversation. If I didn't understand someone's behavior or
feelings, I could hide my anxiety at being confused and lost,
express nothing, and appear calm and unaffected. If I read a
story and had no idea what it was about, I could assume an
air of authority and secrecy and meet every question with
another question, deflect everything. If the noise was too
loud, too variable, or too high-pitched I could stuff my ears
with cotton wool or earplugs. If the lights were too bright, I
could assume the uncomfortable role of an eccentric and put
on dark glasses indoors. If people asked me what I wanted,
thought, felt, or liked, I could appear generous and reasonable
by putting the question back on them. If I was expected
to go into an unfamiliar place, I could suddenly remember
other things I had to get done, I could need to go to the
toilet, get sidetracked, or fail to hear or take personally the
invitation. If I was offered a lift, I could say I preferred to

73

walk. If I was offered a present, I could say I didn't lik
to receive them. There were many things I couldn't comba
but I had a bag full of strategies that made me look goo
trying.

A WOMAN FROM the class sat quietly watching me chas
an airborne dandelion gone to seed. 'Donna, you'r
different, aren't you?' she asked. 'I guess so,' I said
'Just how different are you?' she asked with an air of secrecy
her head cocked to the side. 'Put it this way,' I replied, 'I'n
a culture looking for a place to happen.'

It was the end of a very noisy class. The room had no windows
and the sound bounced off the walls. I had just come from
another classroom where I had been tortured by sharp white
fluorescent light, which made reflections bounce off everything
It made the room race busily in a constant state of change. Ligh
and shadow dancing on people's faces as they spoke turned th
scene into an animated cartoon.
Now, in this noisy classroom, I felt I was standing at th
meeting point of several long tunnels. Blah-blah-blah echoed
bouncing noise wall to wall. I looked at the cheerful, placi
faces of the others; clearly I was the freak.
I had to go to the toilet. I couldn't stand it here an
longer. My stress level was so high I was like a cat abou
to spring. The lecturer who regularly took the class in thi
room was a jolly smiling bouncy woman with a very high
pitched voice, just the kind of voice that sent me through th
roof and set my nerves on edge.
We were reaching the end of the first term and the lecture
announced the school placements for the first teaching round
where we'd actually teach children. Anita was standing nex
to me at the lecturer's desk. 'You two have placements at th
same school,' she informed US.
Suddenly something flew around my shoulder and sat there
like some fast-moving cat. Glad to find she would be wit
someone familiar, Anita had flung a 'friendly' arm around me
I grabbed the thing from my shoulder like unwelcome slime and

74

threw it down. Anita's arm returned like a boomerang come
home. I sprang back and glared at Anita, solemnly regaining
my composure. Like a spitting cat I announced, 'I'm not a
touchy-feely person.' Anita stood there dumbstruck.

My lack of social skills had its consequences.
Anita and jan, another classmate, began to talk to me less
and less. I was seated between them. When everyone in the
class was asked to form a pair with the person next to them,
jan turned to Anita, who was sitting on the other side of me.
'Come on,' she said to Anita, 'we're a pair.' I sat there in the
middle like the Invisible Man as the rest of the class formed
pairs. As in primary school and high school, I was left to
become the dregs ... one of the leftovers with social leprosy
left for the teacher to pair off.

'We're off to the cafe,' announced someone in a drifting cloud
of people. 'Yes,' I replied and waited to be invited. They
didn't ask if I was coming. Why were they doing this? Why
were they telling me they were going but not Inviting me?
Were they showing off how they were all friends going off
together? Was I supposed to assume I was meant to come
along?

The Diploma of Education course was not an easy one to
hide in. I was afraid people would see I was on my own
all the time. During breaks I walked continuously or hung
about behind the closed doors of the stairwell. If I heard
someone coming I'd start walking again, looking like I was
going somewhere. I didn't want anyone to know I was alone.
Mostly I didn't want to know I was alone.

May I99I
Theo Marek,
* * * Why don't I know to follow groups outside of
class? I noticed that we all got along and at first I went
off to lunch with groups from my class who made me
feel included. Then they seemed to drift off without me.
In theory I know people often say things that are

75

I
meant to subtly invite me to come along but people
I know outside of the university know they have to
make this very overt for me or I just take it as part of
the conversation.
I realize there are times I don't want to go off with
groups from my class but I think part of this attitude
is fear. Another part is defensiveness because I don't
understand the cues and get left out, so I say I don't
want to be with them. They do like me and when they
see me outside (when I happen to drift past people in
my class) they call me over. I understand that and then
I join them but I am finding myself increasingly left out
and I am sure they think this is my choice (which is only
half-true). This makes it even harder for me.
I am sure this is why I needed the characters before.
They were so over the top that people were always entertained
and often followed me (even if there was very
little me in the me they fol'jowed). This hurts my feelings
a lot because now I'm being me and I don't get as clear
cues from people as when they were surprised and captivated
before. This is better now for the quality of the
friendships but my ability to get the cues is poor. How
can I work on this except for telling them? - which I
don't want. I want to be equal.
Once I sit with them, sometimes I can talk well but
because I don't follow their topics I either am quiet or
I direct people's cues to talk (nicely, but I know this is
not what others do, and still I can't work out what they
do do. They have no system - unlike in class). I guess
that is language, but socially I have a lot of problems
with this when it is not coming from me. Can you help
me with this because I am slowly accepting that I want
to make real friendships and it hurts that I can't get past
step one?
That's it,

76
Donna.

In the math class, it wasn't hard to realize my math level was
pretty basic.
The lecturer was discussing whole numbers, integers, prime
numbers. divisibility, and a whole lot of other blah-blah-blah
as he drew numbers on the board. He wrote the figure twelve.
'Who can tell me what that is?' he asked. People had already
noticed I had trouble keeping up in this class and I was proud
when I felt sure I had the answer to something.
My mouth was in gear before my hand even went up. I
called out the answer. 'It's a twelve.' The class roared with
laughter. Carol would have laughed and pretended it was
deliberate comedy. I felt myself sink into my chair and shrink
a few inches. I wasn't stupid. By the time he got around to
asking the question, I had lost the context I needed to answer
it.

I stood looking over the shoulder of someone constructing
something out of a long cardboard roll. 'See these rings around
here,' he said, refem*ng to the rings encircling the cardboard
cylinder. 'You can tell how old this I's by the number of rings
around it.' It seemed logical. Cardboard came from trees and
you could tell the age of a tree from the number of rings
running through the trunk. There were four rings around the
cardboard tube. It was four years old.
Five minutes later my mind was still mulling it over. Something
didn't quite fit. Then it all sunk in. 'You bastard,' I said
to the guy who had told me. 'I was only I*oking,' he replied.
The others with him tried not to laugh.

Kerry, one of my classmates, offered to help me with math.
She came to my place. I ferried her very quickly through my
apartment to the chairs outside in the back. She sat waiting to
make conversation. I stood feeling embarrassed there wasn't
one.
I had given up on long dogmatic ramblings and comical
word-plays. I wasn't sure what else there was to use. Eventually
I told her why I wasn't so good at getting to know people
through conversation. I told her about my book and how I
found it difficult to be in the course.

77

jp j
'I already knew you were different,' she said. She had read
a lot about autistic children and already thought I was like
them. I wondered if my background was part of the reason it
had taken me twenty-five years to find out why I was like I
was. If I'd had an educated family that read something besides
murder novels and tabloid newspapers, perhaps I would have
learned about it as part of general knowledge. Perhaps some
of it was just timing. Until I actually had met someone else
who was like me, I hadn't realized that my 'quirks' and
'difficulties' were anything other than my mad, bad. or sad
personality.

Dr. Marek,
May I99I

... I feel I am coming a long way here. It doesn't sound
like much. But these are all things I've experienced in
the last year (since writing the book and finding out
what autism is). Sometimes I felt bad to know. It has
also helped me a lot because now I can distinguish between
my personality and my difficulties. I think it is
this sharp contrast that makes me try so hard. I think
there is hope here. The more I get out of the difficulties
that confine me, the more people will respond to me
as I am rather than as I appear (one of the fallouts in
class was because someone felt it was my personality
that I wanted to be different and think differently from
others all the time and that I didn't want to be part of
things) ...
Thanks,
Donna.

'Have you told anyone in the course about your autism?' asked
Dr . Marek, sitting across the room from me. I hadn't seen any
point.
Throughout my life I had tried to explain these things.
Meaning-deaf I had hit my ears and shouted, 'I can't hear
you!' I had asked constantly, 'Am I making sense? I can't
tell what I am saying.'
When the meaning fell out of everything I saw, I had said,

78

'Help me, I'm stuck, I can't wake up.' People just thought I
was crazy.
Feeling,-dead, Carol and Willie had told people they could
do what they liked to me because I was dead anyway. Carol
had hit herself and laughed, saying, 'Can't feel it.' Hypersensitive.
I had also told people touch hurt. 'Rubbish,' they had
said. 'Touch cannot hurt you.'
Explain things? They wouldn't understand. Those who
knew anything of autism would conjure up images of lowfunctioning,
mute people with minimal or no living skills
who had a repertoire of repetitive movements they had not
learned to control or to be 'motivated' to limit, channel, or
hide.

June I99I

i
Dr. Marek,
' * * In the part-time job I had at my father's workplace,
I had been called a 'smart kind of crazy-backward'. I
explained to one of the people there about autism (he has
known me for years and seen me tearing about my father's
workplace). He told the others (who also knew me for a
long time and had heard of or experienced my behavior),
and I got told off for telling them because I had made my
father ashamed by their knowing I was autistic.
I don't get it. Why would he be happier that people
thought of me as crazy or backward but ashamed that
they knew I was autistic (which means I am not very
crazy at all, intelligent in many ways, and not necessarily
mentally retarded)?
It confuses me that you've suggested I explain my
autism to people if it will solve difficulties because it
is not a on c-hund red -Per-cent, money-back-guaranteed
answer. I guess you never said it was.
One thing is that people think all autistic people cannot
talk. Because I can talk well, most people can't see why
things can stress me out or confuse me so much or why I
can speak so well but understand not nearly so well ...
... Donna.

79

I was obviously clever enough to have completed an undergraduate
degree, supported myself, lived independently, and
developed the vocabulary of a dictionary (probably because I
spent years reading and memorizing them instead of reading
'proper' books). No, there was no point in explaining things.

AS PART OF the teacher's course, we had three classes
that threatened physical contact: dance, drama, and
physical education. They were free to mess with my
mind and even to try to tackle my emotions, but physical
contact with a me intact was asking for too much.
In the drama class and dance class, I eventually told the
lecturers that I might have to step out if there was physical
contact I didn't feel able to cope with and I explained why.
Surprisingly they were wonderfully understanding.
Physical education had always been a nightmare. I never
understood the instructions for games or the social rules about
sport and competition, and the concept of enjoyment in in~
volvement with so many moving bodies seemed totally illogical.
It made people seem like sado-inasochists.

I stood back trying to observe the game. I was trying to extract
the rules and expectations. 'Go on Donna, get in there,' said the
Phys Ed lecturer. 'Join in.' 'I'm trying to work out the rules,'
I explained. 'I already explained them,' she said sharply, 'you
weren't listening.' She was sharp as tacks and stood for every
other sharp as tacks P.E teacher I had ever had who gave me
hell. The walls were going up.
She couldn't seem to understand that I had got zilch from
her verbal instructions. I needed to analyze the scene in order
to know what to do and feel safe. All she could see was
clever honours student enrolled in a postgraduate teaching
course. Of course she assumed I'd have understood if I had
listened.
Swimming was on the agenda. Everyone changed into bathing
suits. I tried to work out who was who. They all looked
different now with very little clothing on. The images of

80

my classmates were now a mass of black, white, and brindle
bodies merging into a picture of foreignness. My brain
was just catching up with the soggy feeling of water under
my feet, the breeze on my exposed back, the disorderly
rows of colorful towels and bags, and the chlorine smell as
steam rose from the heated pool.
'Everyone into the pool,' ordered the lecturer. Everyone
jumped in. I stood chest-high in water, wide-eyed, stunned,
and disoriented.
A few people splashed each other. Water hit me. I tried to
make sense of what the experience might mean to the people
doing it as the lecturer spoke. I lost the meaning of her words
but worked out that the students splashed because they thought
it was fun. I tried to stay calm.
'Everyone hold hands and make a circle,' ordered the lecturer.
My guts twisted. Something soggy reached out gropingly
for my hand. I pulled instinctively away from it. 'Donna,'
said the voice belonging to the body next to me. Ah, the
hair ... it's Helen, I thought, remembering the long curly
hair I had been tempted to grab and shake when I had first
seen it in front of me. Helen had friendly, smiling eyes, a
gentle and fairly predictable voice, and a happy smile and had
always been understanding.
I looked at Helen's hand and at all the others holding hands.
I took it, glad to know it belonged to someone I knew rather
than one of these moving blobs around us.
Someone took my other hand. I forgot that I owned it.
Fear and vomit began to rise in my throat. My entire body
began to shake in the grip of panic. Tears came to my eyes
and poured down my face as my nose began to run. I tried
to remain attentive as best I could when falling to pieces. 'It's
okay, it's okay,' I said to myself and broke my hand free from
the stranger. I tapped myself to check that I was there. 'Are
you okay?' asked the lecturer quietly. I looked for a moment
and asked myself the words. I nodded.
'Right, move around in a circle,' ordered the lecturer. Everyone
began to move. The bodies, the splashing, the proximity,
and the hands were too much. I had to break away. I broke
hands with the others. I was in a deeper part of the pool now

8I

and had to tread water. It was okay. I could swim just fine.
Suddenly something grabbed my arm. 'Are you okay?' came
verbal garble. I pulled away sharply and hands grabbed my
other arm. First one and then several hands were upon me. I
was trapped. Bodies began to enclose me like fish circling in
on bait. Hands were grabbing me and I threw myself backward
under-water to get away from them. I pulled arms off me as
though they were leeches and kicked out wildly. My head
tilted backward under the water.
I was a terrified, thrashing, kicking, drowning blob. Managing
to distance myself from the others, I came to the surface
gasping. My heart was pounding and like a wild animal I glared
at the beasts who had attacked me. The lecturer crouched by
the edge of the pool. 'It's all right,' she said to the bodies.
'Move away from her.' The faces looked as stunned as mine.
The lecturer came over to where I was gasping and shaking at
the edge of the pool. Tears and snot streamed down my face.
I was ashamed.
'Are you okay?' she asked. her voice firm and controlled. I
drew upon her strength. 'Yes,' I nodded. 'Do you want to get
out?' she asked. I looked at the faces staring at me like some
freak in a cage. There was no way this horse was going to
throw me, or I knew I couldn't face another class and would
have to drop out. 'No,' I said decidedly, 'I'll rejoin the group.'
I edged my way slowly back to the people who had almost
drowned me through their well-intentioned 'the world' efforts
to help.
Willic hadn't come to save or protect me or cut me off from
body and emotion. Carol hadn't come to cheer me up or make
me laugh and pretend it was some big joke. I was sharply aware
of my vulnerability. I was on my own. A sense of danger was
I)0I-II.
I felt I needed someone who understood me but my two best
friends, Carol and Willie, had died and I had not even been to
the funeral. There were no bodies to bury. The realization left a
heavy impression. I went home and spoke to the typewriter.

,Y2

Dr. Marek,
June I99I

. I find it difficult to talk about the loss of the
characters, yet I need to recognize the reality and to
say goodbye. It is like my best friends slowly died and I
couldn't say anything to anyone, so all the abandonment
just sits there. Yet this time I abandoned them. I didn't
reject them, they disintegrated (or did they reintegrate?).
I accepted their abilities and turned my attachment to
Travel Dog and Orsi Bear as a bridge between what was
once'my world'and the external world outside of my own
body. From the pool incident I now know for sure that
as entities Willie and Carol no longer exist. They are like
memories of puppets that once had an existence of their
own, and now there is just a me. But they held my world
together and now I'm just shaking a lot in 'the world'.
There is a place for me in 'the world' and I will eventually
learn to give up some of my special things and special
ways as I learn to value new things to replace them. I
need some help to stay aware of the new things because
my fear and aloneness are not helping and I'd just be
running to a big, black nothing now. If we talk about
the new things they will become foreground things and I
may grasp them better as things to latch onto for security
in 'the world'.
Regards,
Donna.

There were two more swimming sessions to go and I dreaded
them. In the absence of 'my world' strategies, I needed some
Cthe world' strategies by which to help them help me. I couldn't
'disappear'. I couldn't break into characters. I knew one thing.
If I was going to survive these people, they were going to have
to know how not to help me.
The lecturer let me address the class five minutes before the
next session. I explained that I had trouble with touch and proximity
and that I could swim just fine. I explained that if they
wanted to not drown me then they should move away from
me if I appeared to be in distress. I never mentioned autism.

83

Back in the pool for the next session, it seemed bad but not
so bad as the last time. Everyone seemed to have glossed over
what had happened the week before. I felt relieved.
One of the women in the course swam up to me. 'I don't
know why you had to put on a big performance,' she said
cuttingly. 'You can swim,' she scoffed in disgust.

wY AM I like this?' I demanded as I sat across from
Dr. Marek. 'Information processing,' he replied
matter-of-factly. Damn you, I thought. How the
hell is saying that meant to fix anything?
Yet It did help. It helped me to stop blaming myself. It
helped me to stop blaming other people. It helped me to
see why I needed to help other people to make themselves
understandable and why I needed to learn to ask questions in
order to understand a whole world I had been meaning-deaf
and meaning-blind to.
Dr. Marek was listening and understanding. He was listening
with his ears, with his mind, and with his heart, and it hurt me
to be aware of it. He struggled with my speaking words as
I struggled to use 'the world' language to describe a way of
thinking and being and experiencing for which this world gives
you no words or concepts. He didn't tell me I wasn't making
sense. He didn't tell me again and again to stop waffling.
He didn't tell me I was nuts.
Session after session this owl took my experiences as valid.
He tried to explain gently to me how other people generally
didn't have these difficulties, and that was why they hadn't
understood. He explained how other people got all the bits
working at once. How they managed to get the mechanics of
so many things going at the same time was nothing short of
a miracle. No wonder they couldn't imagine why I couldn't
rEr

cope, thought I wasn't trying, or that I somehow wanted to be
different. No wonder, in the face of my apparent intelligence,
they were surprised and angered that they weren't making any
sense to me and so assumed I wasn't listening or didn't want
to. No wonder they were confused and hurt as to why I could
talk so well and yet not converse 'with' and so assumed I was

R4

merely selfish or arrogant as I continued rigidly on my own
topics. No wonder they didn't know how I felt if I couldn't
get emotional expression and words going at the same time and
figured I didn't care or had no feelings, or they accepted as mine
the caricatures of emotion I mirrored from their faces. If only
I could understand how they got to do these things, I could
work out the difference between them and me and build some
bridges. And yet they didn't just do them, they were them.
The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was 'the world' slowly
began to fall into place. As the impact hit me, it hurt. I looked
back upon my past. The cost of ignorance left rocks in my
stomach. The price of arrogant assumption left me burning
up. At least now I had some answers. I had hope.

A LETTER ARRIVED in the mail. I had left the manuscript
with a publisher in the United Kingdom. The letter said
they were rejecting my book on the grounds that it
ought to be with a larger publisher. They gave me the name
of a literary agent who dealt directly with large general- interest
publishers.
My comprehension when reading things word-for-word (as
opposed to speed-reading) was as poor as my hearing. I grasped
key words and reconstructed the rest for myself. I saw the word
rel . ect and was saddened. Then the Millers entered the picture.
The Millers were my landlords. They lived on the farm where
my apartment was. I had seen them outside now and again and
had ducked quickly behind the pillar outside my door or raced
back inside (thinking, oh, there's something I've forgotten).
The Millers were nice people by 'the world' standards:
bubbly and social. He was big and jolly. She was smiley
and springy. The daughter was eyes and ears with a threehundred -
words -per- minute voice. The boy was tall and lanky
with puppy eyes that reached out in silence. He looked a bit
like Christopher Robin.

'HI there,' said Mr. Miller, sending me through the roof. It had
been almost two months since I had moved and it was about
time I made the effort to be social. 'Hi,' I said and went to

85

race off. 'How's the writing doing?' asked Mr. Miller. 'Good,'
I said.
The Millers knew I was a student and that I wrote. I had
never mentioned what. I decided to mention the letter. I told
Mr. Miller that a book I had written had been rejected. 'Can I
take a look at the letter?' asked Mr. Miller. I was afraid but complied. '
This is great!' exclaimed Mr. Miller. 'You're not being
told your book is no good. You're being told it is too good.'
The Millers talked to me about the wording of the letter. 'So
what's this book about?' asked Mr. Miller. 'Are you going to
tell us?' Gradually I told them. They explained the mechanics
of how to respond to the letter, and the hunt began to find
the manuscript that I had left in London and to have it sent
to the agent this publisher suggested.

The manuscript reached the hands of the London agent within a
week. A letter arrived shortly thereafter. The agent had read the
book within forty-eight hours. It was going to be a best-seller.
He wanted me to sign a contract.
I was invited into the landlord's mansion, where I met and
fell in love with his fax machine. Here was a machine that sang
in its own special language and brought people's words to me
in a concrete, graspable form - on paper. It was to become my
translator and the mediator between myself and the hordes of
people about to knock upon the door to 'my world'.
Faxes began in a trickle and became a torrent. I arrived home
to a note saying there was a fax for me.
Mr. Miller greeted me at the front door beaming from ear to
ear. I couldn't look at his face or it would all be too much to
handle. As I read the fax, my hands shook. I hadn't understood
it all but I knew it was saying that my book had been accepted
not just by one publisher, but by several. The lives of Carol,
Willie, and me were to be exposed to people all over the world.
I was the most evasive person I had ever known and soon I
would become the most public.
Mr. and Mrs. Miller looked like they were about to fall
over backward. I wobbled like a drunk. I was getting a few
words here and there with a lot of repetition, translation back
to myself, and filling in the gaps. 'Calm down,' said Mr. Miller.

'I'll get you a cup of tea.' Mr. Miller was so nervous that he
returned to the living room three times in a row with white
tea (I only drank black tea without milk).
Mr. and Mrs. Miller sat there grinning. It was like watching
a video on fast-forward, as their excitement and my ability to
comprehend ebbed and flowed. I felt seasick.
I was having enough trouble grasping that this was about
my book. I felt out of control; other people would see my
words. I had a compulsion to find every copy and tear it up
and burn the pieces. The Millers had a word called 'rabbiting'.
They were rabbiting on about fame, success, and a whole
range of dictionary concepts that had no significance for me.
These were words associated with TV and circuses. They
had no connection to my life.
The Millers had visions of lunches with publishers and
interviewers, hotel meals, and dinnertime conversations. All
of this would only be six months away. They were a pair of
fairy godmothers getting Cinderella ready for the ball.
The Millers invited me to dinner. I hadn't been to dinner
in people's houses very often. The times I had been invited
I hadn't coped very well. My ability to perform had
been my only inner map by which to navigate. As Carol, I
never had to understand anything that happened, I just had
to look good. 'Got to go to the toilet,' I would say, smiling
manically, disappearing in a flash. 'The world' gone, I stood
in front of the mirror wishing I could escape into it. My
God ... dinner!
Sitting back in the Millers' kitchen, my mind hit twenty
panic buttons at once. No! I shouted silently. but nobody
heard me. 'Here you go,' said Mr. Miller. planting a plate
of food in front of me, 'eat.'
I felt like I was in a straitjacket and tried to remember
to breathe. I started to tap something. Act 'normal', I told
myself. I began to trace patterns, play with my fork, and fold
the tablecloth. I told myself off.
On automatic pilot, a fork was lifted by my hand to my
mouth and ate something. I had no idea what it was. I took
it on trust that it was something better than a shit sandwich.
Taste, hunger, and recognition of what I was doing

87

I.I
were unplugged in a coiled mass at my feet. I was too busy
keeping up with just being there.
'How's the food?' they asked. 'Food,' I said, quickly looking
at what they had named: a plate of shapes and smells and colors
and textures. 'Good,' I prompted myself, with the standard
answer to go with questions about food. 'Good?' I blurted, not
sure I was passing but hopeful. Something inside screamed. 'Be
yourself,' I said to myself but I had no time to work out how.
The Millers launched into blah-blah-blah and I became a word
processor as emotions took a back seat.

I must have cost them a fortune in dinners. They could see it
was hard for me. Their insistence upon inviting me back seemed
somehow sadistic by 'my world' terms. Yet I was the crazy one
if I didn't understand their apparent irrationality. They were so
much better than me at putting up with things, so it was best
to at least appear to understand.
Their 'friendliness' was so direct it drove me crazy. My
mind reminded me it was time to go to their house again.
My eyes found fifteen things I had to do before I left. My feet
went to the door, my hand opened it, and my body moved
outside. My mind reminded me of something I'd forgotten to
do. Back inside I went and shut the door. Ten minutes and
fifteen more things later my feet made it to the door again.
The worst part was that I liked the Millers.
My feet took me down the path to their door. My hand
reached out and touched a flower, and my nose smelled it.
That's why I'm here, said my mind silently. I'm here to do
this.
Upon reaching the door, my hand made a fist and went
automatically to knock. It stopped in mid-air an inch off
the door and fell back by my side. I looked at the bell. My
feelings got excited and my mind replied with mental images
of manically ringing and ringing and ringing the bell. I pressed
it and my hand stopped dead. Good.
Mrs. Miller answered the door. My feet stayed put. My
stomach went to walk out on me, my heart tried to escape
through my throat, and my torso was backing away without my
sttjbborn legs. 'Hi,' said Mrs. Miller beaming. 'Don't just stand

88

there, come in.' The fact I liked these people seemed insane.
'Why do you keep feeding me, when you know I hate
eating here?' I asked. 'Training,' answered Mr. Miller with
a salesman's smile. 'Training' became a catch-phrase in the
Millers' house. A silent squeal rose in the back of my throat
but was strangled. 'Training' translated to 'social torture' in the
imy world' book of definitions even if by 'the world' terms
they were committed people with good intentions.

DIDN'T HAVE to meet one publisher. I had to meet two
and decide which one I wanted.
Tall and square. the first one resembled an insurance
salesman. As he entered the Millers' place. he handed me an
advertising catalogue for his company. I examined the picture
of the ocean on the cover. What am I meant to do with this?
I wondered.
Mrs. Miller arranged to be there. If it was a conversation
about varieties of garden pest, I'd have managed, but this guy
was here to discuss me in book form.
He spoke confidently. Yet he was too self-assured and his
ego dwarfed mine by comparison. He had sensationalistic ideas
about the book, leaning on the side of exploiting the childhood
abuse angle. Easy for him, I thought. Some men have no idea
what it is like. He took Mr. Miller aside to discuss the deal.
I realized he considered me more as an oddity with some
intelligent bits rather than an equal human being. I smiled to
myself. One down, one to go.
The next publisher had bright red hair and looked like
the children's storybook character Holly Hobby. She had a
whisper of a voice to match. She was stiff as a board and
shook like a sparrow confronted by a cat. I liked her even
though her anxiety made me feel I was a psychopath. She was
not at all self-assured, so there was enough social space to find
myself present in her company. It is hard to make a decision
when your body and voice are present but your sense of self
is absent. Holly Hobby made it easier.
She was about to go. I remembered the other guy with
the company advertising catalogue. 'Do you have anything to

89
I

Contracts poured in. The book was sold to more than ten
countries. It would be in many languages including Japanese.
There was talk of a future film offer. I was going to be rich
My life was going to change completely. I was miserable.
I opened the door of my apartment and stood looking at
my furniture. I walked to the wardrobe and opened it up.
Furniture from the Salvation Army, second-hand clothes, and
cheap accommodation that flooded at least once a year was
all I'd known. Old, worn-out underwear. darned nylon socks,
borrowed sheets and pillowcases, had been part of my life so
long they were interwoven with my personality. I was Donna,
who shopped for the cheapest cuts of meat, the specials in
the fruits and vegetables department, economic meals of flour
and rice, half-priced day-old bread from the baker's. What on
earth would I do with money?

I began to get dizzy constantly and found that my body
was forgetting to breathe again. It was like I had an inner
Compulsion to stop existing but I had no conscious control
over it. I began to lose weight. My conscious mind was trying
very much to be there. My subconscious fought for supremacy
and, in failing, seemed to be trying to knock me off.
All my effort went into remembering to breathe and eat.
Day after day I found I couldn't get the steps together to
complete a whole meal. Shaking, I would tell myself, 'Food.
Eat.' I'd remind myself, 'Food. Fridge.'
I stood at the open door to the fridge. A mass of colors and
shapes stared back at me. 'Food. Eat,' I reminded myself. I took
out a few things and stared at them wondering what to do.
'Food. Cook,' I prompted myself, and stood there wondering
how. 'Cook. Stove,' I went on, half an hour already having
passed. 'Cupboard. Pots,' I said, going to open the cupboard
give me?' I asked. 'Yes,' she replied, producing three glossy
picture books of landscapes of the Australian outback and
tales of childhood and the plight of Australian Aborigines.
This woman knew she was taking a person on board, not
just a meal ticket. I decided to work with her. The book
was on the road to publication.

90

i
but I couldn't because I already had things in my hands. I put
the things down and took out pots and pans and stared at them.
'Pots. Stove,' I said, and looked at the stove. 'Turn it on,' I
ordered, and on it went. The pots and pans on the hotplate, I
left and stretched out exhausted on the floor and watched the
ceiling. Shaking, I reminded myself, 'Hungry? Food.'
An hour or so later, the pots and the pans and the food
were still waiting to be dished up. I began to cry. I felt
hopeless and helpless and all the university degrees in the
world weren't going to save me. Every impulse was being
blocked by its antithesis. A compulsive force of unrecognized
self-denial made every inch of self-ownership and expression
into an Olympic Marathon. Seductively oblivion tapped upon
the doors of my conscious mind, luring me inward, where it
was restful. I would lie down for a minute and several hours
later climb back out of a spot in the wall in which I had been
lost. I didn't want to take a nosedive headlong back into 'my
world'. I wanted to stay awake, aware, alert, and alive.
Over the next few weeks I lost almost ten pounds and I was
afraid. I tried to remember to eat but had no understanding of
my own sense of hunger. The stress of all of the change around
me fed straight into the hands of the Big Black Nothingness. It
was like an invisible big, black spider trying to reclaim me and
take me 'home', where I Cbelonged', where nothing changed,
to an inescapable world of guarantees.

THEO MAREK SUGGESTED that I see him at his home
for our straighten-Donna-out sessions.
was one thing to enter a house of people you didn't
have to speak to or communicate with at all. You could get
to know them through their things and the feel of the place
and leave without them ever knowing that you had gotten a
better sense of them than ten years of blah-blah-blah could
achieve.
I felt smug in this ability to know people without them
knowing I was knowing them (and often I too knew without
knowing I was knowing). I certainly didn't feel the same way
at all about going to the home of someone I was meant to

9I
I

communicate with, especially In any ongoing way. How on
earth was I meant to be free to know them through their
things and their place when they would observe this as a way
of getting to know me?
It was a glorious old house. I wished straightaway that Dr.
Marek didn't live there at all because it was exactly the sort
of house I would want to explore.
The whole house echoed with the hollow, woody sound that
comes from high ceilings and long corridors. The smell of dust
and old fabric, wooden cabinets, roses, cats, and Asian cooking
filled the place from wall to wall. Leadlight windows called me
to touch the sunlit colors and trace the outlines. Wallpaper drew
me into its endless patterns. Pictures with deep backgrounds,
set in dark wooden frames called me into their depths. Beaded
curtains dared me to make them tinkle and sway, to be touched
by the sound: clack, clack, clack. Shells with mother-of-pearl
begged me to pick them up and swim in the rainbows I would
see in them. But Dr. Marek's kitchen was a nightmare.
The kitchen had fluorescent lights and yellow walls, one of
the worst combinations ever. Even from the doorway I could
see light bouncing off everything.
In my tense state everything climbed to hyper, vision included.
There were no whole objects in that room, just shiny
edges and things that jumped with the bouncing of light.
The fluorescent light bounced off the yellow walls like sunshine
on water. Dr. Marek wanted me to go in there and be
blind. Forget it! Why didn't it bother him? How did these
people manage to grasp everything in such a room enough
to actually use it as a kitchen?
'Come into the kitchen, Donna. I want you to meet someone,'
said Dr. Marek. I stood at the doorway looking at the
light, my eyes jumping from half-object to half-object trying to
take things in. Maybe then I could relax a bit and pay attention
to this person I was supposed to meet. She was Mrs. Marek, a
face upon which the light danced manically, turning her into
more of a cartoon than a human being. 'Welcome to Toon
Town. Roger Rabbit. I'd like you to enter this torture chamber
I call my kitchen and meet my wife, who is a 3-D cartoon. She
just wants you to look at her in pieces, say hi whether you

92

mean it or not, and treat her like a human being.'
'Hello,' I said, having no time to get my voice into gear.
The word tumbled out, the syllables melted together. How
can they sit in this room? I wondered. Perhaps it was me?
Perhaps their volume and brightness control didn't go up like
mine did. Perhaps their maker set their switches, and that was
that. Perhaps their switches didn't slip out of tune every time
there was something new to take in. Awesome. Their make
and model seemed more custom-made, with fewer faults than
mine. I was like a European car driving on the other side of
the road in a climate it wasn't built for. Another demonstration
that God has a sense of humor.

Each visit to the Mareks' house was a lesson in disarmament.
I needed to control the impact this had on my life beyond his
house.
I walked as fast as I could through the long entrance hall of
his house. The hallway was the connection between the living
room, where our discussions took place and the world outside.
If I moved quickly through the hall, then I didn't get enough
time to take the hall in. Perceptually the hall didn't exist. I
'hapes and colors as 't whooslied by. It could 'have
saw its s           I
been anything anywhere (or nothing nowhere).
If the hall didn't exist, then Dr. Marek's house was a separate
world, unconnected from 'the world' in terms of my
perception. Anything uncovered or tackled there was safe. I
could integrate it at my own pace and only if I chose to.

Dr. Marek's house was 'a world' and a bridge between 'my
world' and 'the world'. I tried hard to understand him and he
tried hard to be clear. It was as though either my ears worked
or my voice did but not at the same time. When I spoke, I heard
noise but was deaf to most of the meaning I was making. I had
to take it on trust that I was making meaning at all.
'Am I making sense?' I asked Dr. Marek. 'What do you
think?' he replied. 'I can't tell,' I answered. 'I can't always
hear myself with meaning.'
My brain was like a department store where the people
running different departments were workino, alternate shifts.
ZY

93
I

ibl,

When one came to work, the others went to sleep - background)
foreground. Lucky for me I could sleep-walk and sleep-talk.

I said a lot of yes, yes, yeses. Cups of tea arrived without any
connection between their arrival and the yes that had brought
them there.
'Don't just say yes when you don't know what someone
has asked you, Donna,' said Dr. Marek. He had observed
my standard answer to the trigger words 'tea' and 'drink':
'Black tea, no milk, no sugar,' came the verbal ejection in
response to the prompt. I did Pavlov and his dogs proud.
Skinner would have loved me.
The tea arrived again and again. I looked at it in wonder (
sometimes not visually making meaning from this round
white chink-chink thing with black slop~slop in it). Generally,
I said nothing and let it go cold. 'When someone gives you
something, you should say thank you,' said Dr. Marek gently.
These people were weird.
These were the harmless yeses, and even though I never
liked black tea I liked the ritual and the security of inclusion
that it symbolized. (To this day I drink the damned stuff and
still don't like it.)

In the short term, people were more likely to go away and
leave you alone if you said yes than if you said no. If you
said no, they tried to reason or argue with you.
Unlike people deaf to sound, I couldn't say, 'Oh sorry, didn't
hear you.' I could obviously hear sound perfectly. I couldn't
say, 'Sorry, didn't understand,' when I was obviously clever. By
the time I got around to it they were usually half a dozen sentences
further on anyway. Years of people saying, 'Don't listen
to her, she's just waffling,' or 'Listen. Are you deaf or something?'
had knocked a lot of the trying out of me. For a long
time I gave up waiting to understand or to be understood.
It frustrated me that the only person I had been able to
hear directly with meaning had been myself. No, I am lying
to myself here. This inner isolation hurt like hell. But because
I had no choice, I could not acknowledge a hurt I would
never be free of; I was, therefore, merely frustrated by it.

94

I was isolated by it. My lack of hope and acceptance of it
became part of my own identity.
I could only comprehend about five to ten percent of what
was said to me unless I repeated the words to myself. The
security of having the time and space to wrestle with the
relative importance or significance of spoken words was so
unreachable as to not even be worth dreaming about.
I hadn't connected my comprehension difficulties to the
drowning feeling of my Inner isolation, the persistent aloneness
I felt in relating to others and the sense of myself as the
only real person in a two dimensional world. This isolation,
aloneness, and being the only real person in the world were
my 'forevers'. 'Forevers' became assumptions, and assumptions
were buried and never looked at again.
When I was about ten I had begun to hear bits and pieces
directly with meaning. I stumbled upon the strategy of saying
people's sentences inwardly to myself and found I could get
meaning from a whole sentence that way. Over the years I
developed the skill to the point that I could speak to the
other person with an almost imperceptible delay. I would
try to imagine what I would have meant if I had said those
words from my own thoughts. I tried to make pictures of
the words coming in as though they were my own, a kind of
reverse thinking. My strategy brought knowledge and meaning
to my life, and the world of facts opened up to me. I blossomed
in the birth of having a mind to fill. I began to read with
meaning. I exhausted one obsession and topic after another
but eventually found the world was still empty. I could not
be affected. Meaning without inner experience was as empty
as inner experience without meaning. I had no concept of
enjoying a conversation for company's sake, even though I'd
learned to perform one. I had no concept that a sense of 'self'
and 'other' could exist at the same time.

'Speak to me through my words,' I asked Dr. Marek. I wanted
to cut down the struggle in putting mental pictures to words.
'Can you take the dancing out of your voice [intonation] and
not pull faces [facial expression] so you don't distract me from
what you're saying?' Perhaps the request was unreasonable

95

I I
but I felt it was worth the cost. I told him to speak evenly
and tried to listen with meaning more than ever before in my
life.

'Tell me about myself,' Carol demanded from Robyn for the
fifth time that day. We were fourteen and this was conversation
between bestfrt*ends. 'Well, you're short and have curly hair and
blue eyes and freckles and a funny smile and you're a nut . . . '
she went on giving the standard answers to Carol's standard
question. 'Compliment me,' Carol demanded. 'You are a nice
person,'she said, 'I like your nose. " Your nose is crooked,' Carol
replied. 'How are you?' Carol asked. 'I'm good. How are you?'
Robyn replied. 'I'm good. How are you?' Carol answered again.
'I'm good. How are you?' Robyn came back. 'Good. How are
YOU, how are you, how are you, how are you?!' Carol said
to herself, hardly noticing that she'd cut out her conversation
partner. 'Tell me about myself,'she demanded again. 'What do
you want to know?' asked Robyn. 'Hmph. Just tell me about
myself!' Carol insisted. 'Tell me what sort ofperson I am. "Let's
sing,' said Robyn, 'think of a song.' 'Ben, the two of us need
look no more. . . 'Carol began, and Robyn I*ot*ned in. The song
finz*Sbed. 'Another one,' Carol demanded, as though berfriend
was a I'ukebox with whom she sang along.

I brought Dr. Marek my topics on paper and asked for
lists. definitions, and specific answers to specific questions.
Dr. Marek rambled off into lengthy introductions. 'State the
facts and leave out the garble,' I said in frustration. 'I'm just
giving you the context,' he replied. It soon became apparent
that context through spoken words just wasn't even a concept
for me and definitely not a tool I used for comprehension.
My eyes were glazing over in response to Dr. Marek's words
and he noticed sometimes. I told him to check with me to see
if I had understood and not to assume so.
I learned to tell him when the meaning had dropped out. I
could even say at what sentence or at which word. I wished I
had understood these things growing up but how does someone
know they are meaning-deaf? 'The world' didn't even have
the concept.

96

After a session I would go home and let my mind replay
Theo Marek's discussions. Like wispy clouds they floated
about just beyond my conscious. They were like songs I was
trying to remember. Like a computer working on a program,
I could 'hear' it working but my mind wouldn't let me have
a preview until it had finished with it.
As I slept, I didn't dream, I just relived, like a telephone
answering machine on replay. When I awoke, it was with the
insight and understanding gained from the discussion, which
had taken anything from hours to days and even weeks to
make sense of. Knowledge climbed the ladder of subconscious
to preconscious to conscious. My subconscious mind was a
storeroom. I didn't have to miss out on life even if I had
to experience all of it removed from the proper context. It
was no wonder that I had no concept for the usefulness of
anything but the physical, observable context, such as the
room a discussion took place in or whether it was night or
day. Who was related to whom, how you came to know them,
or what their life story was, was of no use whatsoever to a filing
cabinet using its own system.
My hearing with meaning began to improve more in a year
than it had since I was about ten years old. With it, my security
around people, my sense of empowerment, and my confidence
soared. In the space of three months my comprehension of
direct speaking without mental echoing went from about ten
percent to thirty percent. By the end of the year. I was able to
hear directly with meaning about fifty percent of the time, and
seventy percent on a very good day (given a one-to-one conversation,
a familiar voice, and familiar surroundings). I began
to experience 'self' and 'other' equally at the same time, without
fading out, channel switching, or background~foreground
effect. I began to understand why people enjoyed conversing
and saw a glimpse of what I had been missing. I was in love
with my own aliveness and completeness. I was alive with the
vision of light at the end of the tunnel of inner darkness and inner
silence, a tunnel of meaning-deafness, meaning-blindness, and
the inability to feel for one's own experiences. All that mattered
was to know I could see the end in sight, the birth of hope in the

97

I
void of hopelessness. I bounced around everywhere, smiling. I
had the keys to the door of 'the world'.

June I99I
Dr. Marek,
* * * Speech is changing too and this is scary. Before,
I used to say everything people said back to myself and
therefore got no closeness through language (and my
feelings weren't so scared speaking back in some way
because I was, by my perspective, answering myself).
Now I am hearing people directly most of the time,
but unfortunately I am often unable to get specific meaning
out of what they say; I am getting the key words
and imposing my own system of meaning on it (before,
I imposed my own everything, right down to the
phonics, on it). As a result I am learning to feel like
a part of things (as opposed to merely working on appearing
to be) and can really understand why people
communicate; but although my ability to speak is great,
my ability to converse is still not good.
In another sense though, it is better than before. I
feel the other person is there now. I feel they are more
than a thing and I am listening and not just responding
automatically (I am trying to listen; I often don't
get the right track or right line of argument though).
It is hard in class. I interrupt with questions a lot so
I can feel I am staying on track. I don't want to but it
helps me follow them. But they say I drag them off the
track (the opposite of my intention).
Also, language is not a weapon like before. It is not a
tool to hide behind or attack with. It is also not just for
information (most of which I used to add to my arsenal).
It is to help people communicate like equals.
I think a lot has really begun to change in a way
that I should feel good about but the foreignness of it
is scaring me. What I need from you is to talk to me
about these changes and tell me what I can see from
writing this down - not to listen to the fear. I have
a big force telling me to hold onto what I feel safe

98

with and what I know ('my world'), yet I think these
communication things are the things that were missing
that I've been trying to find ...
Regards,
... Donna.

A feeling kept washing over me. It began with the feeling one
gets from eating lemons. It was like a tingle that ran up my
neck and then spread out into every thread and fiber of my
body like the emergence of cracks in an earthquake. I knew
this monster. It was the Big Black Nothingness and it felt
like death coming to get me.

The walls went up and my ears hurt. I had to get out. I had
to get out - out of the room, out of this thing stuck upon me,
suffocating me inside a shell of flesh. A scream rose in my
throat. My four-year-old legs ran from one side of the room
to the other moving ever and ever faster, my body hitting the
wall like a sparrow flying at a window. My body was shaking.
Here it was. Death was here. Don't want to die, don't want to
die. don't want to die. don't want to die - the repetition of the
words blended into a pattern with only one word still standing
out: the word 'die'. My knees went to the floor. My hand ran
down the mirror. My eyes frantically searched the eyes looking
back, looking for some meaning, for something to connect. No
one, nothing, nowhere. Silent screaming rose z . n my throat.
My head seemed to explode. My chest heaved with each final
breath at the gates of death. Dizziness and exhaustion began
to overtake terror. It was amazing how many times a day I
could be 'dying' and still be alive.
'Stop it,' came the desperate voice. 'Stop it or I'llfucking kill
you,' it screamed with frustration.
Something made an impact. There was feedback from the
world beyond my body. There was feedback over which I had
no control. There was a world out there. Everything stopped
dead. I was in a state of suspended animation.
Only the cdyz*ng' was terrifying. Death was much easier to
live with.

99
z,

I

When I was younger the Big Black Nothingness came to take
me again and again and again. It would catch me like a spider
in its web and suffocate me in a void. In the void there was
no thought.
Thought was needed to interpret this mongrel thing that
had a grip upon me. This mongrel thing must have been the
cause of the feeling of suffocation. I had to get this bastard
thing off me. I gripped it and pulled at it and bit it. It was
my body. It had been tied to the ends of the bed eventually.
That was called abuse. Looking back I am not so sure. Faced
with the same thing, with no understanding of it, no offer of
help, and nothing seeming to work, perhaps such desperate
moves have a logic of their own.
The Big Black Nothingness had come and taken me several
times a day. The silent screaming always exploded in my head
and poured out into the room until I finally learned this would
mean the death of me. That had been a hard lesson to learn.
In the void there are no connections. The screaming voice
doesn't even belong to you because there is no you and
there is no voice. There are only eyes that register nothing
in a mental darkness and ears that hear sounds so distant
and unreachable as to be on the other side of the earth. In
the nothingness there is no body to be comforted and touch
only confirms the already painful sense of this thing stuck on
the outside of you from which you must escape. You must
escape because you hear the roar of 'tidal waves' - big, dark
Ctidal waves'. (It is the sound of blood rushing through the
contracting muscles of your own ears.) You respond to the
impending sense of the 'waves' approaching. The 'waves' are
death. In the void they will get you.
I sat with my arms around me on my red carpet and waited
for the impact. After twenty-six years I had learned that this
was not death coming but emotions.
Which one, which one? screamed the wordless impulse
within me. If I could only name these monsters and harness
them, link them to the places and faces and times they
had come from, I would be free.
Willic and Carol had saved me from the Big Black Nothingness.
With the characters, emotion had been done away with

I00

and visits to the Nothingness were usually channeled into
attacks of pure wild mania or sharply focused obsession. The
Nothingness still got what I knew as Donna but the episodes
were more like quarterly excursions, not daily visits.

The monster was now back. Give me Freddy Krueger anytime
Sometimes it would get me several times a day and then not at
all for a week. Sometimes it would be gone for a few weeks
and then hit so badly I almost would have killed myself to be
sure I would never have to go through it again.
Each time felt like forever, a one-way ticket to hell. There
were no thoughts to remember that you always come back.

I felt the tingles start to crawl and got crayon and paper. Before
it overtook me I wrote, 'It's okay, I'm coming back. It's okay,
I'm coming back. It's okay . . . '
My body trembled like a building in an earthquake, my
teeth hit together with the sound of a fast typist attacking the
keys of a typewriter. Every muscle tensed as though it would
squeeze the life out of me and relaxed just long enough to be
hit and hit and hit again by 'tidal waves'. A scream came to
my throat but was strangled and exploded in an inner silent
screaming. Breathe, came a thought in the pauses. I breathed
deeply, tuning in to the rhythm. I was outrunning it.
The 'tidal wave' was upon me and took me again. I could
stop and start these fits but never outrun them altogether. I
could break them up by climbing out just long enough to get
some deep breathing going. Another calm before the next wave.
Breathe, came the thought and the pause was longer this time.
I broke into a hum. There was sound in the piercing silence.
The next wave hit, though it was smaller. My teeth stopped
chattering, the tremors turned to shivers.
I felt the bastard start up again. Knocked down the ladder,
rung by rung toward an inner darkness, each time, a lower
rung getting closer to the pit below. I had a choice. I could
be knocked off by the waves or dive. I relaxed back into the
Nothingness and let it take me again so we could get this over
with. I dove.

I0I

This was my emotional dirty laundry that had been stored
up to the point of overflow. Too busy just keeping up with
things, like a computer working to full capacity, there had
been no time for emotions to register at the time I heard
or saw or was touched by things. The feelings just piled up
in the laundry room to be ironed out later. But life was too
convenient without emotions and I kept leaving them in the
room and the door would eventually burst open when the
room overflowed. 'Your computer disk is over capacity, we
cannot close the file. Delete?'
The tidal waves were my own delayed, out~of-context reactions.
These terrified walling bouts of Big Black Nothingness
were emotional overload triggered by anything from happy to
angry and everything in between.

I I
WANTED TO understand emotions. I had dictionary
definitions for most of them and cartoon caricatures of
others but because they didn't happen in context I couldn't
link them to the physical experience.
MY inner map was blown to bits so I also had trouble
reading what other people felt. I could make some translations,
though. If people's voices got louder, faster, or went up,
they were angry. If tears rolled down their faces, or the
sides of their mouths hung down, they were sad. If they
were shaking, they were perhaps frightened, sick, or cold. If
they smiled, they were laughing.
The most important thing was to check if people were angry.
'Angry' had the worst and most invasive consequences.

'Are you angry?' I asked Dr. Marek, as his voice changed.
'No Donna, I'm not angry,' he replied for the fiftieth time.
Dr. Marek smiled.
'Stop laughing at me,' I said as he smiled. 'I'm not laughing,'
he said, 'I'm smiling.' 'You're lying. You are laughing. Look at
your face. Your eyes are laughing and you're smiling.' I went
on. Dr. Marek couldn't win. The only categories left were 'sad'
or 'frightened'. If I had seen 'sad', I would probably have been
worried I would now be in trouble or I would feel angry at him

I02

feeling sorry for me. If I had seen 'frightened', I would know
that I was something very, very bad. The other alternative was
to choose not to give a damn. I gave a damn bigly.
'How do I stop people getting angry?' I asked. In effect,
this meant how could I stop them from having any
vocal variation whatsoever. I also wanted to know why they
made faces and insisted on making their voices dance even
though they could see it upset me.
'How do other people learn these things?' I wanted to know.
If I could learn how they learned them, I could teach myself.
'They learn them naturally,' Dr. Marek said.
He explained that others could use these ways of selfexpression
and spoken words all at the same time without
conscious analysis. I felt I was staring into the face of genius.
This made people's apparent ignoring of my reality look all
the more deliberate, the inequality and injustice I had faced
all the more intentional. How could I have been such a bad
person and not known it?

T WAS THE end of the first teaching round. I had spent
two weeks teaching everything from math to music, phys
ed to social studies, to a class of nine-year-olds. I had
survived, with a good report for teaching and a bare 'Pass'
when it came to rapport with fellow staff members. It had
been a damned hard few weeks.
I liked Vanessa. She was a student in the course with me.
I liked her hair and I liked her eyes. I reminded Vanessa of
someone she knew. 'Do you know anything about dyslexia,
Donna?' she asked me. 'Some,' I said.
Vanessa had a friend who had reading difficulties but she
had always felt it was more than this. Her friend had shared
the same strange ways and had failed to pick up the subtleties.
Vanessa wondered what it was that we shared in common.
'Does dyslexia also involve having trouble being with people?'
she had asked me. 'What sort of difficulties?' I asked. 'He
doesn't seem to notice people's feelings. He talks over everyone
or he talks really loudly about anything in front of anyone.
I end up feeling embarrassed by him sometimes and when I

I03

explain it to him he really tries to understand but then he
does it again,' she explained. 'When I met him, I thought
his funny ways were really cute. I thought he was just
na*ive and that he'd learn all these things, but now we've
been together three years and I think either he can't change
or he doesn't want to bother.'
Vanessa was close to a person with some difficulties like
mine. I could, therefore, risk telling her why I was like I
was. I told her about autism.
When I saw Vanessa was placed with me for the first teaching
round, I was relieved. There would be someone here
who would understand me. I spoke freely and openly with
her.

I
We were both teaching at the same school and it was the day
our supervisor would come to assess our ability to teach. One
hour before my assessor came to watch me, Vanessa asked me
to come with her to the room she was teaching in. She handed
me a letter. I walked away to read it.
The letter explained that I was making her very, very uncomfortable.
It said that she had been dropping hints but I
hadn't seemed to get them. The note said that I was selfish
because I only talked about myself and never asked her about
herself except to say, how are you? The note said not to talk
to her in front of people anymore and not to discuss the note
with anyone except her. I was not to do so face-to-face. I was
to do so only by phoning her outside of school hours to discuss
it. Vanessa never realized that to say, How are you? from my
own feelings was a big thing. She never realized that none of
the things that had upset her were intentional.
I burned up with shock and shame and hurt. I stood in the
bathroom and splashed myself with cold water. I was about to
vomit when the assembly bell rang. My next class was going
to be assessed by the lecturer who I had already been informed
I couldn't tell about the letter.

Carol had been chatty with the other Performers in the play as
they stood behind the stage curtain waz . tz . ng to go on. Tonight
was a special night in the run of the play, a famz*ly night.

I04

he

I
Everyone had someone special to them come along to the
show. Carol looked at the audience from behind the curtain,
all the anonymous faces. A realness began to break through, as
though a child was crying from somewhere inside her.
Donna stood there shaki . ng, with tears in her eyes. Vomz*t
rose in her throat. 'You okay?' said one of her comrades in
the play, reaching out and touching her on the back. In a
flash, Donna was 'gone' ' killed off by the grace of unexpected
touch. Carol bounced back as dead as ever, totally focused on
the rote-learned script, the role about to be played. The curtain
went up and she strutted out to do her scene.
'That was great,' said the director, after the show. 'That was
the best show you've done sofar. ' 'Yeah, I know,'replied Carol
glibly. 'I was throwing up I*ust before I went on.'

I wanted to run, to cry, or be sick. Carol took over, emerging
in full force to do a great performance. She returned from the
dead and took the lesson as though she were on stage. Betrayed
by a 'the worlder' I had trusted with my Self, I had nothing
left within me to drive me to fight back. The classroom was
Carol's theater. The audience had appreciated the performance.
The lesson was assessed as very good but I was told I had been
hyper and manic. 'You won't be able to keep up this pace as a
teacher,' warned the lecturer.
I knew this better than anyone. I knew that I was unable
to keep up this pace even as a person. It was Carol's first
and last performance in a classroom. I had been shocked
and yet relieved, sure that if that trigger between terror and
manic oblivion had not been set off, I would have failed the
asse,ssment. I got home and fell in a heap.
A knock came at the door. I sat bolt upright like Dracula in
his coffin at the stroke of midnight. 'It's me, jessy,' called the
Millers' daughter. 'Mum and Dad want to know if you want
to come in.'
The Millers kicked some spirit back into me just at the point
when I felt I had to drop out. 'You've come this far and you're
going to give up just because of one ignorant person,' said
Mr. Miller. 'What a wimp.' I was not a wimp and Vanessa's
ignorance was not going to make me give up.

I05

THE MILLERS TRIED to teach me that words can be used
to form closeness. They didn't realize that I didn't share
a 'the world' definition of closeness. I had far more
understanding of why I needed to avoid it than welcome it.
They began to talk. I selected out bits of what they had said
and went through my 'me, too' routine. 'The world does not
revolve around Donna Williams,' said Mr. Miller gently.
Shifting back and forth from one voice to the other, the pattern
of speech changed continuously. It was too quick for me to
keep up with any interpretation and it was getting out of sync.
Mrs. Miller's patterns were just registering when Mr. Miller
began to take over. My hearing started to climb, as though
someone had turned up my volume, pitch, and speed controls.
I covered my ears and tried to get a rhythm to calm down.
My emotions climbed. I snapped as though being attacked.
The Millers tried better to explain what they were saying. Overload
had set in. Explanations were just more blah-blah-blah.
I needed time out but I couldn't get the mechanics going to
work out how.
My vision started to climb; an emergency signal to tell me
to do something about the overload before the fuses blew. The
lights became brighter.
I was tickled by the effect on my senses and began to giggle.
The hypersensitivity and the memory experience of it took
on a momentum of its own. It climbed ever higher, topping
itself under the intense effect of the brightness on my nervous
system.
I squinted and grinned, the strain and the confusion of the
sudden change from happy to excited to tortured took place
within the space of fifteen minutes with no cues to tell me
why ot. what I was feeling and no time to reflect. My ship
was sinking and no one knew.
Conversation poured down upon my ears. The TV went
blah-blah-blah. The carpet had a disordered pattern of fluff
upon it. The papers on the table needed tidying. The grain in the
wood paneling was not symmetrical. There was a sock under
the couch. 'A sock under the couch? A sock under the couch?
A sock under the couch? Damn! What the hell is a couch?'
I looked at the beige-colored rectangular blob in front of

I06

me. Meaning had shut down not only through my ears but
now through my eyes, too. I could see it but I had absolutely
no idea what it was for anymore.
Carol would have broken into 'entertainment' time. Endless
reams of stored commercials, songs, and word associations. My
fear had been Carol's mania, a last-ditch effort to stay out of
the Big Black Nothingness. But now here sat I, with the time,
space, and inclination to stay intact despite the fear. These
people fought for me and inspired my insistence to have a self.
The Millers sat there smiling and talking. 'Who the hell are
these people?' I asked myself. The thought drifted by like a
cloud and slipped through my fingers before I could speak it.
'The Millers,' answered my thoughts silently after twenty other
things had bombarded me. The triggered words, which I knew
matched the visual image in front of me, made no connection
and no sense whatsoever. I fell into the Big Black Nothingness.
The Millers were faced with a stunned mullet. I disintegrated
into a blubbering mess. 'I think it's getting a bit much for her,'
said Mr. Miller quietly, as my mind stored the sound sequence
it would later recall with meaning.

July I99I
Dr. Marek,
The people in the house where I live are very nice to me
and help me in conversations with them (yes ... them).
They understand the signs that things are too much or the
noise level too high and they adjust by letting me change
the subject or they speak slowly or they bring their voices
down.
This is the first time I can remember handling speaking
wz'th more than one person at a time without closing
one out - and I've been able to follow thet'r topics for
a good part of the time. I both wouldn't have done this
and largely couldn't have done this before, and a large
percentage of this is due to my now understanding my
situation (in a way I can describe to 'the world') and
also to my having been able to help them understand
enough to adjust to help me follow them and feel safe that
they wouldn't push me too far (when I seem dizzy or

I07

overwhelmed, they back off and only keep going to clarify
things). Now I know not all people are so patient but it
really has helped to find I am capable of this (it has meant
I have missed out on a lot before - information, sharing,
belonging). It also tells me I will be able to find other
people I can exercise this skill with.
I am not just talking to these people but I am following
what they say (jumbling some sections and missing a
few concepts, but following) and talking with them. I
think theyyve been experimenting here a bit (they're into
psychology), but I think they have good intentions (I
judge this by their going out of their way without wanting
anything for it - they have fed me sometimes, too) ...
They don't pick on me when I muck things up and
they donyt laugh too much at the links I make but they
have explained there are three parts to conversation listening.
joining, and switching. They said I switch conversations,
but I think they'd agree that I am trying to
listen more and join when I can ...
Anyway, the other thing about conversation is they
say I don't seem to get the emotional content of what
they say (attachment to a subject or to how they felt
at a time). They pointed out that I miss this and the
relationships between people they speak about (the social
business expressed through conversation). They said I
only take the information part out (facts). I haven't had
much luck with this, I'm afraid. If language comes from
experience, maybe this part of conversation won't be so
inaccessible to me as life goes on.
Anyway, as you know, I've been trying too hard to be
social (not forcing the expression of false emotions like
before, but putting myself in social situations without the
safety of the consistency I get speaking to the two people
in the house). I shouldn't push myself so indiscriminately.
It may be important to passing this course but it is more
important to stay in one piece. . . . Besides, I have had a
few fallouts and sad situations because I can't choose who
to talk to or trust properly so it may be just as well ...
Donna.

I08

'You don't seem to give a damn about our experiences,' said
Mr. Miller in a polite, matter-of-fact way. 'Why are you saying
this?' I asked. 'Part of "Donna Training",' he replied.
I was allergic to words like 'we', 'us', or 'together' - words
depicting closeness. I never had conversations that weren't oneto-
one situations unless I was simply in front of people and not
Cwith' them. I was phobic about sharing my friends. It was no
wonder I didn't know what to do when the Millers introduced a
sentence with 'my friend's friend' or 'her brother's girlfriend'.
I tried to grasp the Millers' efforts. They tried equally hard
to come to grips with mine. Somewhere in there, my view
that others lacked empathy melted. The Millers were trying.
Like me, they were trying without many rewards. They were
coming from a foreign place and speaking a foreign language
just like I was. I began to see that given how totally different
our underlying systems were, it was a miracle that we bothered
at all.

APPROACHED DR. Marek armed with a list of concepts
for which I wanted 'the world' definitions. One of these
was 'friend'.
As a child my definition of 'friend' was 'someone who
would let me copy him or her to the point of becoming
that person'. Without focusing directly upon him or her, I
would somehow melt into being that person, merging with the
other's tone of voice, style, and pace of movements. Friends
were vehicles of escape from myself.
In my teens, 'friend' came to mean 'people who would put
up with me and people who smiled peacefully'. People could
do the most atrocious things as long as they smiled peacefully
at me. A smile always called for a smile and unintentionally
I not only let them get away with murdering Carol again
and again but my innocent smile seemed to tell them it was
okay.
Later, I came to understand that 'friends' were 'people who
touched you and used you'.

I09

'Are you my friend?' asked seventeen -year-old Carol. 'Yes,
Of course I am your friend,' said the man to whom she was
a domestic prostitute. 'Why do you want to touch me?' she
asked. 'Because I love you,' came the answer. Carol turned
away, only a whisper escaping -'If you loved me, you wouldn't
touch me.'

Either the wrong messages had been sent out or people were as
deaf and blind to my ways as I was to theirs. I finally came to
understand that some of them probably chose to be ignorant.

BREAK INTO GROUPS,' said the lecturer in the drama
class. People chose their friends and I sought out
Craig. Craig seemed a gentle giant and a humanitarian.
He was in a group with three others and I asked to
join. joe, who had been warring with me all year joined the
group.

We had been asked to create a performance. I came up with
an idea that everyone liked except Joe.
(if I ever have to be in a group, I'm going to make sure
you're not in it in the future,' he snarled, flashing his Cheshire
Cat grin at the others as if seeking approval.
I felt like I was going to explode. I left the room hardly able
to breathe. joe pursued me and found me with my back to the
wall, snot and tears running down my face. 'You just want to
be different all the time,' he scoffed.
The drama lecturer came out. 'Leave her alone,' she told joe.
'I'm just talking to her,' he said smiling. 'Are you okay?' asked
the lecturer. 'Yeah, I'm fine,' I said, and made my way toward
the toilets.
It was so much easier before. It was so much easier when
what they said couldn't hurt because there was no self to
hurt. It was so much easier to retaliate before, when the
verbal weaponry was a storeci-up, memorized arsenal collected
from the persecutors themselves. I looked now for weapons
that would come from myself. Nothing came out. My own
feelings just didn't form any retaliation. I guess I was moving
forward. At least I didn't smile.

II0
I

went to a friend's house. I told her what had happened.
'Put two questions to yourself,' she said. 'Ask yourself: a.,
whether you know the person well; and b., whether you
respect their opinions and comments.'
I thought about this. Whenever things went wrong I had
always double-checked myself. I assumed that everybody's
reactions were caused by me and I took responsibility for
every crap experience that came my way without question.
At the same time, the thought that people acted out of their
own difficulties and insecurities existed only as a theoretical
concept. Neither understanding could cancel out the other so
both remained compartmentalized and separate, unable to be
reconciled, and no conclusion able to be reached.
I really didn't know if I knew someone well. Friends always
remained strangers and acquaintances were, in effect,
no different from friends. I was close to everyone and no
one.
My definition for 'respect' was 'to be in awe of someone'.
But I couldn't feel safe with someone I was in awe
of.
,Trust' was an empty concept. I trusted everyone and no
one. I couldn't use trust to work out if someone was a friend
or not.
The rewards for friendship seemed a sick joke: closeness,
attachment, belonging. Closeness made earthquakes go off
inside of me and compelled me to run. Attachment reminded
me painfully of my own vulnerability and inadequacy and was
a threat to security. Belonging was with things and nature, not
with people.
YOU ARE ONE of the family,' said Mr. Miller at the
dinner table. Shock waves hit me like a punch in the
stomach. I got up from the table and walked to the
window. 'Do you have a dustcloth?' I asked, scratching at a
mark.
The word 'family' was a verbal guarantee of ongoing contact,
which for me was a social and emotional prison. I couldn't grow
with someone observing my growth before even I had been able
to become comfortable in my awareness of it.
'Don't say that word,' I told Mr. Miller. 'What word?
asked Mr. Miller. 'Family,' I replied. MY fear fell on dea
ears. The only perspective they seemed to understand wa
that of negative reaction to past experience. I tried to tell them
it had nothing to do with this.
I stared at my knife and fork as I sat at the Millers' dinner
table. The barrage of new lessons felt like knives and
forks I allowed them to dig into me with. I had armed them
and like a sadist I had gone back for more and more. I
had accepted that whether I liked this or not, I needed it.
Motivation in the absence of want was one of the legacies
of my family background, where fear was shown to be irrelevant
to choice - thank God.
I squirmed in my seat at the creeping feeling within me
in reaction to other people. It wasn't fear and that surprised
me. It was a niggling feeling that connected my mind and
emotions. It was a feeling that was against 'my world' law.
It was curiosity about other people.
The Millers' words poured onto my ecars and the meaning
began to fall out of them more and more. The Millers slowed
down and tried to speak more clearly, but my hearing began
to intensify as I headed for self-initiated sensory torture at
the hands of my friends because I was curious enough and
interested enough to tune in.
Mr. Miller saw that I was squinting and that I had covered
the eaar nearest him. 'Do you have cotton wool?' he asked. 'I'm
sick of being a freak who has to put cotton wool in her ears!'
I shouted. 'I'm sick of wearing dark glasses indoors just so
I can stay calm enough to understand!' This was the price I
was meant to pay to stand being there without the deadening
defense of breaking into characters.
I was sick to death of my attention wandering onto the
reflection of every element of light and color, the tracing of
every patterned shape, and the vibration of noise as it bounced
off the walls. I used to love it. It had always come to rescue
me and take me away from an incomprehensible world, where,
once having given up fighting for meaning, my senses would
stop torturing me as they climbed down from overload to an
entertaining, secure, and hypnotic level of hyper. This was
the beautiful side of autism. This was the sanctuary of the
prison.

mY WORLD OF objects dead around my feet, the
people-world was showing me a world I couldn't
have. I damned it for showing me that it, too, had a
type of beauty. I damned it for being enticing and unattainable.
I damned others for having it.
I now acknowledged that it was not closed out by choice
but by disposition. I was driven to want it like someone who
finds her true home but finds she's been locked out. As I had
once been committed to keeping the world at a distance, I now
became obsessively committed to smashing that glass, not for
conformity but for belonging.
I accepted how much I wanted this world and blossomed
with emotion. I thought about the Mareks and the Millers,
feeling the compulsion to reject, destroy, and run. Each time
I was with them, it was as though it were the last and I fought
the compulsions. I knew I couldn't bear to watch everyone
fade away again.
I now knew that my war had perpetuated the delusion that
I had rejected 'the world', when, in fact I was powerless to
hold it.
The distinction between 'my world' and 'the world' implied
that I had a choice to be in 'the world' or not. The realization
that autism stole this choice from me became the linchpin for
the final shattering truce that would bring my world-underglass
crumbling to the ground. I learned that there never was
and never had been a 'my world'.
Most of my 'my world' strategies were designed to tell me
I was not there, in order to lessen the load. Torn down the
middle, one part of me fought desperately for air and the other
part said, Breathe? Who needs to breathe when you don't have
lungs?
I talked myself through self-denial. I talked myself through
the tremors that signaled the Big Black Nothingness. I talked
myself through the fear of the foreignness of my own voice
talking with a me choosing the words. I told myself where I
was going. I told myself the hard part was only short-term and
temporary. When I couldn't understand my own reassurances,
I drew them.

GRABBED FOR the paper and pencils, and just as I had
drawn concepts for myself, I asked others to speak my
language as a bridge to my learning theirs with meaning
and connections.
I knocked on the Millers' door armed with pencils and paper.
'I want you to show me emotions,' I said.
In the mathematics of people, I was at a stage equivalent
to basic counting, and addition and subtraction of one-digit
numbers. Unfortunately the Millers found it very hard to break
down the mathematics of people. They were beginning with the
equivalent of algebra and logarithms in teaching someone who
was a social retard. Oh God, I had come to the class but the
teachers had only half the teaching aids. So much for Santa
sacks and magic wands. 'Shit, all of this and I have to teach
the teachers how to teach me.'
'Are you two angry?' I asked the Millers.
'No, we're not angry,' came the reply. Their voices got fast
and went up and got louder. Were they lying? Why couldn't
they admit they were angry most of the time?
Out came the paper and pencils. They showed me that all the
actions I interpreted as 'angry' could also mean 'busy', 'tired',
'anxious', 'emphatic', or 'excited'. None of these meant 'angry'.
In lines and diagrams, I saw the angry scale, the happy scale,
and the sad scale. They marked the greater or lesser variations of
them along the lines: tired, busy, flustered, agitated, annoyed,
angry, and furious. They tried to show me how each might
look on a face or be mirrored in actions.

I was the one who was angry! You mean to say I have
spent twenty-seven years responding to two-thirds of people's
behavior as though they are angry and they probably never
were? I thought.

It began to dawn on me how often my expectations might
have tipped the scales from tired to angry just because I expected
it. It occurred to me how so many years of miscomprehension
had helped justify my war against 'the world' and my fear of
it.
Yet the anger could go nowhere. I couldn't blame other
people. They had learned these things automatically. They
could not have imagined that I would need to learn them
formally because they were not like me. They could not have
imagined I required a far more constructive expression of their
so-called empathy than the charitable save-the-world martyr
routines they sometimes went through; tolerant people are
those who put up with.
I thought about what saves us from being consumed by
ever-climbing agitation. When someone experiences anger, it
is the reassurance of closeness and security or the expression
of happiness that counterbalances it so the anger
doesn't consume them. I found closeness suffocating and invasive;
its expression negated any reciprocal feelings of
closeness within me. Fear of touch, and the irritation of
emotionally charged intonation meant that the ways people
expressed reassurance totally undermined my own security,
which depended fully on predictability and distance. How
could I have a normal level of constructive anger when their
misguided, well-intentioned reassurances merely stoked the fire
of my defenses?

EVERY DAY AFTER school I raced into the Millers' house
to check the fax machine. Letters and faxes from foreign
literary agents and publishers arrived each day. I was
about to be flung by the heels into the world of business
where I was the business. 'Are these people my friends?' I
asked Mr. Miller. 'No, they are not friends,' said Mrs. Miller.
I went berserk. The Millers seemed like lunatics. Take me to
a sane place please, I thought.
I was expected to do frightening things - publicity things
- for people who weren't even friends with me. 'Why aren't
they my friends?' I asked. 'It's business, Donna,' said Mrs.
Miller. 'But why would I do business with people I wasn't
friends with?' I wanted to know.
Out came the diagrams and stick figures, scales, connecting
lines, and talk bubbles. We moved from emotions to sketching
out relationships between people. I saw where words like
'friend', 'acquaintance', and 'stranger' fit on a scale. With the
concepts neat and labeled, it began to emerge just how much
I had taken on faith.

Twenty-seven years too late, I learned that friendship is
not given blindly but earned. I began to test the theory in
my growing friendship with the Millers and the Mareks. I
learned that the answer to the question 'Are you my friend?'
was not an assurance that people were not going to hurt
you.
I learned that real friends didn't just become friends because
you asked them if they were and they said yes, or because
they wanted to have sex with you, which meant they liked
you.
I asked what other signs there were so that I wouldn't have
to check all the time if someone was my friend, and somewhere
in there I learned about context. But as I learned what I had
been blind to, I had to face the degree to which I had been a
victim of this context blindness.

'You're invited to a party,' said one of the girls Carol knew.
d To  b b d bought her
a drink once from the drink machine. He was a friend; she
made him laugh.
'Ton,v wants vou there. Carol like ny. e a

Carol went to the party - a fourteen-year-old bursting at the
seams for acknowledgment of equality and popularity. Once
in the door, Carol found she was the party. By the ti'me she
began to understand, she was gathering her clothes and nursing
a black eye and a swollen face. Still, she had thought it must
all have been a mistake. She must have misunderstood. Two
hours later, after wandering the streets, Carol returned to the
same place again to apologize for whatever mistake she had
made that she hadn't understood.

I was angry. I wanted to ban the word 'friendship' from the
language. I was in a Catch-22. If I accepted what I was learning.
I would be able to have a more comprehensible and complete
life. But I would have to look back at what had happened to
Carol in the name of friendship.
Carol was not the shining picture of survival she had once
been. She had been the epitome of the word 'victim'. It was
time not just to agree to take care of what had once been
Carol, but to be angry for that part of my life in order to
move forward.

I sat at the end of the row in the corner of English class. With
my back against the wall, I felt relatively secure.
Week after week, joe singled me out. I had no idea why.
When it came to picking a scapegoat, I stuck out like the
testicles of a bull terrier. It seemed I had some invisible sign on
me saying Masochist in Search of Persecutor, Please Apply.

'How's the university,' asked Mr. Miller. I told him the latest
chapter in the scapegoat saga. 'Where do you sit in the room?'
he asked. I had no idea what this had to do with anything but
explained the way I stood when approached, where I chose to
sit, and how I spent my time on breaks. Mr. Miller stood up
and said, 'Right. I am Donna Williams.'
In his kitchen, I watched Mr. Miller play 'This Is Your
Life'. Slowly I came to understand why I had had more than
my fair share of being singled out. Without understanding
body language in the same way as others do, I had been a
walking advertisement for trouble.
I came to see how my version of 'wanting my own space
and owning myself' was their version of 'lonely, in need
of company' or 'lacks confidence, ego-trippers welcome'. In
being friendly I had sometimes been curious about people's
height, age, and the color of their eyes or hair. I had occasionally
asked to touch a piece of their clothing (if it was
velvet or angora). Their translation was probably 'must be on
drugs', 'hippie with brain damage', or 'open to being slept
with'. I came to realize that when it came to sending out
messages I may as well as have been doing this in Swahili
with the amount of shared definitions between myself and
others.
'Let me explain "herd mentality",' said Mr. Miller, arranging
some objects on the table to show me the concept in
action. I saw that these people who found security in the
company and support of others were not actually crazy and
illogical after all. I looked back on my life and cried. If only.
Yet somewhere in all of this I finally learned why people
turn to each other for support.

At the university, joe was as creepy as ever. He had come to
symbolize every walking ego problem that had ever had Carol
play bedroom games. He stood for the wall that had stopped
my accepting the word 'friendship', the new awareness of how
people earn real friendships. Outside of the university, I felt a
growing urgency to physically attack him. I told my classmate
Kerry.
Kerry listened to me talk about how to attack joe as a
symbol of social slime. It was all just theoretical. Nevertheless,
the emotions were hugely real. Morality screamed,
'At least an eye for a life of lost innocence.' Only logic
managed to survive my inner battle. Good old logic reasoned
it through. I could not hurt joe. It simply wouldn't solve
anything. Tomorrow there would be a thousand other pieces
of walking slime and symbols of my victimization to take his
place. Tears came to the rescue.
Tears are empowering. With the writing of Nobody Nowhere,
tears had been shed for Donna's lost years and for
Donna's lostness. Tears now had to be shed for Carol so
that those eyes could be full of life and that smile could be
real. Then the victim within myself could find strength in the
knowledge that she was not dependent upon the fragile protection
of others. The victim within myself would find strength
in knowing she was in control of how to protect herself.
If there was one fatal blow that could be struck against the
population of walking slime, it was this awareness. What had
once been Carol became a part of a very real Donna Williams.
She was going to go through the rest of life well-armed with
insight, self-forgiveness, and empowerment.
oNE OF THE most important pieces of ammunition
people have for their own self-protection is the ability
to ask and the ability to explain. I had gone into training
but my training field was one of the most unlikely places to
be found. It was with the three children of a Chinese family.
Nancy, the oldest child in the family, answered the door.
I had arrived in answer to a request in very broken English
on behalf of the businessman father-of-three. The job was to
teach his three Chinese children English.
It seemed fairly straightforward. If anyone had analyzed
language, I had. I had a huge vocabulary and knew all about
sentence structure and phonetics. I had studied linguistics. I
was thoroughly committed to learning languages and the value
of language in general.
Nancy spoke no more than twenty words of English and
her sister and brother spoke even less. This was great. There
was no way that these children were going to find out that I
had any difficulty with the use of language.
I made Nancy get up and touch the things we named. For
every word there had to be a contrast. Floor contrasted with
roof' windows with doors, handles with hooks. boxes with
bottles.
We identified what everything was made of, tapping and
touching everything as we went: wood, metal, plastic, rubber,
and concrete. We went through adjectives - 'rough' and
Csmooth'. 'dull' and 'shiny' - and moved from the names of
the objects around us to their descriptions and uses.
We acted out every new verb, spinning and jumping, rolling
and running. All learning was through our bodies, and the walls
of the classroom extended beyond the house and into the wider
community.
Language progressed to the visual, and the house became
filled with books and posters. I relived my fetish for categories,
exhausting every branch of each topic. We acted out every
sentence. We became the moon and the stars, the stage of a
theater, and the opera singers performing there.
We moved to invisible. yet audible nouns and adjectives:
'noise', 'rhythm', 'loud', and 'soft'. We drew emotions and
put them on scales.
Nancy went from twenty words to hundreds of words and
complete sentences in the space of three months. Then she
wanted to converse with me.
I was protected within the structure of being the language
teacher. I knew how long each session would last. I knew
I could say stop or change the topic. Nancy had such a
thirst for knowledge and a hunger for company. She wanted
me to converse with her not only on the topics we had
covered but to talk with her about the changes she was experiencing
as a fourteen-year-old going through puberty who
had just arrived in a very different new country with a foreign
language and culture. In a way, we had many things in
common.
Nancy was deep~thinking and deep-feeling and probably
the most insightful teenager I had ever met. It was like sitting
with Confucius. Somehow I felt destiny had thrown me
this job so that I could give Nancy the words so she could
teach me their use. I knew loads about speech. She knew
loads about language. She spoke slowly enough and with
space enough for me to follow her topics. As I helped her
put words to her emotions, I learned better to name mine.
With the innocence of a child Nancy looked into my eyes
and insisted upon sharing them.
Words became no longer mere vehicles of fact collection
nor auditory reminders that I was not alone as long as I
heard my own voice. Words were no longer weapons or
mere tools of insight upon a page. Nancy taught me that
words are not merely entertainment in themselves but are
put together and shared back and forth as part of how people
grow together. With Nancy I learned to enjoy conversation and
how friendship grows, not in spite of language but because
of it.
My ability to speak
with focus was fueled by my writing
and my practice with Nancy. Spoken words became userfriendly.
The concept of 'language to build walls and use as
a strategy to keep people at a distance' found itself face-to-face
with its antithesis: the concept of 'words to invite
people in'.

July 1991
To Theo Marek,
... Talking to Nancy, I can understand why I find
it so hard socially communicating. In terms of communication,
I have language like a one-hundred-year-old
(the best possible), but I have the social communication
skills of a badly trained young child. I can talk on
many topics but when being social and language come
together (with emotions and self intact) they drag my
level of functioning way down
That's it
Donna.

'It's been twenty minutes since you've looked at me,' announced
Dr. Marek. I glanced up at him obligingly ('the
world' ways - play by their rules if you are on their team).
We discussed the rules of how much time between glances is
customary and normal for 'the world' people. 'A few seconds,'
said Dr. Marek. I was supposed to make the transition from
twenty minutes to a few seconds without putting on characters
to do it.

Dr. Marek was 'touching' me with his eyes. I was afraid.
Other people weren't supposed to be able to do this, according
to the laws of 'my world'. Dr. Marek was breaking
my laws and I felt I was being hurt even though I knew he
didn't know the rules. My developing 'the world' perception
told me this was just feelings because I was being affected.
There was an emotional connection happening because
enough meaning was getting through. I was taking part in
a dance called eye contact, to which I had come willingly
with a self intact. I had to allow the control to be shared.
My developing 'the world' sense told me this was part of the
way out.
Dr. Marek knew I was scared. I had tremors from head
to toe, I fidgeted like someone at the dentist, and when I
stood up I sometimes swayed on my feet. Damn, all this and
emotions, too. Didn't they know there was a 'my world' law
against being affected by people (you could care mentally all
you liked but not be emotionally affected beyond your own
control to be). It wasn't going to get easier.

bACK AT THE apartment, I looked in the mirror. There
was a fragile realness in my face. In place of the indifference
emerged a painful shyness. Shyness was a step up.
I had often felt shyness but found that it so exposed a lack of
control that I had always channeled it into something deeper;
defensiveness, evasiveness, and indifference. I was emerging
like a rose does in summer and was aware and cherished the
emotions I came to own as part of me.
I bought some paints and began to paint in color for the
first time since I was about thirteen. I had dabbled in painting
then, always too afraid to let anyone see or understand
my pictures. Everything I painted had to be highly symbolic,
even the subject had to be mentally and visually intangible.
Back then I had finally resorted to black and white,
a bit like my view of the world, but in my opinion safer
because without color it expressed the subject but not the
feeling. Colors stood for emotion.
In the privacy of my apartment I took out my paints and let
the pictures from within emerge. Rose gardens and hills, long
grass of gold, green, brown, and black. I captured 'my world'
where it should have been: on the flat surface of a sheet of
paper, two dimensions appearing to be three.
The ocean at different parts of the day and night, city
lights, the sky reflected in lakes, and the personality of clouds
conjured up images of Manet, Monet, and Turner. The colors
became brighter and brighter, the pictures luring the viewer
to enter a world of color, a symbolic journey. I welcomed
it with open arms as I captured it upon paper; I painted a
child climbing from the depths of the Big Black Nothingness
reaching upward for the light. I painted the cats that had long
been symbolic representations of myself.
The expression seemed so clearly my own. I watched my
emotions and moods stare back at me as something other
than a mirror image albeit not yet human. I painted the
seven cats that stood for the seven colors of the rainbow.
a,

the spectrum of emotions. The meaning that had long been
underground, hidden within the hidden within the hidden,
came to the surface - observable. tangible, and able to touch
me emotionally.
I spent hours staring at the paintings as I had my reflection
in the mirror. I liked what I saw and I liked myself.

FOUND THERE was a wider choice than fear or indifference
when it came to enduring ongoing friendship. In my mind I
fought fear and joined Theo Marek's hallway to his house and
its place in the outside world. I would now allow the lessons
learned to become an accepted part of 'the world' I had come
to know and claim a place in.
'What are you doing?' asked Dr. Marek as I walked at a
snail's pace through his hallway taking everything in. I had
usually made my way through the hallway like it was on fire.
Now I wanted to see and understand what was in it and what
rooms went off it. I wanted to experience and understand that
it was connected to the living room, where our latest discussion
took place, and that it joined to the porch and the path that
would take me back to my place.
On the way out I stood at the front door and looked in
Dr. Marek's eyes. I smiled to myself over the secret control.
I was exercising control in giving up control. 'Bye,' I said, and
left, fully aware that there was no wall anymore between the
Mareks' house, what I learned there, and the rest of 'the world'
beyond.

'I want you, if you can, Donna, to touch my hand,' said Dr.
Marek at our next appointment. Nausea overcame me and I
froze. What did this man want from me? I thought in panic
as the echoes of the past hit me like a tidal wave.

MY friend's elderly father entered the room. I had been able
to stay here when my best friend wasn't in. My friend and
I were like brother and sister: we shared the same clothes,
and we could sleep in the same bed and know each of us
was safe. He was sixteen. I was fourteen. He had come
closer than most to uncovering Donna beneath Carol.
'I want to touch you,' said the father, sitting on my friend's
bed next to my body. Carol listened for herfriend's return. 'Will
you let me touch you ?'asked the father, his hand reaching across
like so many others. Thank God he had asked, for although
Carol could not freely stand up for herself (because she had
no self) she could, nevertheless, answer a question honestly and
bluntly. 'No,'said Carol, but the damage was done. She could
not tell her friend so she simply walked out on the friendship.

It made no sense. Dr. Marek was on my side, wasn't he? I
wanted someone else present in the room. I wanted another
woman there.
As far as I was concerned I had tackled things. I had
told the truth about Carol's 'bedroom academy awards' and
about 'disappearing. The war was over and these things were
never going to happen again. Why would I want to touch
anyone?
I was in a war with myself over the old 'my world' strategies
and the new 'the world' rules. Who cares who touches me, I
told myself. This body is just stuck on me anyway. NO!
screamed the other part. It's me in here.
If he is trying to touch you, it won't be so bad. Smile and
accept oblivion. Laugh at them for being unwitting collaborators
in the art of 'disappearing'. Gloat to yourself about how
right you were not to trust. Dr. Marek must have known my
war. He would not invade. He held out his hand and waited
for me to touch him.

Exposed and in the absence of a want, I was frightened.
Perform, perform, perform. But I couldn't because I was
expected to initiate this and I couldn't bear to do so without
feelings. And yet, to have feelings would be impossible. Dr.
Marek's outstretched hand mocked my inadequacy.
He didn't play down or laugh at my fear. He did not push
me. Seeing my face covered in tears, he left me to work through
my feelings and try again another time. What for? ... What for?
I nagged myself in frustration, looking for an answer. Why do
I want to? There was no reply.

There were four weeks till my next appointment with Dr.
Marek, and I was afraid. Standing in front of the mirror, I
put my face against the glass and cried.
My hand went out, and my reflection and I touched. I
looked at this predictable person I had known and grown
with all my life. I wished so badly that she would climb
out of the mirror and be with me or become me so I could
leave. My mirror image was the only person with whom I
had initiated touch out of want and not compliance. She
looked back at me with equal intensity and sorrow that it
was not possible. She couldn't get out, not then, not now,
not ever. I put my hand up against hers and looked from
her eyes to our hands. 'Mirror hands,' I said to her, and
smiled as we cried. She smiled back, the smiling example that
optimism can survive imprisonment.

THE SECOND TEACHING round arrived. It was to be in
German, teaching all levels of the school, children from
five to twelve years old. It would be great because the
children did not speak fluent German and it was my job to
maintain my own German at all times and in all situations.
Where the children could not understand, I was to augment
my speech with gesture, image, and materials. Speaking through
objects was my forte. When I made my words concrete and
visual, they didn't fall emptily to the ground.
I wrote most of my lessons into music and arrived armed
with a guitar and a voice. The topics were learned through
actions and music, and expressed and expanded upon through
art, craft, and science experiments.

My first class began. I was not used to the children's voices,
and having too many directions to follow, I was meaning-deaf
to the children. 'So, can someone tell me how this works?
uh, huh ... and what do you think of that, Andrew, can
you explain anything else about it?' I drew upon the children
constantly to comment upon and add to what each other
had said. It hid the fact there was no real dialogue between
them and me, and they seemed to take well to the offer of
managed independence. I took well to the outsider's role of
facilitator rather than teacher.
We were studying buildings. I considered the match between
the foundations of a building and the foundations of my own
ways. I had been like a house of cards, without support
beams or solid grounding. I had had a roof falling in on
me all the time and walls that needed constant rebuilding and
strengthening in the absence of support structures. I thought
about all the things that could not enter my house because
the foundations were not built to support them. I thought
of the lack of windows in my card house, and my door,
which was forever either opened or closed but lacked the
hinges to allow the free, unstructured comings and goings a
proper house would allow. I had no chimney so my house
was full of smoke, my ability to make sense and connections
obscured. I thought of the way 'the world' came in through
the cracks between the cards.
This new strategy was one I named 'parallel systems' and
became the basis for a new way of understanding one thing after
another until I could hardly keep up. It was as though I had
been starved for oxygen and could suddenly breathe. My mind
exploded into new awareness and ever new corridors within
my mind emerged as years of stored-up, unused knowledge
found the structures to slot into.

My supervisor for this teaching round was a dream. Right from
the start she could sense me rather than observe me. Eventually
I explained things to her and she understood and treated me in
no way differently except that she encouraged me all the more
to face my difficulties head on.
As part of my training I had to participate in classes other
than those I taught. Some of them involved dancing, and the
dancing involved holding hands.
I had previously worked in child care. Picking the children
up and clothing or feeding them involved what I called 'instrumental
touching'. I handled it as I did when I resigned
myself to letting a doctor or dentist examine me. It was a
category of touch that was dealt with by the part of my
mind that was purely clinical, purely logical, purely responsible:
Willie. There was nothing social or emotional about
this form of touch; we were both objects. There was no
stomping upon my difficulty balancing self and other. There
was nothing intuitive needed. Practical touch was yet another
repertoire in a file titled 'theory self'.
But social touch was somehow communal and communicative.
I was meant to touch these people as human beings and
not as animate, human-form, speaking, walking, blah-blah-blah
objects that happened to need assistance. 'It'll be fun,' said
my supervisor smiling. I felt ill.

I stood on the outside of a gathering circle of five-year-olds.
My arms hung limply by my sides.
'Take their hands,' said the supervisor in German and I felt
glad the children didn't understand. The supervisor and I were
separated from 'the world' by being the only two in the room
fluently speaking a shared language.
I looked at her desperately. I felt like Brer Rabbit pleading
with the fox. I could take a child's hand to cross a road or
to stop him or her from getting hurt. I could pick a child up
if needed. I could even passively accept or overlook a child's
casually touching me. And while this was not so hard with
people smaller than me as it was with adults, I found it
just too close to home that I was meant to make physical
contact and smile and dance and sing all at the same time.
Carol, come on down! came a thought. She was nowhere to
be found.
Vomit sat in my throat waiting for the appropriate moment
to introduce itself. My eyes screamed out at this supervisor
to let me off the hook. My heart raced and my mind shouted,
run ... run.
The supervisor looked over at me with a sort of mocking
though reassuring smile, as if to say, grin and bear it, it will be
over soon enough. I had had enough of 'it will be over soon
enough' to last me a lifetime. Wake me up when it's over, I
thought, as my dead, wooden legs skipped around the circle
coincidentally attached to the body they took with them. My
own clay hands sat emptily in a pair of small, cupped hands
full of humanness, which kept squeezing them as though to
put some life into them. I felt buried alive.

AT HOME I was in a state of overload. Some kind of
emotion had come over me and left me an uncomprehending
mess. The meaning of everything before me
had dropped out and I was surrounded by color and pattern
and shape, with my sense of hearing heightened, my sensitivity
to light increased, and my own nameless emotions washing over
me.
Alone, I walked about, touching the things around my
apartment and waiting for the lost friend of 'meaning' to
come back. I saw me in the mirror and put my hands against
her hands. I turned my cheek against her cheek and cried.
Cold, I said inside my head, looking at my hands against the
flat glass surface of the mirror.
The word-thought struck me sharply, full of meaning in
this meaningless state. Nothing came out. Something was on
the verge. Something horrible or nice - I was unsure - but
it was just around the corner.
I stood back, my hands still against her hands on the other
side of the glass. Looking at her face, I took my hands away,
silent for a moment. All my life she had been my security,
and those cold, flat, glass hands had been my form of personal
comfort. It was the only real touch I still equated with
closeness, the only thing still uncorrupted.
I took my hands away and looked at them out in front of
me. Then I looked at her as she put her own hands together.
'Warm hands!' I burst out, having finally found the answer to
the difference between me and her.
I looked from her hands to my hands. They were touching.
From her to her hands to my hands and back, I looked and
the meaninglessness around me didn't matter. 'Warm hands,'
I said, cwarm hands!'
My face against the mirror and my hands still touching.
I smiled at her and she smiled back. 'Warm hands,' I explained,
my face lighting up with understanding, an explorer
discovering an ancient lost tomb.

back against the mirror. Back to back
I turned with mY    warm touching hands. I had
with her I looked, alone, at my
the answer. I knew where I was going.

I had never had time to build a bridge from the nothing
of empty performed touch to the acceptance of touch and
real feelings that was supposed to come from closeness or to
know why I should want to.   negate and destroy
Inside I knew that to touch me was to     th but it
I       seness. 'The world' touch was dea could
all possibility Of clo rse sense of security in knowing I
also gave me a perve   can only be killed off once,
then no longer be affected. You
and after that you are blissfully dead. it was the vulnerability
It was oni,,g back to life that hurt.     ontrol had been
of feeling alive that was to be fought off. C
more important to me than anything else. To touch me was
to make yourself ineffectual and that was to give me total
I                          ly kill
control. You could kill me but inside I would secret
you in the process. YOU Would die in 'my world' and be
forever unable to enter again.
As others had watched me become a willing victim, I had
watched them ignorantly and willingly give up an even greater
weapon than even touch could be - the ability to affect me
through closeness. They could be physically close to my body
but it meant nothing when I did not experience, acknowledge
or want the thing as my own. The more they touched it, the
further I could dissociate from it. In a perverse (my world'
way, I was winning. They were helping me 'disappear.

-seven years, I had touched my own hands many
In twentyjust jumps of flesh, blood, and bones de
times. They werenction, and Image as something
lineated by type, location, fu  ent to them,
we call 'hands'. There was no emotional attacbm   the act of
. nificance to
no personal belonging with them, no sig of two such objects
touching hands. it was merely a collision
in space.  c belonged to the bastard body that trapped
They may hav     there were two of theni and they
me inside, but as long as            ically
were patterned and fitted together as a pair, I was aesthet*

pleased to have them. I liked their symmetry and the life maps
sketched upon them by genetics.
Hands seemed functionally useful when it came to facilitating
self-abuse or when I applied myself to the usefulness and
principles of eating and taking care of health. They had a
sensory role in touching hair and velvet but for many textures I
preferred to use my feet or my cheeks. Hands had an expressive
function when it came to anger and the protrusion of one
or more fingers in gestures such as 'go to hell'. They were
functionally effective as nose pickers or to fetch a handkerchief
when I was moved to be a little more sophisticated and less
absorbed in the texture of snot or in the rolling or flicking
or smearing of it. Hands were good at making noises when
it came to making things go ping, playing piano, or adding
life's punctuation - clapping. They were useful body tappers
when I got scared at 'disappearing' too well and asked, where
is me? The tapping let me know that despite being cut off, I
was actually still there. Hands made interesting shadows upon
the wall and could be turned in front of me to make interesting
patterns. They were essential for clean toilet habits and a clean
house. But they had nothing at all to do with closeness.

There were two weeks to go until I saw Dr. Marek again. I
thought about touching his hand. I felt like I had failed an
exam, and lived in dread of having to take it again. Either I
was going to go to the next exam well-prepared or I was going
to drop out.

I made a puppet in the drama class of my teaching course.
He was a furry black cat named Moggin, with a pink nose,
whiskers, white cat's eyes, and vinyl ears. On my hand he
moved just like a real cat. He hid away from the people I did
not want to look at even if I continued to look. He could be
touched and greeted by people I liked in a way I could not. He
could put his cat's paws around my neck and hug me, as I could
neither ask nor tolerate to be hugged. Moggin was my bridge
to touch and closeness as Travel Dog had been my bridge to
maintaining self in company.

I took Moggin to Kerry's place. Moggin touched her tentatively
with one of his paws. Kerry didn't touch back. Kerry was safe.
Every time I went to Kerry's, Moggin came with me. Moggin
was beginning to replace the mirror.
Kerry and I sat on the floor in her room reading aloud from
various books. 'Will you do something?' I asked suddenly,
looking over at her mirror. 'That depends on what it is,' said
Kerry. I asked her to come and sit in front of the mirror with
me.
'Touch the mirror,' I said to Kerry. She did. I laughed
and shook with a combination of anxiety and excitement.
I reached out and tentatively touched myself in the mirror.
'Touch yourself in the mirror when I do,' I ordered. She did.
There we sat in front of the mirror, side by side, with our
hands touching Donna and Kerry in the mirror world.
'Go away,' I ordered Kerry's reflection suddenly. 'Get out
of there.' I no longer wanted her in the mirror with me. I
looked at Kerry, not quite sure why I disliked her doing this
even though I had asked her to. I moved away from the mirror
and Jeft her in there on her own.
I came back again and reached out quickly and touched her
in the mirror. 'Touch yourself in the mirror again,' I asked,
and as she did I touched myself, too. I looked from her to
me, then from me in the mirror to her in the mirror and
back again. I did a visual circuit of the connection between
this side of the mirror and the other. 'Now touch your own
hands over here,' I ordered, and copied her as she did it. Kerry
and I and 'her in the mirror' and 'me in the mirror' all had our
hands held together. We were a group. 'Again,' I ordered, and
watched and began to understand.
Kerry looked away from herself in the mirror. I burst out
laughing. 'What's so funny?' she asked. 'You looked away in
there,' I said. 'What did you expect?' she asked. 'Well, " yourself
in there" is not the same as "myself in there",' I said.
'Of course not,' she said,  you look like you and I look like
me.' 'It has nothing to do with what we look like. It's to do
with what she did when you looked away,' I said, referring to
the Kerry in the mirror. 'She looked away,.' 'Your reflection
looks away, too,' she said. I laughed to myself a bit, knowing
she was wrong. I had never seen it look away. When I looked
back she had been staring at me as always.
I believed what my eyes told me and my eyes told me my
reflection did not look away. I could recite the physics of
reflection but this couldn't cancel out the logic of perception
and so the two never came together.
'I've never seen it look away,' I said. 'If it looks away, how
come I can't see it?' 'Where are your eyes when you look
away?' Kerry asked. 'Looking away,' I replied. 'What would
you use to see if the reflection was looking away?' she went
on. 'My eyes, of course,' I replied.
Back we went again and again, around and around in an
argument of mental mathematics that I couldn't quite grasp.
Each time I got to the second step, I had lost its connection
with the first. I got the meaning of each sentence but there
was something more than addition happening here and I wasn't
grasping it. Eventually, with a bit of gesture and role playing
and observation of what happened with her in the mirror, I
took it on faith that Kerry was right.
I went home and stood before the mirror. I took my hands
away and touched them together. 'Warm hands,' I said out
loud. Then I stepped to the side so that I was facing the wall.
'This is what other people see you doing,' I said out loud to
myself. I could hardly believe it, and it hurt.

The Millers's daughter, jessy, was saying goodnight. I studied
her as if she were a bug under glass. It was somewhere between
babyhood and adulthood that I had lost some pieces. She was
a simplified version of an adult. Maybe by watching her I
would find what the pieces were.
'Goodnight, Mum,' she said, and hugged her mother. 'Good
night, Dad, she said, and hugged her father. 'Goodnight,
Donna,' she said to me, waving, aware that I didn't take
well to being touched and was certainly not spontaneously
responsive.
I watched the case with which she had hugged her parents. I
watched the expression on her face as she hugged them. What
she did was not just for image, or for acceptance. It was not
out of insecurity to make sure they would still like her. She was
not scared. She did not seem to be doing it Just because it was a
pattern and a routine. There was something happening for her
that affected not her expression but the change in her expression.
What she did had come from feelings, and the change in her
expression seemed like a dialogue between her and her parents.
She was talking through touch.
She had felt something, acted upon it, gotten feedback, and
expressed the way this changed or built upon her feelings.
I reflected on what had generally been my one-dimensional
expression in response to touch when cut off from self and
emotions. There had been no change in response. There was
no dialogue. Touch, for me. had always been a one-word
sentence with a one-word answer that fell upon deaf ears,
and a performance to hide what was missing.
I was moved by what I saw. I could understand it and I
could begin to understand the difference between what I had
known and what this girl had. I now knew why I wanted to
understand touch.
This type of touch had nothing at all to do with the other
uses touch had been put to throughout my life. It was not the
antithesis of closeness and the invalidation of it. It was a way
of breaking isolation and showing people you felt something
for them. The concept of touch now both haunted me from
behind and beckoned me forward.

Dr. Marek,
August 1991

... I am scared about the direction of things I'm learning.
I didn't mind learning how to explain or better
understand my problems. I could manage to stop ignoring
them and think about them within myself. I could even
cope with explaining them to you and then to other
people. But with all of these things, I could still keep
people 'out there'.
I was getting closer to others mentally and even beginning
to try to have more respect and consideration for
their emotions and to listen more and talk on their topics,
but dealing with my social or touch problems in a practical
way, while it makes sense (I know I can work through it in
theory only so much), is the most frightening of the lot.
That I have appeared to be social or allowed people to
touch me in some of the later years leading up to the
book never helped me because I never acknowledged
that it was me or even that the body going through
the experiences belonged to me.
Now that sounds really mad, but when I was alone I
blocked out all recognition of this so I didn't have to
experience it with any awareness of a self and certainly
not with any attachment to others or consideration for
them as people (I really hated and mistrusted almost all
of them most of the time and thought that a smile was
a wall to hide behind, just like a body).
I think 'my world's' end began at the outside of my
body. Anyway, now I am accepting that the outside of
my body is attached to the rest, and it all belongs to
me (which is where I was before people taught me to
cut off so they could touch me - they didn't know
they taught me that, though).
Anyway, I thought about what you said about pushing
myself as opposed to being pushed overwhelmingly
so that you feel dead. It must have been delusion because
it is a real fact that every person - autistic or
not, whether they feel like it or not - exists in the same
basic way: one subjective person.
I can hear people without repeating them to myself
now ('understand', sorry, not 'hear'). I survived that. I
have even been curious enough about it to want to listen
a lot now. The frightening things may well be just like that.
Not easy, but you are right, I can see by my example that
the pattern is that they get easier and keep getting easier
and easier until it is just plain old living.
I think this letter is what people call psychotic. I think
people get locked up if they think like this. I think you
know I am very, very sane and that I'm only crazy when
the world' gets too close. Now I'm going to be sane in that
world and wide awake at the same time if it kills me, because
I have got nothing to lose and everything to gain.
I thought to send this letter to you because then you
will understand how those doors work better and because
it is not just me that my words may help, but other stuck
people who could have half a chance if they found as
many tricks to get the words out as I have. The words
are not enough but if you send them to someone else
they can be the best place to start (but to the right
people and not to the wrong ones).
Thank you,
Donna Williams.

'Can I touch you?' I asked Kerry. 'Of course,' she said. It was
not the same as being able to touch people with the feeling
that they and you were objects or that you, in fact, were not
present as yourself. I not only logically knew Kerry was not
just a thing, I also felt it in my feelings. I now knew my own
body belonged to and was part of me and was not an object
either and I understood what touch was for. I reached out and
quickly touched her sleeve as though she were a tarantula.
I grabbed Kerry's sleeve and shook it. Her hand moved
and I laughed. 'What do you feel?' I asked, touching her arm
through her sleeve. 'You are touching my arm, ' she said. just
like the strategy of detaching Theo Marek's hallway from his
house and making it disconnected from the rest of the world,
I had always felt it was safe to touch people's clothing because
it was not them.

People were inside of their clothes. My clothes, too, were
my suit of armor. If people touched my jacket, I could always
think, Ha, ha, they didn't touch me. This had been a
useful strategy and had helped me survive things like public
transport.
What I saw was basically all there was. I saw a sleeve. I
saw no arm. Putting together the knowledge that there was
an arm inside of the sleeve and that touching the sleeve was
touching the arm did not happen automatically. There was the
first part and there was the second part and I accepted both
but did not combine them to come up with a conclusion.
By the time I got to the second part, I had lost track of
the first, each part stored separately.
I accepted that I was in fact touching Kerry's arm even
though it defied my perception. I had to accept that if I had
done this, then I could touch her arm without her sleeve.

After several visits I finally touched Kerry's hand, treating her
more and more as though she was not poisonous. Then, one
day, I grabbed her sleeve and held her hand upright. I put
my own hand against her hand as I had always done in the
mirror. 'Mirror hands,' I said, my eyes fixed upon the hands
held together out in front of me. I looked from Kerry's eyes
to the hands, from the hands to the eyes, connecting her as a
whole self. Kerry smiled gently, with watery eyes, and I got
into the car and left in a hurry.
On the way home I thought about how touch doesn't just
happen any more than abuse ever did. Touch was something
done by people for different reasons, sometimes bad, sometimes
good. This time it was for good reasons.

My appointment with Theo Marek had come around. I would
survive touching his hand now. I could pass the exam. But, to
my surprise, there was none. It seemed he had decided it had
all been a bit much for me. That's fine with me, I thought.
Give me time, and I will pass with flying colors.

Sitting at the Millers' table, I felt like the only albatross
around for miles. I felt alone. 'Can I do something?' I asked
Mrs. Miller. 'Promise me that you won't react or do anything
back.' She was used to me by now and was familiar with
my sort of logic and what sometimes appeared to be my
unreasonableness. 'Okay,' she said.
I reached out and quickly touched her arm, not as someone's
arm, but for closeness. It was an action that said, i trust
you' and spoke not of a 'can' but of a 'want'. It was the
emotional language of touch.
'Give me five!' said Mr. Miller, shoving his big hand out in
front of me. I had obviously gotten over my aversion to touch
as far as he could see. 'No,' I said firmly, feeling imposed
upon and invaded. He was yet another man larger than myself
initiating touch and expecting me to mirror it and prove my

I-36

(normality'. I didn't need to gain acceptance. What's more, I
needed to learn to tell people no when something didn't feel
right.

MY AUNTIE ARRIVED at the Millers' farm. I had not
seen much of her over the years. She had always
been very fond of me.
She was a gentle person who was physically affectionate
toward the people she was close to. Over the years she had
tried hard to relate to me and bring me out of my shell, despite
my distant behavior.
I was picking gum-nuts from the gum tree outside my
window. The patterns in them were fascinating and I wanted
to put them along my window sill. My auntie picked some,
too. Her hand touched mine accidentally and instinctively I
pulled away. 'Sorry,' she said. This time, so was I.
I picked more gum-nuts and handed her one. My hand
brushed hers and I did not pull away. I looked at her and
smiled.
We sat down at the table. She was telling me something. I
looked at her hand sitting across the table. I reached across
and took it, looked at it briefly, and held it. My auntie cried
uncontrollably. 'All your life I've been waiting for this,' she
said. It had taken me twenty-seven years, but I had been
able to show her directly and without prompting that I had
understood and appreciated her.
A whole world seemed to be opening up to me. My roots
settled into this new soil and I named this 'belonging'. My
branches grew outward wildly to meet the light around me
and I named this 'sharing'. I blossomed and named this 'the
freed expression of my true self'.
I realized how dry the old soil had been and how stagnant
the uncirculated air around me had been in my controlled
world. I realized how seldom I had truly seen the sun beyond
the darkness in which I had been growing as best I
could, stunted and distorted. And yet for every inch of celebration,
there was equal remorse.


August 1991
To Theo Marek,
I realized when I wrote my book that I'd left many
casualties of my war against 'the world'. I never really
felt as remorseful about it, though, as now. At least now I
really know remorse. Remorse is not nice. I guess it's only
a good thing to know so that you can make a decision to
either drown in it or to be sure you'll never ever add to
it again.
I realize with much bigger impact now why others have
been far sadder about my story than I have been. I never
really understood their feelings as much as now. I never
acknowledged mine so much as now - the events, yes;
the feelings, no. I now know it took real feelings and that
feelings hurt, especially when they meet a brick wall.
It's like I understand what love is now. It used to be
a weapon people had to hurt me. I realize they hurt for
me like I'm hurting for me now. I think I'm hurting for
me and all of them now. I never realized the value of
what they tried to give me. I never realized they weren't
trying to hurt me by trying to teach me to change or
by showing me how to try. I rejected friends overnight
because I couldn't understand. I did worse: I looked at
them without any recognition, or with hatred, and they
never knew why. Can you imagine the guilt now that I
understand? The only consolation I have for the guilt is
that I am truly sorry and that I really didn't understand.
I can see that the conversations that are my best efforts
have gross holes in them and this is the best I've ever
done. Yet the people who attempted to be ongoing friends
accepted and accepted until I rejected them blatantly for
their acceptance. I was so arrogant in my ignorance.
I thought what they had to offer or say had no relevance,
and I couldn't listen as anything more than an
act of tolerance, I could only hear sometimes. I played
with their words like objects and made people turn up
the emotional volume of their words to try to reach
me until I burned them out. I can truly see how monsters
don't mean to be monsters.
Inside my head I am screaming I'm sorry, but I can't forgive
myself because I have twenty-seven years crumbling
down on my head. Twenty-seven years I want to make
up for by beginning with what I owe to myself.
I saw Terry's face (a friend from early childhood) after
she read the book. She truly expressed in her face alone
how far I had yet to go. She felt hurt for me. My auntie,
too. Both of them happy for me but so hurt that I finally
knew. I saw it in their faces, and Mr. Reynolds' face, too
(my old primary school teacher), and I could understand
these expressions now. I even understood the Millers'
dog's expression when I pushed it away. I understood
what hurt looks like and that it is not an empty look.
I was blind to them before. It really hurts to feel their
hurt. It hurts even more to feel it and still not be able
to be touched, because now I know why they wanted to
hug me. People hug people when they are hurt.
... That's it,
Donna.

'Hello, Bryn,' I said one day when out of the blue. I called
him. He was floored. He had never heard me address him so
directly. personally, and spontaneously. When I had used his
name it had always been his full title. Anything less formal,
too close, would have made the effort cost too much.
It had been roughly six years since I had seen this man who
had changed my life. He was the first person I had met since
the real Carol - who moved in 'my world' enough to
call into question the very possibility that there was no 'my
world' after all. In knowing Bryn I had come to question if
there was some sort of 'our world'.
My time knowing Bryn had been one of the most beautiful
and the most painful. I had finally found someone whose
ways were like my own enough to finally catch a glimpse of
belonging. But a lifetime without it and a terror of emotions
crippled my communication with him, leaving me unable to
ask him anything or talk directly in any way with him rather
than merely in front of him.
Bryn didn't even need to shatter the fagades of Carol and
despite the fear. Trust, as only found in the company of
oneself (or one like oneself), stood firmly in the way, despite
my best efforts to 'disappear'. So I shook, and broke out in a
nervous rash, and was unable to hide behind word games and
topic knowledge.
But life's merry-go-round doesn't stop for the slow ones to
get on or catch up, so having gotten a grip on relating as the
characters, I was not prepared at that time to face my fears
and jump off for any length of time. The closer I became to
Bryn, the more dangerous the vision of a crumbling faqade
had become. I had left Bryn behind almost six years ago,
and with him, I had for a long time in so many ways, left
myself.

I stood at Bryn's door shaking from head to toe. The stress
was like being at my own funeral, doing exams with someone
pacing beside me, and seeing my mother all at the same time.
Finally I knocked.
Bryn answered the door, his eyes as blue as ever and his
wavy hair and accent unchanged. But six years of being thought
useless, hopeless, crazy, and odd, as well as the constant use of
alcohol as an emotional anaesthetic had left their mark.
We sat in the garden, surrounded by tall weeds, wood, red
bricks, and an overhead clothesline - dotted with pegs - that
cut the sky in half. Bryn dotted the brick path with cigarette
after nervous cigarette as I let go cold the ritual cup after cup
of black tea.
I had never been to his place. I had hardly been able to
bear having lunch with this man six years ago, and now I was
actually visiting him at his own home. What I had to say and
what I had to confront were too important to let fear get in
the way.
Bryn's big hands were shaking. It was clearly still as hard
for this gentle giant as it had been for me then, and was
still now. Yet now that I stood without my facades, able
to communicate personally and directly with him, Bryn was
a walking repertoire of all I'd been.
'What was I like six years ago?' I asked him. He laughed
nervously to himself. 'It was like being with someone on LSD,'
he said. 'Why?' I asked. Bryn cleared his throat and put on the
role of narrator.
'Well, you spoke in a way that most people couldn't understand.
You could never be quite sure what you were talking
about, but if you didn't think about it you could understand it.
You were way off with the fairies. You just stared intensely into
what looked to me like nothing but you seemed really captured
by it. I wondered if you might have been hallucinating. Then
you'd just go off on your own track, seeing something in
the grass or the pattern of something.' 'Did you think I was
strange?' I asked. 'Strange but familiar,' said Bryn.
I explained to him about the characters. 'What about Carol?'
I asked, 'Could you tell the difference?' 'Oh, yeah,' said Bryn,
'but mostly you weren't like that when you were with me; you
were like that, though, as soon as other people were around.'
'How did it make you feel?' I asked. 'It scared me,' said Bryn.
'It confused me. It was out of control.'
'Do you know what autism is?' I asked him. 'Autistic people
are in psychiatric hospitals and places like that, aren't they?'
said Bryn, looking for confirmation. 'They rock all the time
and don't speak.' Bryn had never had a friend until he was in
his teens, and up until then had largely been unable to talk with
other people. Neither his parents. himself, nor the people now
surrounding him considered him usual, although he passed for
normal-like, eccentric, scatty, and, because of his egocentricity,
selfish.
Bryn seemed oddly mechanical to most people and he himself
was aware of it. Conversation for him with most people was
a series of well-rehearsed lines and the calculated occasionally
'yeah?' and 'that's interesting'.
Although he was generally unable to work out the meaning
of what people said in conversation, Bryn had a great
memory for strings of words, and when people told him off
for not listening, he would use my strategy of repeating their
words back, to 'prove' that he was.

'I'm autistic,' I told Bryn. 'No you're not,' he said breezily.
The only other high~functioning people I was in touch with

were people_I had spoken to through letters. In person, i had
only met so called less able autistic people. I was in no way
going to argue.
'So when do I get to read this book of yours?' said Bryn,
looking at my hands clutching the manuscript upon my lap.
Too afraid to leave a copy of the manuscript with Bryn, I told
myself I had done enough to let him know he was in it. I had
wanted to let him read it, but mostly I had wanted to soften
the blow of what he might later come to understand. 'I can't
give it to you just yet,' I said, my hands shaking. Bryn had had
no idea how much he had meant to me or why I considered
him in some ways to be 'like me'.
I could tell from Bryn's cheery mechanical 'conversation'
that he was not ready to give up the props yet. Before, I
had been so occupied with my own war, I had hardly 'seen~
him and only enough to sense he was like me and to know
I was not alone. And yet now that his strategies stood out
so blatantly as a crude mockery of what 'the world' turned
him into, I was not about to knock him or expose him. Yet
knowing how much fuller the world was with one's eyes open,
I would also not leave him in the bliss of his own ignorance.
'In the book. I wrote that you were like me,' I told him. I left
the rest for him to piece together.
Bryn and I stood at the front door to his house. It seemed
as if the ground itself was shaking. I picked a flower and gave
it to him. I looked deeply into his eyes in a way that had never
been possible before. He looked back with an overwhelming
air of vulnerability that a newly orphaned three-year-old
would have struggled to achieve.
I felt I was abandoning him. I also felt I was on the verge of
freeing him. 'Come back again sometime,' said Bryn casually.
Echoes of earlier times left a haunting ring in that phrase. I
said nothing, turned, and left.

THEO MAREK ASKED if I night give a talk to some of
the students at his university. They were teachers and
nurses and people with psychology backgrounds who,
for one reason or another, were learning about autism.

I wanted to give something back for the help I'd been given.
The talk was organized and I felt it would be good practice for
the upcoming book publicity I would soon be facing overseas
with the impending publication of Nobody Nowhere.
Dr. Marek promised to make sure I stayed on track, so I
didn't have to worry about being embarrassed or not understanding
the expectations of the questioners.
Willie had given a few talks throughout my university course
but these had neither invited nor allowed questioning. I had
taken classes with children. but if I didn't understand them
distinctly it wasn't as noticeable because I was assumed to be
the clever one. I could always say, 'hmm, that's interesting,'
and select another student to comment on what was said.

I felt great after my lecture to Dr. Marek's class. I had answered
all of the people clearly, without waffling or going wildly off
track. My language was slow and jerky, like wading through
mud. The words were hard to find and I spoke in pictures more
than words. I had spoken not from stored repertoires but from
myself and my emotions. I spoke with an awareness of self. I
had, however, wanted to leave, and as time rolled on and on,
I waited for the lecture organizers to tell me it was time to go.
No one did. It was easy with a lesson plan to follow, but here
there was none and I seemed at their mercy.
After over an hour. I was exhausted. My words were still
answering but I was slipping away from them as they hung
on the wind at the end of each utterance. My mind was losing
awareness of what I had said. My eyes grew wide, looking
for signs and indications that the meaning of the words to
which I had for now become deaf. did in fact make sense.
It was like peeing in the darkness of the Australian bush
on a moonless night: one wonders and waits to know if
one has peed on one's own feet. Theo Marek called a stop
and I looked at him with relief.

iT WAS THE second-to-last teaching round. I felt secure
about returning to school. There were no fellow student
teachers to worry about and I would have the comforting
distance of teaching in German to a bunch of children who
struggled to speak it just as I struggled to make meaning of
their words in English. It seemed a fair swap, neutral territory.
I felt I was almost home free.
Yet the return to this school was a double-edged sword. I felt
good to be familiar with the physical surroundings but the personal
familiarity with the children meant the threat of becoming
known. The continuity of relationships had never been a strong
point for me even if I was now committed to working on making
it so. I had always preferred anonymity and indifference.
As I entered the staff room, my stomach scrunched itself up
at the sight of the smiling welcoming faces of three unfamiliar
fellow student teachers I had never met before. Their smiling
faces and eager curiosity seemed to crawl across the table like
a virus threatening my anonymity and detachment.
The three smiling faces were all introduced to me. I jabbed
myself in the back to answer each one of them. I asked myself
if any of them would treat me as had Vanessa, the fellow student
who had shoved my lack of social awareness down my throat.
'Hello,' I said mechanically in response to each one as I choked
upon the word.
These faces attempted to make conversation and it was like
how it feels when the dentist tries to make conversation before
taking your teeth out in a room that reeks of what is about
to happen. I answered each of them, feeling ill and needing
a toilet break and mental space. Their smiles merged with the
memory of Vanessa's and became a category in my mind that
signaled danger.
I wasn't too sure, when I had to go into the staff room the
next day, whether I had passed the last staff room sociability
test or not but the atmosphere-had changed. I wasn't sure
whether to take it as a sign of 'the world' failure or 'my world'
relief that few further efforts were made to speak to me.
The staff-room dentist feeling had taken its toll. My confidence
level dropped to zero. You would have had to chisel
a smile onto my face for me to at least appear approachable.
I was in knots; it was as though I was back at the
beginning of my teaching course.
My supervisor at this school was too ill to be there on
this first day. Thank you, God, I said to myself, grateful
she wouldn't see that I was functioning so poorly that I'd
hardly have made it on a factory production line, let alone
in a classroom. I was like a wind-up toy and needed constant
prompting even to remember what room I had to be in or when
the next class was or what level it was that I was teaching for
any given lesson. I was in a permanent state of stage fright
and if not for the lesson plans I took with me to each class,
I would have had no idea what to do.
By the time my supervisor arrived the second day, I must have
looked like I was having a mental breakdown. She was recovering
from a serious illness and lumbered herself with the guilt
of my apparent impending failure. This did nothing to help
and just made me feel guilty about her guilt.
I groaned my way through my second day, with inattentive
zombie eyes, deaf ears, and a blank expression. I left each
lesson not remembering what I had taught. 'So how was it?'
I asked my supervisor, cringing in anticipation of the reply.
'Well. the lessons were disjointed. You hardly realized the
students were there. You didn't involve them in any way,'
she said gently but honestly.

Every day those three student teachers smiled more, chatted
more among themselves, and I sat there feeling more and more
hopeless and exposed for all my hopelessness.
I couldn't get Vanessa out of my head, and her pleasant
demeanor as she had given me that letter like a scorpion's sting.
Day after day, I just waited for another letter telling me what
a failure and an embarrassment I was, and for the knots that
came with being told not to mention it to anyone.
By the middle of the week, my stomach ached all the time.
I was full of tears that could not come out because my mind
couldn't recognize what feeling I was having. I wondered if I
was sick.
The flu hit me like a tornado. My nose was like a tap,
my lungs were under water, my head felt like a blocked
toilet, and my limbs felt like they were encased in lead. I
was so disoriented, I couldn't have done worse if drugged to
the eyeballs on tranquilizers.
'Damn you, you bastard. You won't get me,' I told the flu.
But there was something else. This aching feeling inside was
frightening me and I shook with fear like one confronted by
a ghost, the ghost of my emotions.

I HAD GROWN very close to the Marek family. We were on a
first-name basis now (which was a big deal for me, because
it could take forever to spontaneously call someone by a
casual and familiar first name). I loved their house, which had
become one of my prized objects and stood for my closeness
to them. I could touch the Mareks' things and express my
curiosity and enjoyment of them in a way that was still too
hard to express to them directly.
I was due to go away soon. In eight weeks I would leave
for overseas to promote my book. I felt the heavy weight of
this and its haunting reminder of too many other 'too lates'. I
felt bad about leaving my friends without being able to directly
express the physical-emotional feeling I did not yet have a name
for.

'I've got this awful feeling in my stomach,' I told my supervisor.
'It feels like rocks.' She was wonderful, more concerned about
my soul than my course. She was the only one of my supervising
teachers at the various schools to whom I had explained
autism and my impending trip overseas.
'I think you are going to miss the people you are soon
leaving,~ she said. 'This feeling is "missing"?' I asked. 'Does
this mean I am feeling "attached" to these people?' 'I think
so,' she said.
I smiled from ear to ear. Unbelievable. It was incredible
how bad a good feeling can feel when you don't know what
it is called or why it is there. I was overjoyed at my
humanness.
I had tried for years to appear attached. I had done so
many things, and in doing so hurt myself so much and yet
persisted because I wanted to appear to have feelings and to
be like everyone else. I could never bear to be told I didn't
care about anyone but myself. I had developed a huge ability
for mental emotions but they were almost never linked to
these awful feelings that affected my heart, my stomach, my
throat, and my shaking hands.
As a teacher. I had failed the day miserably. As a teacher,
I had failed the whole damned week miserably. But I had
passed as a human being with flying colors. I went home
happy at being real and complete.

The Mareks were in no way mirrors. They were nothing at all
like me, and yet I was attached to them. I was moving beyond
the mirror to the real world.

I sat up all night at the Millers', drawing pictures and diagrams
and passing them back and forth in a dialogue about emotions
and the effect people have on one other. Despite the flu, half a
dozen handkerchiefs, several crying bouts, and a lot of pacing
and tablecloth tracing, I emerged from their house carrying
pages of life on paper to hold the slippery concepts in my
mind, build upon them, and understand them. I stole an hour
of much-needed sleep time to do hurried lesson plans for the
next day and took a handful of vitamin C.
The lessons in the classroom seemed miles and miles away
from the lessons I was going through in my own life. Earth
to Donna, Donna to earth, come in please, is anybody home?
Huh? came the answer.

The smiling faces in the staff room had left. The student
teachers on placement here from other universities had now
finished and gone. And yet the relief was too much for my
emotions. When the floodgates opened, I broke down and
finally told my supervising teacher about Vanessa. That was
all I needed. Once it was out, the fear and inadequacy could
no longer eat away at my insides. We talked about why other
people say or do things. I had taken it all onto myself, as I
had the behavior of the men who had capitalized upon my
situation. It was Vanessa's damned ego baggage just as it had
been theirs. She and they could carry their own crap from here
on.

As I taught, I began to come back to life. Each class was
becoming more linked with the last and with the next. I
realized the links between bits of what I was saying, which
had till now been mechanical. disjointed, and totally reliant
upon detailed, step-by-step lesson plans. I involved the children
again, brought music and life and color and objects back into
the lessons. I was just getting back to my old self when the
assessor from my university arrived to watch my lesson and
decide if I would pass or fail.
My assessor, as it turned out, was a sharp, crisp visiting
lecturer who happened to have seen me in Theo Marek's
department when I had given a talk to his students. She was
friendly in a polite matron-like way and I had, despite my
apprehension about her, been pleasant back.
'How was the lesson?' I asked her. 'It was okay, she said.
showing me her notes. I had done brilliantly in comparison
with the totally nonfunctioning, daydreaming, distracted zombie
teacher I had been the week before.
My supervisor was proud of me. I was proud of me, too.
It seemed she had helped pull me out of the quicksand just in
time.

THE MILLERS INVITED the Mareks to tea (with some
prompting and with me on the phone so it appeared
to be my offer). I was anxious because it marked the
acknowledgment that the Marcks were now personal friends
but also because it was the most people I had eaten with
(having company while eating, not just eating in the presence
of bodies).
Sitting at the Millers' table, I spent forever tracing the
tablecloth. folding its corners, and straightening the tiniest
creases. The doorbell rang. I wanted to 'disappear'.
The Mareks came into the room. I had only known them in
their house and it seemed like a comedy that they were here.
I tried not to laugh and yet I wanted to tell them they didn't
fit. But I knew not to so I just giggled to myself and thought
how they didn't realize how odd it was that they were here.
Theo Marek wanted to take a photo. I hate photos. As
much as I try to get one eye to pay attention, the other
simply cannot betray me and off it goes, making me look
like an idiot, or else I look away.
I felt people captured you with photos. They could keep you
there on paper and look into your eyes to see if you were there.
You are exposed and frozen in time on the paper. You cannot
get away. What is worse is just because you are in a photo
doesn't mean you own it. As far as I was concerned, if things
had me in them, they belonged not to me but with me.
I never minded that others were captured like this. They
were part of 'the world', and I had known that many things
that disturbed me didn't worry them for whatever irrational
reason there may be. Looking at their photos gave me a
kind of power and control - a hit-and-run familiarity without
consequences; the kind they seemed to take everyday without
apology or second thought.
'Why do you want to take a photo?' I asked Theo Marek.
'Because we are close to you,' he replied, as though the concept
would make instant sense. The 'my world' defensive part of
me squirmed as the vines of closeness threatened to invade
and wind around me like clammy tentacles. The 'the world'
part felt as vulnerable as brittle glass. Each wrestled with the
other, abandoning me finally to an emotionally exhausted heap
of indifference. I agreed to the photo.
On the way down the hall I put my hand up in front of Theo
Marek's face, spreading my fingers out like a fan. I laughed
quietly to myself at his being safely 'behind bars'.
'What does that mean?' he asked. 'The Donna Williams zoo,
I said. 'Who is in the zoo, though?' he asked, 'You or me?'
He was right, it was him I had put in a cage. But I did
this so openly only if I liked someone and was trying to
reassure myself it was okay to relate. People can't discuss
the walls and bars they cannot see. I had 'put him in a cage'
so openly because I could trust him.
I was concerned about where everyone would sit at the
Millers' dinner table. I didn't want the seats too close and
didn't want to be sitting somewhere where I would be looked
at. Not a lot of choice. Everyone sat down and people did look
at me. I felt like crawling under the table. 'Well, what's going
to happen to you, is your head going to fall off?' asked Dr.
Marek. It made me laugh. No, my head would not fall off, I
told myself. I would manage.
And they're off ... Off they all fired into blah-blah-blah
like horses leaving the starting gate. I tried to stay in tune
but couldn't keep up. By the time I found something to
say, it was generally to raise some linguistic peculiarity I
had picked up in their words rather than a comment on the
topic itself. With all the shifts from one speaker to the next
and with others choosing the topics, I was a few sentences
behind with each topic change.
Carol would have picked her own topic out of the blue
and put on a performance to cover for the fact that she was
not keeping up. She would have either tried to make them
laugh so that she could at least be sure that they were not
angry, or just entertained herself. But instead, I took it on
faith they were enjoying themselves and just watched them
quietly. I did not feel left out and did not feel threatened
that my friends would know each other. I looked at them
and was glad they were my friends. I felt a kind of security.
I smiled to myself as they went on with their blah-blah-blah.
A word struck me, and my mind lit up, and my feelings
spread a smile wall to wall across my face. The word was
'belonging'. I felt a sense of belonging.

IT WAS THE September holidays and my Australian publisher.
Holly Hobby, had asked me to use the break from
my teaching course to fly interstate for my first face-to-face
press interview about the book.

The Journalist sat opposite Willie, Interviewing him about his
views on education. This was one Of Willie's topics. He had
collected clippings and read a lot of books on education and
Inequality.
Having survived for a year as an independent student in
secondary school with no funding to survive on whatsoever,
I had now, at the age of twenty-two, been given an award
for voluntary work I had done and for academic achievement.

The award was a check for $500. Willie could hardly stomach
the hypocrisy and save-the-world martyr back-patting.
The interview was outdoors and Willie had already spoken
to the Journalist over the phone. He gave her three sentences
she could quote him on (including one about seeing the check
I had received as so hypocritical that he suggested using it most
appropriately as toilet paper but had conceded to buy books
with it instead). Willie was guarded and evasive. 'You are
the most evasive person I've ever had to interview,' said the
journalist.
Willie thought he'd done brilliantly. He'd given her an earful
of his armchair politics. The jOurnalist got up from her chair and,
without asking or giving warning, snapped a photo.
My father had seen it. 'I could tell you were just about to
"fly" her,' he said, recalling Willie's previ*olence expression.

This new journalist was here to talk to me about me. There were
no characters to hide behind, no big speeches on well-rehearsed
hoo-ha topics of social inequality or funding for the homeless
or education policies that gave some of the disadvantaged little
choice but to be factory fodder.
This journalist was here to discuss the very images I had
hidden behind all my life, the strategies I had used to appear
as close to 'normal' as one could achieve when one is actually
not. This man was here to speak to me about the very threads
and structure of 'my world' and expose them for my own
country to scrutinize (and the occasional person with heavy
ego baggage to try to cash in on).

Stopping at another strange city on the way, I was about eight
hundred miles away from the city where my next interview
would be held. I waited around the city square waiting for
my flight. I asked directions to the bus that would take me to
the airport.
The woman I spoke to was old, cheerful, and a little too
chatty, even if I did like her voice and its worn-away edges.
'You're not from here,' she said. 'You have to go to the
art gallery before you leave.'
'I don't know how to get to there,' I said. She walked with
me to the bus that was leaving for the art gallery. My plane
was due for boarding in half an hour.
Sitting cheerily on the bus, I felt good with the sun coming
through the window and warming my face. I had brought only
a thin cardigan with me for this trip across two states and it was
windy. I didn't mind so much. Even when physical sensation
was present I was generally unable to tell cold from hunger or
fear or needing to go to the toilet anyway. Generally they all
felt the same, so I ignored the lot.
I realized I didn't know what bus stop to get off for the
gallery. I had never been here so I didn't know what I was
looking for. I saw some bright-colored flowers out of my
window. 'Is this a garden?' I asked the stranger behind me.
' Yes,' she said. 'it's a garden show.' 'Is it far here from the
gallery?' I asked. 'Where do you want to go?' she asked
me. 'Well,' I explained, 'I am going to the gallery and then
catching a plane interstate.' 'What time is your plane?' asked
the woman. 'I have fifteen minutes till check-in time,' I said,
casually glancing at my watch and telling her the precise time
I was expected to board the plane.
This woman looked like her pants had caught fire. 'Look,'
she said hurriedly, her voice climbing higher and higher as I
tried hard to listen to the meaning of her words amid the chaos
of her squealing intonation. 'Get off this bus right now and
catch a taxi straightaway.' She jumped to her feet, pulled the
cord. 'Let her off,' she ordered the driver. Then she pointed
out the nearest possible telephone and told me where I was.
I jumped off the bus and ran.
I knew I was in trouble. I ran to the phone as fast as I could.
I looked for the number of the taxi and finally found it but then
found I had no change. I managed to get some. The taxi arrived
within minutes. He seemed not too confident that I would get
to the airport in time for boarding.
I arrived at the airport fifteen minutes before take-off. The
other passengers had checked in, boarded, and were sitting on
the plane. Holly Hobby had neatly written out the check-in,
boarding, and take-off times for me and was waiting patiently
and confidently eight hundred miles away.
Then the plane was canceled due to mechanical failure. I

I52

couldn't believe it. It seemed everything was falling to pieces.
I made a long-distance call and told Holly Hobby I would be
late.
I went to the toilet, splashed myself with water, and put
my hair up, trying to cool down as I burned up with anxiety
and frustration. It was too late. I was over the top. I took
my bag with me and sat in the toilet cubicle silent-screaming
in the Big Black Nothingness.
I came out of the toilets in time to be put on another plane.
Holly Hobby and her bright red hair were waiting at the
arrival gate. She was a piece of familiarity amid the chaos.
She was meaning after the void.

I had already spoken by phone and in writing to the journalist
I was about to see. I felt reasonably understood and felt he was
a 'safe person'. I let this person see me without my armor and
weaponry. I tried to help him make himself comprehensible
and tried to stay connected to my words as I spoke them, even
though I read them from a script. (I insisted that journalists give
me their questions before the interview so I could take time to
understand them and write out my answers.)
I didn't want to be deaf to my words this time. This was
too important. This wasn't a defensive mind-games session of
someone trying to work out who Donna was. This was Donna
explaining who Donna was. This was not some voyeuristic
exercise on the part of the interviewer. There was a reason
why understanding how I experienced things might be useful.
The interviewer was not interested in getting me on a stage
and keeping me performing, or in winding me up to see how
well I could fire on an intellectual topic. He was here to discuss
who I was and how I worked.
There was none of the tight-lipped, legs-crossed, let's-playpsychiatrist
stance Willie did so well. There was no impression
of my mother (which even scared me), or the I'm-so-rugged
toughic image Willie had taken on from boys in secondary
school. There was no mimicking of endless American sitcoms
and 'finding families' imagery played so well by Carol. Nor
was there any of her larger- than-life, life-of- the-party, cartoon
image stage performance modeled on her teenage friends. This
man was not here to be entertained by two-bit images and
neither was I.
It never occurred to me to question whether I wanted to be
interviewed or that I should have understood and weighed the
implications of becoming known. I merely accepted that I was
to be interviewed, and set about trying to make the best of it.
I traced the pattern of the curtains too many times. I tried to
sit down but got too restless and anxious to stay there. I found
it too sensorially overwhelming, as my emotions, now without
the numbing defense of putting on characters, climbed sky-high
and my sensitivity to brightness and pitch climbed with it. I
wasn't as impressive as I might have been as the characters. But
I was trying to listen. I was trying to understand. I was trying
to be there with my feelings intact and to remain aware of what
I was saying instead of turning on the verbal tap and hoping it
was sense and not verbal diarrhea that was flowing out.
I wasn't polished, but plastic appears polished and I had no
desire to be plastic. Right now, I was proud of myself that I
was very real.
Yes, I thought, there would be skeptics. I had lost enough of
a life in entertaining them in their mind games, their ego games.
their power games, their violence games, and their bedroom
games. In the words of one so-eloquent street person I had
known, they could 'eat shit' for all I cared.

THE SEPTEMBER HOLIDAYS were over and I had gone
home as the teaching course resumed. Back at the university,
in one of the guest lectures before the end of
term, there was a spare seat between me and another student.
joe came and sat in it, beaming one of his Cheshire Cat
grins.
The guest speaker's unfamiliar voice was hard to follow
and I was having trouble latching on to the meaning of his
words. The student sitting next to joe drew me diagrams to
explain what I had had trouble understanding. This made more
sense to me than the lecture.
'Shhh,' snapped joe. I asked him to change places with the
other student, and with a lot of huff and puff he did.
Some other students were discussing various things in a
corner of the room and another was drifting off to sleep.
The student beside me and I sat there communicating through
writing and diagrams. Turning to me, joe snapped, 'I told you
to shut up, his voice brimming with hate and disgust.
The student next to me rolled his eyes, thoroughly familiar
with joe's weekly, if not daily, confrontations with me. He
went on to say something quietly to me when joe interrupted.
'
Listen, slut, I told you to shut up,' he said clearly and loudly
for everyone to hear.
A few students turned around and scowled at me. No
one gave me any look to console me. Why should they?
Wasn't I the weirdo with the odd timing who forgot half
the time to say the ritual 'good morning', 'goodbye', and
'did you have a nice weekend?'
Crawling back within myself, I sank in my chair. I could not
bear the injustice and blurted out just as loudly and clearly,
'It is not my fault if joe said, "Listen slut, I told you to shut
up.
'Why don't you just get out? None of us want you here,
said joe with utter conviction. The faces around us remained
blank. No one put him in his Place, no one even attempted to.
I took this as confirmation they agreed with him.
I stood up. 'Thank you,' I said with all the graciousness I
could muster, 'I've been wanting to leave for some time, but
now that you have given me permission. I think I will.'
I walked straight to the secretary's office. 'Can I have the
work I've handed in so far?' I asked her. 'Oh, and I will be
away for the rest of the day.' I couldn't think. I just wanted
to get all of my things out of this building and to get off
the university grounds. If these were future teachers, then
not much had changed since the ignorance I had faced from
a handful of my own teachers.
'Are you okay?' asked the secretary. 'I can't go back to
any more classes,' I explained.
'Look,' she said. 'Here is joe. He's a bug on the carpet. Stamp
on him.' 'No,' I said, thinking this was the same as if someone
did this to me. 'I can't.' 'Imagine him as a clown, she said. 'He
won't be frightening if you think of him like that. He would be
an embarrassment even to himself.'This helped. Like someone
thrown from a horse, I went and had a cup of black tea and
went to my next class. joe wasn't there.

THE FINAL TEACHING round had arrived. As if it were
fate that as much crap had to land on me as possible, I
found I was placed with Angie, the woman who had
picked on me after the pool incident.
All year I had had trouble with her. I found her staring at
me all the time and then when I would stare back at her to
make her look away she would give me funny looks.
Her big, round eyes and the tone of her voice frightened me.
She seemed to take control, which made me feel powerless in
her company. When I did something that appeared strange
to her she jumped upon it, challenging me directly. I felt
suffocated around her. I was afraid to make a move or say
the wrong word for fear she would ask all the how, what,
where, when, or whys of what I said or did. In frustration,
doors came close to slamming. there were a lot of breaks for
black tea, and a lot of mirror conversations in the solitude of
the toilets.
Angie caught me by surprise. 'I see we're on the final teaching
round together,' she said. She had been separated from her best
friend for the final round and was glad to be with someone she
knew.
I compared this to how I might feel if I were now meant
to stay away from home anywhere without Travel Dog and
I felt sorry for her. Angie's best friend had come through
many years with her, and throughout the course, they had
been strength and belonging for one another. I admired their
friendship even if, in ridicule and exclusion, I had sometimes
felt myself a victim of it. Angle was able to achieve and
hold what I could not: a permanent ongoing friendship with
someone she was emotionally close to.
For my final teaching round, I would again be working
with those of high-pitched-voice fame and sometimes-tootactile
disposition; the youngest children in the school - the
four- and five-year-olds. I would be working with those most
notorious for stretching stress-capacity and looking for the you
in there.

Arriving at the school, I was met by the woman who was to
supervise me. She seemed the epitome of the prim and proper
schoolmistress right down to the well-ironed clothes and the
hair neatly in its place. Willie would have been impressed.
Her room was orderly and categorized and I felt incredibly
grateful for that. At least visually I would be able to function
in this room without the blindness of distractions.
The wall of windows let natural light into the room, and the
rows of tables on either side of the room and the large amount
of space to work with made me feel free and not so closed in.
There was a large blackboard and a huge array of objects
and visual-tactile resources to use. I still had my guitar, as
well, so there would be music and movement through which
to learn.
Words were used with rhythm, music, actions, and image.
Words were something the children and I could talk 'through'
and not just 'with'. We explored them as far more than mere
assaults upon the ears, distancing weaponry, or vehicles for
other knowledge. I used words in this class with the intimacy
and love for them as objects that had led to my own compulsive
and obsessive exploration of them, their feel, their variations,
their categories, and their use as playthings.
The children had a separate recess purely for play. Not
having much of a clue to how to facilitate direct interaction
between people as people (as opposed to people as cases or
people-objects), I just let the children do what children do so
often naturally: mix.
Instead of spending this time buried in a book I hung about
and looked for the patterns in what they were doing. Outside
of my face, I smiled for them. Inside of my face. I cried for
me. Sometimes tears rolled down my peacefully smiling face
and I moved my glasses and wiped them away. I was their
teacher and yet I was aware and deeply moved by just how
much I was here to learn from them.
I tried to sit in the staff room. I tried to remember to ask
questions instead of just answering those thrown at me. I tried
to listen and be polite. I busied myself in my lesson plans during
breaks.
'HI,' said Angie, calling me over to sit with her. I was frightened.
She had seemed so unpredictable. Right now, though, she
was nervous about this final round and feeling isolated without
her friend. Eventually I confided in her how I had been afraid
of her.
She seemed surprised to find she had been so frightening and
intimidating and I was relieved to learn it was not intentional
and was more often than not due to misunderstandings.
She had been disturbed by my inability both to work out
when to stop looking at someone and to pick up some of
the subtle messages she felt she and others were giving. This
had made her wonder whether I was quite right in the head
or not. My cleverness seemed to give weight to the idea that I
was just insolent rather than ignorant or struggling under the
weight of a processing problem.
Angie also told me that she had found many of the students
threatening and perhaps especially me. 'You've done so much
with your life,' she said. 'What have I done? Nothing. I've
lived at home with my family all my life. I went straight
from school to college to the university. I still have the same
friends I've had all my life.' Listening to her talk about living
at home with her family, being close to them, keeping the
same friends for years, going straight through school to the
university, and being involved in her own cultural community,
I felt impressed by her achievements, which were some of the

The lecturer arrived for the final assessment, which would make
or break us as teachers. Our drama lecturer at the university was
to do the assessment. She had been understanding throughout
the year but she was by no means an easy marker.
I met one of the fellow student teachers in the hall. Her marks
had been harsh but fair. Another had been surprised at getting
good results from the supervisor's observation of her teaching.
Angie and I were the last to be assessed.

It was a stinking hot summer afternoon and the children
were sweaty, niggling, and tired. The lesson for the afternoon's
assessment was on science. Twenty~five pairs of distracted
beady little eyes were peering around the room and I commanded
their attention as I played my guitar, gently keeping
the rhythm as I spoke.
(I don't feel well, Miss,' came a squeaky little whine adjoined
to a hand in the air. It seemed she had decided that
the two children already resting up were doing something
better than joining the class. Another decided this looked
like a good strategy and said the same. Having directed them
to separate corners of the room to rest up in beanbags, I
discussed what we were going to be doing so that the children
knew where I was taking them.
I began to play my guitar rhythmically again as I spoke,
raising and lowering my voice like the ocean tide. The lesson
was an original composition for which I had choreographed
actions. The children would learn through music, singing,
movement, drama, and art. They would learn through their
eyes and ears, and through touch.
As we learned about the life cycle of plants, the children
in 'sick bay' seemed to come to life. 'I feel better now,' said
one, rejoining the group. 'I feel better now, too,' said another.
I continued to play and sing and direct the bodies around me
as I silently instructed the dissenters and casualties with the
occasional pointing finger or directed stare.
Intuitively I knew what was going on in all peripheries and
even behind me, and directed children by name who were out
of sight. I was so calm and tuned out that I was totally tuned
in. I felt I was not teaching but conducting and directing and
learning along with the children.
My lesson went like clockwork as the children were moved
through the lesson step by step. Holding onto the whole
picture, approaching it again and again from every different
angle, the children were given the chance to take the floor
and demonstrate their learning.
My assessment was excellent. The lecturer was amazed, not
because she hadn't expected it from me, but because of the
way I taught, my hyperawareness of the moving parts of the
goals, and my good sense of pacing. My lesson had pattern and
rhythm, it was visual and concrete, and everyone owned their
own learning and could find their own level of strength while
still exercising and building upon their weaknesses. The dancing
and music, the logic and the flow, the structure and the consistency,
gave me everything I needed to teach a lesson well.
Angie had passed well, too. This woman I had feared and I
congratulated one another, our faces in a dialogue of genuine
smiles.
Despite my excellent assessment, none of it gave me a sense
of real achievement. Although I had taught without Willie and
Carol's help. I was still using stored~up voices, stored facial
expressions. and stored movements. I was still moving too fast
to be aware of how I did what I did. Like some disembodied
mind I was still on automatic pilot. I was the captain of the
ship but I was still using controls to run the ship that I'd
had little time to get to know or call mine. The assessment
confirmed that I had the ability to teach, but it didn't make
me feel like a teacher. I could sculpt, paint, compose, and
speak foreign languages, too, but I couldn't keep up with
these automatic abilities in action. I was a computer with
slow monitoring, both internally and externally. I was good
at things but that didn't mean I felt for them. Ironically I
could personally get more out of sweeping the floor than I
could from something 'the world' would applaud.

THERE WERE JUST a few more classes to go to finish off
the course. Caught up in the feeling that we had survived
the final rounds, serious business was far from the minds
of many, including mine. I was given a letter by the head of
the department. I opened it up and felt I was going to be ill.
It was an appointment to come and discuss my course results.
The letter said that I had been failed by the visiting lecturer
who had seen me on my previous German teaching round.
But at the time, the lecturer had told me that my lesson had
been okay. I couldn't understand.
I knocked upon the lecturer's door. She opened it, looked
at me briefly, and turned away to continue packing up her
things for the day. 'I' in a hurry,' she said. 'I don't have
time to discuss it. I'll be away. My colleague will speak to
you about it on my behalf and decide what action to take.'
The appointment with the head of the department was set for
the following week.
I spoke to some of the other students. They were surprised. I
spoke to the lecturer who had assessed my final teaching round.
She had found my teaching flawless and marked me as excellent.
She was astounded. I spoke to Kerry, who suggested it might
have had something to do with the visiting lecturer having seen
my talk in Theo Marek's department.
I knocked on the lecturer's door again. I insisted on knowing
upon what grounds she had decided to fail me. 'Look, this
is a teaching qualification,' she said. 'It's not just a piece of
paper that gives someone the right to go out there and be in
a position of responsibility and teach. We don't want anyone
killing anybody.'
I was shocked and confused. I had never hit the children. I
had never even threatened to. My form of discipline with the
children was much more to discuss their behavior with them
after the class, try to understand how they saw it and whether
they thought it was fair and what should be done about it.
I established discipline in the course of a class by setting
out the rules at the beginning of each class, getting feedback
that the rules were understood, warning dissenters, and then
distancing them from the other students in order to keep the
class going. I kept the class in control and my use of a strong,
low, calm voice in the face of challenges was more effective than
any raised voice or threat. I was always consistent - systematic
but fair. Discipline, according to my assessments, had been one
of my strongest, fairest points as a teacher and had won me
respect from the students as well as supervisors. I could not
imagine that any teacher or student ever feared I would kill
someone. Could my talk on autism or the Department of
Child Behavior have conjured up such bizarre images?

A week later I had my meeting with the head of the department.
The teaching round for which the visiting lecturer had
assessed me had been taught in German. This was part of an
additional teaching qualification I had taken on to be a teacher
of languages other than English. There was no doubt that this
was an area in which I was skilled. Nevertheless, explained
the department head, if I would accept to pass merely as
a generalist teacher and forfeit this additional qualification,
they could use this as a loophole to disregard the failing
assessment. I had little choice. I accepted and passed with
qualifications to be a teacher in English alone. I never told
the head of the department what this lecturer had said to
me. There seemed no room for discussion and nobody asked
me my side of things. The lecturer herself was away for the
meeting.

The Marcks had arranged a goodbye dinner for me at their
house. I was off to the United Kingdom to publicize my
book. The Millers came, too, and I was free to wander about
if it was all too much. My emotions overwhelmed me, my
hearing became painfully acute, and the meaning fell out of
everything everyone said and did.
I fell headlong into a silent movie where the meaning was
turned off and the volume was up full blast. I began to shake
from head to foot, and tears welled up as the muscles in my
ears contracted with the amplified sound of rushing blood to
add to the meaningless cacophony.
'Put cotton wool in your ears,' someone said, aware by now
of the signs. No, I snapped silently to myself. I'm not a
freak.
I was equal to everybody else here. And yet my body tended
not to agree. I left for the living room before losing control.
It was like my body attacked itself, making me a pin cushion
into which pins were stuck ever harder until I gave in or
suffered the consequences of shutdown. But I wanted to stay
in the company of my friends.
Theo Marek left the room, I put out my hand to his wife.
I had come to trust her and feel secure in her familiarity. She
looked rather surprised but pleased as I shook her hand, equally
pleased with myself.
I had spent a long time making the transition from doing
mirror hands with myself to shaking my own hand in order
to comprehend the action and be fully aware of the sensation
without cutting it off. I had spent my life disappearing from
people's lives to avoid goodbyes and the associated feelings (or
the frustrating lack of them in the face of expectations to have
them). I had avoided the inevitable efforts at touch. Until now
such touch had always negated closeness and left me feeling so
very glad to be going. It seemed so freeing now to finally have
a shared way of saying goodbye with feelings.
Theo Marek reentered the room. I looked at him like a lion
I was about to reach out to. His ability to understand me and
affect me were his claws and teeth.
I put my hand out toward him. He couldn't help but smile.
I shook his hand without treating him like he had leprosy.
The look in my eyes was genuine. The shy smile fighting
with my face was far from plastic. I had come to mean a
great deal to the Mareks, and Theo Marek knew that this
handshake was given with forethought and meaning and trust
and friendship.

iT WAS APPROACHING Christmastime. I had only ten days
between the end of the teaching course and getting on a
plane to meet my literary agent and United Kingdom
publisher for the first time. I tidied away the year's teaching
materials, boxed up one-third, gave away another third,
and threw away another third.
I had spent most of my life trying to fulfill expectations
and fit in. I had gone into teaching to pass the time but also
to challenge my defenses by facing my difficulties head on.
The fact that I made a good teacher was both relevant and
irrelevant. It meant nothing to the choice to continue but it
created something too easy to play to and hide within and
behind: expectation. Teaching had served its purpose but to
take it on as 'Donna's goal in life' would in time become stored,
mechanized, and automatic. It had been a good bridge but there
were bigger challenges. Somewhere, sometime, I would find not
a cause but a place, not a group, but a special someone whose
expectations and needs I would not fulfill but who would
find, admit, come to terms with, and fulfill needs within
me. Classrooms were not so far removed from audiences.
I didn't need to be idolized, needed, or wanted. I needed
to love to need and to want. It is hard to find your own
wants standing before a room of puppy eyes and outstretched
hands. I had spent my life denying them. I wasn't going to
find them here. Autistic children generally wouldn't reach
out with these puppy eyes and outstretched hands but my
compulsion to meet their needs would surely overshadow my
own and that was just what my defenses wanted. My defenses
could go to hell. This was my life.
The course over. I sat down to serious business and together
with the Millers' daughter, we made a tall, life-sized, homemade
cardboard cut-out of a Christmas tree. We decorated it with
scraps of shiny paper, glitter, and cut-out stars. Then we
hung it on the door of my apartment. Kerry would be moving
in after I left and it would be there to make her feel
welcome.
My friend Tim showed up In time to help me put together
the Millers' tree. Together with the Millers' daughter, the three
of us went into rapture (mostly me) over the various kinds
of tinsel and colored plastic decorations. I raced outside to
bring in some presents I had already bought and wrapped. I
gave Tim the one I had wrapped for him. It was a painting
of the countryside, which I was going to miss: a lake at
dawn, surrounded by shadows caught by tall blades of grass.
It was the sort of picture that conjured up the sounds of
birds in the morning and the feel of bare feet on stubbles of
dried grass and golden clay. This used to be the best kind
of Christmas: a hit-and-run Christmas where I wouldn't be
there to share it. Yet a lot had changed. I now wished I was
going to be there to celebrate.

Tim and I sat among the fallen orange pine needles of the small
pine tree cluster at the foot of the farm. It was a warm feeling:
a feeling of home, which I felt I was leaving. I looked into
his eyes, spoke as myself, and felt - all at the same time. We
discussed how far our paths had come. 'It's been six years,' I
said. 'Thanks for believing.' Thanks for sticking with it. Thanks

I64

for being able to see the real me. Thanks for insisting I live
with myself, I thought to myself.
Saying goodbye to Tim, I didn't want him to try to hug
me anymore. I wanted to know what it was not to be inflicted
upon (even though I had coped better with Tim than
anyone else). I wanted to know what it was like to want
to hug this person I knew I felt for. 'Can I hug you?' I
asked, unsure of how one announces such things but feeling
it was surely fair to do so. I felt somehow that by announcing
it, the expression of this want was not undeniable and
I would have to follow it through. 'Of course you can,'
said Tim. I managed to stay with the feeling long enough
to know it. 'That is the first time I have been the first to
pull away,' Tim said. We both smiled.

T WAS THE final day before boarding a plane to go overseas
for the first time since writing Nobody Nowhere. On the
way I would land in another state in Australia and do
more publicity for Holly Hobby.
I went out walking in the night and said goodbye to the
farm and the city I'd grown up in. Something within me
knew I'd only really come back to go to a few funerals
and say goodbye. Some things are a part of the way. Some
things are where you are going.
Goodbyes to the Millers had come in the midst of Christmas
and other confusions. They had been a great help to me and
had spent many late nights sitting up with me defining and
illustrating a hundred and one elusive social and emotional
concepts, expectations, conventions, and rules. We had gone
over everything from mock interviews to herd mentality.
The Millers were going to take me to the airport. Tim had
always wanted to but I had never allowed him. But there
were no more battle lines now. Both Tim and the Millers
could take me to the airport. I warned them all, 'You know
I may feel nothing. I may say a blunt and casual goodbye
and leave as though I am just going to do my shopping.'
They understood and accepted.

I65

I
It was too much. I was woozy with so much newness and the
almost irreconcilable image of Tim standing together with the
Millers, chatting occasionally. These people were from different
times in my life. different situations, and spoke in different
ways. Strangely the only consistency was that I had been the
same self with each of them. Yet I couldn't hold together
what was happening, or follow it too well. I decided just to
have a little faith and let it be.
It was time to go through the departure gates. I was having
trouble enough keeping up with three people and two children
talking, and keeping track of the sequence of moves
involved in boarding a plane. I stood at the gateway and
shook hands with the Millers.
I looked at Tim. He knew I was sorry that in all the confusion
and overload, my capacity for emotion had simply abandoned
me. There was no interpretation of the events happening. I
hadn't managed to get that far with everything happening
at once. And yet no characters emerged. 'You knew this
would probably happen,' I said to him, speaking a language
he understood already without explanation. 'I'll probably fall
apart in the toilets on the plane in about an hour when it all
hits me.' He wouldn't be there then.
It would take that long for the blocked sink to clear. By
then, all the emotions would be robbed of their context.
There would be no Millers, no Tim and no Mareks. There
would just be me with myself in the immediate context of
an airplane toilet, several thousand feet up in the air. Silent
screaming and tears without understanding would be my traveling
companions, with little more than rocking as a release to
comfort me and keep me sane.
Contextless emotions. God must have an incredible imagination
to have created such a thing. But God probably knew
where I was going in this life. There probably could have
been no greater guarantee against a disturbing environment
in which I had always remained detached and almost alien in
my resilience.

I66

THE BRIGHT CITY lights of another Australian state were
a good transition to the huge changes ahead. The state
was unfamiliar enough to shake me up and yet familiar
enough to get used to in small doses.
It was one thing to make great flying leaps when I was
alone and free like a leaf in the wind. That had always been
part of the freedom of untouchability and escape. Now I was
embarking upon journeys where people would be aware of my
every move. My days would be thoroughly planned and filled
up with people I would have to see on an ongoing basis as
myself. All my life I'd avoided planned meetings and dates;
they were like social cages where I could be held to time and
place and be scrutinized. I couldn't just tell the journalists and
publishers we'd run across each other sometime. in the usual
hit-and-run style I'd been used to.
In my hotel room, I discovered room service, and the drama
of getting all the steps going in cooking were suddenly unbelievably
simple: the menu was unfamiliar to me, the food was
unfamiliar to me, so I went out and bought some groceries
and cooked for some of the time instead.
My washing was washed with my body in the bath as usual.
then wrung out and hung to dry around the room. Eventually
I made sense of the cards about laundry service but spent a
long time contemplating whether I could cope with other
people taking my clothes away and deciding to bring them
back when they were ready. I stuck to the bath system.
'Don't go walking around at night in the city,' the Millers
and the Mareks and my publisher had said. I stood barefoot
instead on the gravel-paved balcony. I looked at the symmetry
of various patterns of city lights, their colors, and
the sharp contrast of the vitality of the city with the serious
and ever consistent deep blueness of the night sky hanging
overhead. It rained. I stood out in it; big drops of fresh water
fell on my outstretched hands.

Holly Hobby was waiting in the hotel lobby. I was glad to see
her familiar face. Her red hair was a guarantee she was a nice
person even if it came from a bottle. It was frightening to speak
to people without anyone to copy or mirror, without searching

I67

MAIN

5~
I

Kt ^I
and constantly anticipating the correct or expected response.
How did she become herself and be there to greet me so easily,
so breezily? I was in awe of the ease with which others seemed
to master some of the most difficult things, and yet these were
the things they labeled Csimple', 'natural', and 'instinctual'.

The first journalist reminded me of a friend of mine. There
seemed no point to me in the ego exercise of seeing 'how well
we could make the autistic woman speak'. I knew damned
well this would suffice for ten-minute meetings or intellectual
reel-offs of well-rehearsed topics. This would not suffice for
personal topics about a life I now felt was more than just 'the
Donna case' *
I didn't want to answer the reporters' questions on the basis
of fifteen to fifty percent comprehension. I wanted to be sure
I was answering on the basis of at least eighty percent. Having
the questions on paper in the intimacy of my own undistracted
space. I could cut out the effects of anxiety, distraction, and
confusing verbal waffle. I could see what I was saying and what
I wanted to say. I would not be forced to speak, deaf to the
meaning of my own words. I was not a freak in a circus or some
exploited performing animal forced to do impressions of human
stunts with no understanding of why. I deserved no less humanity
than others did even if mine was a hidden disability.

It was time to fly off to the United Kingdom. I called Theo
Marek to say goodbye before leaving my country. I was full
of the weight of sad. The blocked-sink effect was beginning
to clear. I was getting the effects of the events from two days
and several goodbyes before. I thought of why I was there
and why I had even decided to let the book be published. I
would manage. I would have to.

ARRIVED IN Sri Lanka on the way to the United Kingdom.
I didn't know where I was staying. I just knew I had a ticket
that wasn't an airline ticket for somewhere and that it had
something to do with a place called Goldy Sands. Having
come through customs with the mass of sweaty baggage and

I68

sweaty people carrying it, I found myself standing about not
knowing what to do or where to go.
I followed some people holding tickets that looked like mine.
They were being ferried through a gateway and shoved into
clusters. They held out their tickets. I looked from them to the
attendants and held out mine, too. I got shoved into a cluster
of people.
'Come on,' said the attendant, and I followed. Herd mentality.
Stick with the herd, Donna. We were ushered into
the Sri Lankan version of a taxi.
We were driven to the hotel and given keys. I took to my
room like a mouse chased by a cat to its mouse hole. My
old friend the ocean was outside of my window. I tuned
into the rhythm of the tide until I became it as I stood on
the balcony, and the sun went down.
I didn't know what one did about eating in a place like this.
As it turned out I already had vouchers for meals as part of my
ticket. 'You should go on a tour,' said the attendant. I forgot
the 'little old lady, buses, and art gallery' rule and went with
a Sri Lankan stranger in his 'taxi'.

'You married? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you like Sri
Lanka? Do you like Sri Lankan men? Do you like men? Have
you ever had a boyfriend? Are you afraid of AIDS? Would
you like to get married? Would you like to get married to me?'
The taxi driver went on and on as I answered each question
honestly. It wasn't until he got to the last question and he
explained his intentions that I understood what was happening.
I thought that it was a sort of factual quiz, a culture study on his
behalf, or that maybe he was into sociology or something.
I felt so worried and sick after this that I didn't really
notice where we were going or really see the sights of Sri
Lanka. I tried to stay focused on what Mr. Miller had told
me: 'Herd mentality'. That's what I had done wrong. Damn
it, I had strayed from the herd.
'Don't answer their questions,' Mr. Miller had told me. 'If
they persist, tell them you're not interested in talking.' 'I'm
not interested in talking,' I said mechanically to the driver,
echoing Mr. Miller's sound advice. The driver persisted. 'I'm

I69

.Ikn
not interested in talking,' I said again looking out the window
thinking, Thanks Mr. Miller. The driver finally shut up. Back
at the hotel I paid him and raced back to my room.

LIFE WAS Aboard game, the dice had been thrown, and
was to move forward a few more spaces.
The plane touched down in London and Santa Claus
was there to greet me as I came through customs.
My literary agent was a white-haired old English gentleman
who sounded like the King of England and looked like Santa
after a shave. 'You're shaking,' I said to him. 'So I am,' he
answered.
He was a warm person with rosy pink cheeks, a cheerful
disposition, and a very strange sense of humor. He took me to
the hotel chosen for my stay: a little cottage-style hotel right
down to the floral curtains, in the middle of London. It had
clack-clack -clack birthday cake chandeliers and mirrors.
There was so much to take in. My head was spinning. I
had to meet my English publisher, my English public relations
person, my foreign literary agent representing me in the United
Kingdom and all of these people would know each other and be
constantly in touch. For the first time I was to work for more
than one boss at a time and be the same person with each and
every one of them. I would learn what it was to experience
myself consistently and find security in having a network of
people to catch me if I fell. I was no longer walking tightropes
up so high, so I would never again have so far to fall.
My days were planned, my notebook was full of names
other than my own, the space under the dates filled up with
appointments and train station names. directions and things
required to bring.
Carol could have strutted into the publishing house playing
'social'. Willie could have spoken to them in interview mode.
But these people were there to meet me. It was me they knew
through my writing, my faxes, my phone calls. Anyone in the
street could have been taught how to do Carol's parrot impressions
or Willie's monkey-see, monkey-do impressions. You
don't travel ten thousand miles to put on a cheap stage show.

I70

mY ENGLISH PUBLISHER was the first person to be
working with me who didn't shake when meeting me.
I was impressed. I had grown accustomed to people's
being unsure around me, even confused or perplexed, but the
shaking was just too much. I couldn't be that unpredictable,
strange, or awesome could I?

Carol stood on the platform at Waterloo station. She had
followed a stranger to this place, as she had so many other
strangers to so many other places. It was all too much. Under
the fa~ade she was sick of it all. She was sick to death of it all.
The trapped feeling of living under a fa~ade she couldn't break
out Offound its way into the lure of train tracks. She had beard
that ten people a day I*Umped onto the railway tracks in Bri*tat*n.
Hmmm, imagine all my bits splattered down there, she thought
wz*th amusement, standing close to the edge at the edge of the
platform as the train approached. It whisked past her face and
she smiled as though she were merely facing into the wind.
'Not today,' she thought. 'I'm meant to be at work. Got to
go to work.' Instead of I*umping in front of it, she jumped into
z . t and went to her I*0b, where she worked as a temp clerk.

The lights were damned bright. Adrenalin was running through
my veins and noise was already climbing up through the
roof despite the cotton wool in my cars. It would have been
so easy to 'disappear'. It would have been too easy. Being
numb and unaffected, being someone other than yourself,
is simply too addictive when being affected is so difficult
and so sensorily overwhelming.
My publisher had understood this. I had explained the mechanics
and demanded that we adjust the environment until I
got used to it so that I would be able to feel for and experience
and fully comprehend what I was doing and why. I wanted to
be able to guarantee that I would not suddenly pack a rucksack
and disappear on the whole operation, leaving their money and
effort tossed away like refuse down a well-flushed toilet.
My war had become so complex and reinforced that it had
taken on its own momentum until not even I could call it off.
It had strangled all experience of my own actions, and life was

I7I

I

on,- I

la~' just
a great long game of strategies and battle tactics to hide
the flaws, holes, and deficits. The emptiness was so complete,
life had become a living death. I knew the war would one day
mean I'd end up in front of a train and me and the war would
be gone in less than a minute. Publishing the book would force
me to lay down my weapons.
I also knew there were others like me out there who would
go on living day to day because no one could understand their
wars either. Even if I could condemn myself, I could not be
responsible for having had a choice and chosen to damn them,
too. It would have been the damnation of a world of symbolic
me. The stakes were simply too high.
Money and the elusive bullshit concepts of 'success' and
'fame' meant nothing. They were just theories. Beyond this
I could not understand them. These concepts belonged on TV
screens. I could have walked out on such rot without a second
thought. But if I chose to turn my back on the publication of
the book. I would be turning my back on myself. I would
be headed for the train tracks and no amount of 'the world'
money or promises could have brought me back.
I must have looked like I was crawling the walls. The
publisher thought it was a good idea to go to the park for
our first meeting. It would be outdoors, so neither light nor
noise would bounce wall to wall making the i-neeting even
harder than it was bound to be.
The lack of control that came from commitment and escape
strategies to cut down overload or bail out twisted my
stomach into knots. I seemed to be heading toward shutdown.
Walking past the colored lights and rainbows shining
brilliantly in the reflected light of a chandelier in an Indian
take-out shop, I blew a fuse.
Meaning entirely fell out of all things visual. I didn't know
what the visual image of the form next to me, which a few
seconds ago had been my publisher, meant anymore. I looked
desperately at this image trying to get the meaning back. All
I knew was that the image was meant to be familiar. I found
the name for the image. The name had no meaning. It told me
nothing of its significance or relationship to me. All I knew was
that it had to stay there and not move. I was blind and even

I72

4

this bit of meaningless familiarity was better than none at all.
I looked at the flat, cold surface next to me and tapped it.
'Window,' I said, naming it, trying to get the words to connect
again. Cbt*nk, chink, said the cold, flat surface, and the word fell
from my mouth with no connection between the two except my
stubborn, insistent belief that the two were meant to connect.
The empty word fell on my own deaf ears and I cried. I felt
totally helpless to get my brain to reconnect.
'Lights,' I said, looking through the window of the shop,
making a connection. I turned away. I felt the muscles tensing
in my neck. It was like I had eaten a bag of lemons. I winced.
'We'll walk, I ordered, suddenly surprised I had found a
phrase. Great, I was coming back.
I was so totally ashamed. I felt like I had wet myself in
public. I felt so disgusted in myself, so let down. Yet I looked
at my publisher and named her. I felt I could trust her. She
hadn't freaked out. She hadn't run about like a mad hen. She
hadn't gone into verbal blah-blah-blah, making overload worse
or forcing dissociation. She hadn't slapped me, trying to make
me 'come back'. She just stood there waiting for me.
We walked for twenty minutes and each step was another
step back into 'the world'. The meaning and wholeness of
experiences fell back into place, piece by piece, to the pattern
and rhythm of my own footfall and the familiarity of my
publisher's safe presence. If she had coped with that, that was
the worst of it. There would be no need to run from these
people. If I couldn't cope, they would understand.

MY PUBLIC RELATIONs person had silky blonde hair
and a soft but sure voice. She was lovely but she
shook. Eventually we got used to each other. She became
my 'the world' eyes and ears. I could only take everything
said as statements, but she was able to see subtle and double
meanings and )udge the relative significance of journalists'
questions and 'where they were going'.
I was asked what happened to Willie and Carol. I was asked
about sex, sexuality, and men. I was asked about my family. I
was asked about childhood abuse. 'But surely you must think

I73
I

I'

that abuse affected you?' I was asked again and again and again.
In my mind I saw my mother. I saw fifteen years of me unable
to relate to her directly and, at times when I was capable, I
saw me ignoring her as irrelevant to 'my world'. But surely
you must think that abuse affected her? I thought. Sometimes
abuse is neither visual nor intentional.
Finally I spelled it out for them. I had feared closeness,
so I didn't suffer so much for rejection. I had been fiercely
controlling and independent, so I didn't suffer so much for
neglect. I had been a world unto myself and I was my own
family, so I didn't suffer so much from the lack of belonging.
My persecutor didn't have my advantages.
I took the journalists out for walks. They could know my
thinking and words through writing, they could know me by
spending time in my company outdoors simply being.

I
T WAS CHRISTMAs day and Santa Claus was gone on
vacation from the literary agency. My publisher, foreign
publishing agent, and public relations person all disappeared
to live their own lives. I came to understand the division
between business and friendship. When it comes down to it,
friendship doesn't take a vacation at Christmas but business
does.
I sat alone on the floor of my cozy shoebox room in the
hotel. My stomach ached with a sense of homesickness for
a home I did not have. I painted a picture entitled 'Home'.
I imagined I was in this elusive place. It was a picture of a
place I had never been to except in my mind. There were
wildflowers and distant hills, tall grass to dance in, and wild
birds flying across a pink sunrise sky.
I went walking around the streets among the street people
of inner London's Christmas atmosphere.
I had arrived in London to see beggars in droves, and after
giving away around three pounds every day, I finally was
enlightened by my publisher and agent.
It wasn't that I was charitable. It was just that by the time
I struggled to make sense of what beggars said to me, they
were well into the details of their well-rehearsed spiels, saying

I74

precisely what they wanted money for. I found myself again
and again actually telling them to wait, and I would buy them
something to eat after having been told they needed money
because they were hungry and wanted to buy food.
The sudden fall into a total lack of structure after days
and days of appointments and involvement with people left
me swimming in space so free it was overwhelming. In my
pre-diabetic state I forgot something else. I totally forgot to
eat. With severe hypoglycemia, I was supposed to eat every
two to four hours.

I went to a Christmas movie. Alone in one of the back rows.
I was lost and in a dream. As the pace of the movie climbed,
my blood-sugar level plummeted.
I walked out of the cinema not sure where I was. I was drifting
into a sleep state. My conscious thoughts were like wispy
clouds drifting by and hard to grasp. This place looks awfully
strange for Australia, came one of my own drifting, wispy
cloud-thoughts. It's London. It's London, I reminded myself
trying to make sense of the word London as it drifted by. jet
lag couldn't take this long to catch up. Something is wrong, I
thought suddenly. I felt slapped by the contrast of a thought
that struck home with feeling and significance. Fear filled my
stomach with rocks. Oh my God, I thought, I am asleep.
I was scared. I knew I was in trouble but my cloud-thoughts
wouldn't let me stay on track enough to work out why. Where
was I living? Which way was home? What did 'home' mean?
Oh no. Meaning- shutdown. Oh shit.
I wandered around the wintery streets crying, feeling homeless
and helpless. The feeling triggered a memory: stray cats,
cobblestone laneways, my duffle coat around me to keep out
the cold.

Carol pulled the hood of her 'mobile home' over her head
and buried her hands in her pockets. She had had the coat
since she was twelve but it still fit her now at the age of
seventeen. She sang as she walked along, each street loz'nz'ng
the next, on and on and on to nowhere in particular. She
found herself in a schoolyard. A piece of an amber bottle sat

I75

at her feet. She picked it up and held it to her eye. looking
through t't up at the moon. Colored glass, she thought. She
threw it to the ground, where it broke into pz'eces. She bent
down and gathered up the pieces to take home and put in a
shoebox. She would put all the pieces in a sboebox and make
a cellophane lid for it and she would gather all sorts ofpteces of
colored glass and shake them about, listening to the tinkle they
made and watching the colors rush like they do when you run
your fingers through colored beads.

I had on a long, black coat. My hand upon it, I was deeply
shocked. How on earth did I get my duffle coat back? came a
dense cloud-thought. No, it's my long, black coat, I answered
myself, my waking mind wrestling with the one drifting off
to Never-Never- Land. Phew! 'Long, black coat', 'London'
- I tried to string the concepts together in a mind that had
suddenly shut the doors, turned out the lights, and was in
a vacuum. I continued to fall into a void, the end of which
I knew was the Big Black Nothingness. To fall into a deep
sleep while sleep-walking and sleep-talking in a strange city is
the stuff nightmares are made of.
I wandered past a hotel that looked familiar. That's your
room, I told myself. My words were wispy clouds and made
no connection to consequences as they fell upon deaf ears. I
passed my own hotel and was headed nowhere. just don't
get on a train, I told myself, a dense cloud leaving some
trace of impact. Don't go to the ocean. I knew that if I did
either of those things, anything could happen in this floating
sleep-walking state.
I wandered down another street. It was dark. I had been
walking for ages. I hadn't eaten all day. With hypoglycemia,
my blood-sugar level must have been dangerously low and
my ability to focus mentally was hopeless. My brain was a
sieve. If I had come up with the word 'food', I wouldn't have
worked out what it meant, let alone what to do about it.
Some men were gathered in front of a house as I sauntered
past on my way nowhere. I was captured by the pattern of black
and white squares they were standing on. 'Scatar,' sneered one
of them. 'Scatar,' I echoed back in his own accent, and spat

I76

suddenly and automatically upon the footpath, unaware of
the significance of having called out 'slut' in Macedonian. I
continued to walk ahead in a daze. The men got into a car,
their words and actions a thousand miles away.
'Malaka,' shouted one viciously out the window as they
casually drove along beside me, calling me 'shit' in his own
language. 'Malaka,' I echoed in the man's own accent.
A sense of danger struck a chord sharply. I could make
no sense of it. 'Walk,' I heard myself silently say, thinking
in a version of my mother's voice, the thunderclap of a
storm cloud-thought. If anything was going to motivate me
to move and move quickly, that was. Willie was back and
probably just in time. 'Get to the hotel,' he said to himself
in a sharp and cutting order that broke through my cloudy
consciousness like cold water over someone sleeping. It was
like being back in my family. Understanding and fear were
irrelevant. My feet followed automatically.
Like a robot, I walked at a fast and mechanical pace. MY
feet kept time with my own heartbeat, which had now change~
from a dead pace to the speed of a metronome on allegro.
This was probably the first adrenalin rush, a reaction by the
brain to the liver to break down food stores and maintain
consciousness. It couldn't have come at a better time. The
men had passed me and hopefully given up.
At each corner, Willie, the eyes in the darkness, shouted
mentally to turn. I was half asleep in the shadows. My feet
turned. Out in front of the hotel, Willie said mentally to
himself, 'This is it.' I stood there fighting, a soldier rebelling
against unintelligible commands of the commander. 'This is
what?' I thought in wispy cloud-thoughts, not working out the
significance. 'Get inside,' Willie said to himself, doing a mental
imitation of my mother. Again I felt struck by a thunderclap.
I knew this was a familiar hotel. I knew I was staying
here. But the 'I' and the 'hotel' and the 'staying' were all
floating concepts, purely theoretical, totally without personal
significance and thoroughly unconnected.
Key in hand, I opened the door to the room I knew in
theory belonged to the person with my name. I knew nothing
more than that the things in this room also belonged to this

I77
I

-gw
person and that this was the safest place to be right now.
I realized my blood-sugar level was probably dangerously
low but couldn't translate that beyond the word 'danger'. I
couldn't work out the consequences it ought to have had for
cooking and eating, let alone manage the order and mechanics
of the acts in this state.
I knew that after the adrenalin rush, my blood-sugar level
would go almost up to that of people with hyperglycemia
and diabetes but then it would again drop to a dangerous level
of hypoglycemia. I had been told that if this happened I could
go to sleep and not wake up. But my mind was far from able
to recall such a complete picture or act upon it. I did probably
the most dangerous thing I could have done. I went to sleep.
I woke up in a sweat, with my heart racing again. This
time, without the distractions of creeps following me swearing
through a car window, I focused on what to do. I got up and
ate a pile of dried biscuits and bread, drank orange )*ulce, took
vitamins, and then crashed out again to sleep. The next day I
made a rule never again to leave my hotel room without eating
something.

THE CHRISTMAS BREAK was over and I welcomed the
impending demands upon my time, and the structure
they would bring. Slowly my ability to talk personally
keeping a sense of self and my own emotions intact grew, not
only with my new work colleagues but with the journalists,
as well. I felt, somehow, most of us were on the same side.
I went to France and Germany to promote those editions
of the book. The countries flew by, with the sights of Paris
and the city lights and reflections playing upon the river in
Hamburg. Statues, beautiful parks, old wooden cathedrals, and
marble sculptures, paintings by Renoir and scenes by Monet,
captured me and brought home the beauty of 'the world'.
These were things we could all share and about which we
could all have a dialogue of appreciation with or without
words no matter who we were.
The frozen pond I had waited my whole life to see (lakes
didn't freeze in the Australian state where I'd grown up) had

I78

waited for me. Birds were walking on the ice like skaters. 'Jesus
Christ birds,' I named them. They could walk on water. The
views of Paris and Hamburg, of frosted trees and icy fields,
were landscapes in pastel shades. The beauty moved me so
deeply I found myself crying as it flashed past me through an
endless succession of train windows. 'Hello emotions,' I said
gently to myself.

LA GEODE IN Paris, a huge mirrored ball at least thirty
feet tall, stood free in the outdoors. The haunting sound
of music came from it and the whole scene seemed
beyond the notion of when or where. Breaking away from the
ever-smiling translator who had lived my book in translating
it, I ran to this mirror world as though I had finally come
home. The water of nearby ponds, the city lights of nearby
buildings, the pattern of purple and blue in the cloudy night
sky were all captured in there and so was I.
I looked up at the real sky. It was so two-dimensional
and flat in comparison. My hands upon those of the me in
the mirror, I looked intensely at her in the mirror world.
It seemed so much more real than the free-floating place I
stood in. I could take in her world with one glance. I was so
blind to mine. I could only see mine piece by beautiful piece.
In hers I saw the whole painting.
Tears fell down my face as the music played, and the me
in the mirror and I cried together. I looked up to see a
door in the top of the mirrored ball at least twenty feet
up. I laughed. Typical, I thought. They give you a door to
get in, but put it out of reach.
'Do you want to go inside of the dome, Donna?' my translator
wanted to know. 'There are all sort of displays in there
to see.' 'No,' I said. I didn't want to. I didn't want anything
to change this ability to perceive a whole world with a me in
it, even if it was only transient, even if I would never get in
there.
I had finally seen beyond the room my reflection lived in.
I had seen her standing in 'the world'. I couldn't fix my
own broken brain, which made it hard to take in scenes as

I79

a whole in any depth. But I had waited all my life to know
this feeling. Displays and images, no matter how brilliant,
.seemed so pale in comparison.

EW YORK WAS the next stop on the way back to
Australia. On the way to Australia, I would stop off
in St. Louis and meet two of my autistic pen pals for
N
the first time.
New York was full of bridges. The tower blocks stood for
my abilities. the open flat space of Central Park stood for
my capacity to develop untouched potential, and the bridges
stood for the means of sharing these beyond the company of
myself.
I was met by a tall, flowing, fairy-like woman who was to
be my American editor. She was soft-spoken and calm and
avoided looking at me, which made it so much easier to be
there. We had arrived at a huge hotel opposite Central Park.
It was like I had walked into a movie. Broadway was around
the corner and Forty-second Street was )ust down the road.
As I entered my room on the fifteenth floor, it was )*ust
sunset. The sky was a haze of purple and blue, and the city
lights against this formed the most beautiful picture over the
vastness of Central Park. I was hit with a sense of panic. I
raced to my suitcase.
I had brought my paintings along with me for the trip back
to Australia. Among them was a copy of the painting I had
given my solicitor. It was a city scene with a hazy blue and
purple sky, with the lights of the buildings playing in the
reflection of the water stretching out before them. I raced
to the window with my picture. My heart was thumping.
Fifteen stories up, I found I had painted the scene outside
of my window, building for building, steeple for steeple, in
the same order, complete with the cranes now towering over
them in the process of construction work. There was one thing
wrong. I had painted the picture four months before coming
to New York and I had never been there before.
The next day, a rather large cleaning woman arrived to tidy
the room. Having finally given in to allowing people to clean

I80

my room in London, I was accustomed by now to their seeing
my things and shuffling about.
'Look at this picture,' I said to the cleaning lady. 'Where is
this?' I asked her. 'That's out there,' she replied. , it's Central
Park. Did you paint that here?' 'I painted it four months ago,'
I said. 'Oh, so you was here before then,' she remarked. I
explained that I was not.
It dawned upon her what I had said. Suddenly she looked like
she had seen a ghost. Her voice went up and she became animated
and bouncy. Another cleaning lady entered and the two
stood there holding my painting, pointing out the window, and
speaking in such high-pitched voices that I covered my ears.
My American literary agent arrived in the midst of the
commotion. Without knowing who she was, the two cleaning
ladies accosted her and swept her up in the pointing and
picture-waving before she even had a chance to introduce
herself to me.
The cleaning ladies left. 'There's no water down there,
though. in Central Park,' I said. 'There is in my picture.'
My agent pointed out that, out of sight, there was a vast
reservoir, just beyond the trees that met the road in front of
the buildings. The light reflected in it just as I had painted.
My Canadian publisher and press person had also flown
down to New York to meet me. Through hour-long walks
through Central Park, along with occasional meetings with
red squirrels, and the beauty of the now iced-over reservoir,
I came to the conclusion I could work with these people.

MY PLANE TOUCHED down in St. Louis. As I came
through the gates I spotted a skinny little dark-haired
woman of my own age. 'Donna!' she squealed.
It was Kathy, the autistic woman who had tracked me down
almost a year ago in Australia in her effort to accumulate
'comrades'. She had written to me regularly ever since.
I had recognized her from her photo. 'How're ya doin'
comrade?' she said in a broad Midwestern drawl that impressed
me deeply (being a great lover of accents). She was just as
excited by my accent as we walked to God-knows-where and

I8I

I squinted under the awful glare of overhead fluorescent lights
and the high pitch of her voice.
We were going to her apartment, where she lived with her
cat, Obie, and worked as a secretary with university qualifications
in history and politics.
I was so totally relieved to meet her. I could not believe
that I would ever meet another autistic woman as able as I
was. There was another surprise. jim, an autistic person from
Kansas, was driving down to stay over for a few days and meet
me. jim and I had also been writing to each other. It was to be
one of the best reunions I had ever had.
Kathy and I had loads to talk about and, boy, could Kathy
talk. Like Carol she was almost manic and talked virtually
nonstop and I had to tell her that I couldn't keep up. We
swapped letters, books, information, and life stories. Kathy
was like a resource person on autism and had so many contacts
that she made me feel - as she had said right in her first
letter - that I was not alone.
Kathy was part of a pen pal list for high-functioning autistic
people. The list had grown in the last two years from twenty
people to around two hundred people of all ages, abilities,
backgrounds, and qualifications. Most had been diagnosed in
childhood, some with hopeless prognoses. Others. like Kathy.
had been diagnosed in late childhood and others in adulthood.
Some had had good functional language most of their lives.
Some had been late talkers and a few, like jim, had not had
functional language until quite late.
jim was working toward an MA in psychology, gave lectures,
ran newsletters, and taught religious instruction at a
religious school. He showed up accompanied by his three
dogs. He had left his four cats at home in his small apartment
with a neighbor to watch out for them. He was as
small as Kathy and me. I began to wonder if autism had
something to do with Munchkins.
There was something familiar about jim almost straightaway.
At first he struck me as being very much like Willie. So
purely clinical and logical. he was a walking dictionary who
could climb inside of his own mind and describe it with the
detachment of a structural surveyor.

I82
-I

-qp

It was like we used the same system. As it turned out, jim
and I both had trouble with sensory overload and shutdown
through our eyes and ears. jim's trouble amounted to his
being functionally blind to the meaning of much of what
he saw. Despite this, he was able to drive, able to avoid
hazards, and stay within the lines, even if he didn't make
meaning out of other things.
jim and I took the dogs for a walk. The familiarity between
us, the sense of being 'normal' in his company, struck me as it
did with Bryn and the Welshman. But this time, there was no
fear of emotion. It was accepted. I looked into jim's eyes as he
looked into mine and felt as though I was hit. It was as though
all of the impact people have upon each other every day was lost
for me because I struggled by their system, their 'normality'.
And yet with jim I was impacted upon straightaway, all the
more forcefully because I so rarely experienced it.
Until I met jim, I had not fully realized the different forms
autism could take. Being with him, I knew that he and I were
like each other within this wider category. Like me he had
mastered the art of 'speaking in order to get the words out'
despite being meaning-deaf to himself. Like me he was able
to continue to function in spite of total physical-, vocal-,
emotional-, social-, and even self-dissociation. Like me, he
could work with overload and shutdown in a way that generally
never left him with any one system shut down permanently but
left the forfeiting of systems in a constant state of shift. We both
paid the price in terms of the fragmented perception of ourselves,
our lives, and our surroundings. And yet despite all the
inconsistencies and the lack of connections, both of us had remained
connected at the very center of our own being. Despite
the chaos, we could maintain faith and never be totally lost.
Despite thousands of miles, our 'our world' concepts, strategies,
and experiences even came down to having created the
same made-up words to describe them. Together we felt like
a lost tribe. 'Normal' is to be in the company of one like one's
self.
jim stayed for a few days and among the three of us there
was hardly a word of silence. We all had so much to say. Over
the three days, we barely managed to prepare three cups of tea

I83
I

and drink them. We hardly cooked or ate. Yet it was such a
great atmosphere. No one would criticize us here for staring
at a hot cup of tea and not working out what to do about it
until it was stone cold three hours later.
We all had a sense of belonging, of being understood, of
being normal ... all the things we could not get from others in
general. It was so sad to have to leave. 'Why can't we all live together?'
we had each asked at some point or other. jim and I felt
the same way about touch and Kathy was the same but less so.
We said goodbye with our eyes and it meant so much more.

BACK IN AUSTRALIA, I arrived at Bryn's place with
a copy of my book for him. I was able to look at
him and give it to him and show how I felt both
toward myself and toward him.
After reading the book, he came to see me. There was so
much to say and it was all he could do to contain his emotions.
I had been right that he was like me. Bryn was diagnosed
at the age of thirty-eight as having Asperger's Syndrome, a
high-functioning form of autism.
Bryn looked back with tears and anger, with regret and
shame. He looked back upon years and years of bullying in
school for 'daydreaming'. He looked back upon the isolation
of never having had friends and the sense of intrusion by
his parents, and he tried to forgive. He looked back upon
his sense of inadequacy in not having developed the social
skills to know the hows or whys of relationships and touch,
and he tried to accept. Bryn looked back upon six months
in a psychiatric hospital for being a withdrawn teenager, uninterested
in socializing, and he tried to be understanding.
He looked back upon the well-intentioned forty courses of
electroconvulsive therapy he had been given there in an effort
to 'get his mind right', and tried to laugh.
He looked back on having developed a character in place
of the self he hadn't yet learned to express; a mechanical I
automatic, endlessly rambling, apparently perfect, c the world,
version of himself in order to work his way beyond this place.
He had thought of that character as Perfect Bryn but had

I84

always known it was a fagade. He looked at ten years he
had spent buried in alcoholism, unable to give up the secret
that his self was long since dead and buried, and he tried not
to cry. He looked back over almost three and a half decades
of the effects of ignorance. After he had looked back over
it all, he found forgiveness of both himself and his life and
those in it. He was just so glad to have found some answers.
'No more Carols,' I said to him.
Bryn and I drove to the riverside where we had once had
coffee. We lay in the tall grass and both of us were shaking.
The feelings were out in the open now. We looked into each
other's eyes. Bryn's were full of tears that rolled silently down
his face and onto the grass. For the first time, I found the want
to touch him. I was not afraid of him and although my own
emotions were making my body shake from head to toe and
my hearing climb unbearably. I reached out and put my hand
against this big giant's hand as my mirror. I looked into his
eyes as I linked my fingers with his. I held onto the him in
there to stop him falling into the void alone. I was shaking
violently. We both gave strength to each other.

It was nighttime. Walking through the darkness, Bryn's tall
frame looked so vulnerable in my own black coat, which
I had given him to wear against the cold. His long arms
stuck out well beyond the sleeves. He was my comrade, a
brother, a friend, and the first man I had loved with feelings.
He belonged in my black coat.
For the first time in the six years I had known Bryn, he told
me everything there was to know about himself. We walked
in the darkness to nowhere, drank lots of tea and coffee, drove
with the wind in our hair, and ate fish and chips on my red
carpet floor till dawn. These moments were frightening but
beautiful and they were numbered.
I would soon be going back to the United Kingdom for good.
Big tears silently filled Bryn's eyes. 'You're going to leave now,'
he said, 'now that I have finally found I can be myself, you will
leave.' 'I'll visit,' I said. 'I'll write,' I said. 'I won't forget,' I
said. But Bryn was right. I had really come back only for the
funeral of my past. I was going and I wasn't coming back.

I85

Rib
WENT TO visit the autistic school once more before I left
Australia. I did not have to explain why I wanted to visit
this time. Since the school was now aware of my book, it
was assumed that the staff might benefit from my visit.
jody was still there and now had a new teacher. It had been
six months since I had last seen her. I entered the room she
was in. She looked intently at me and smiled.
~,I

Her Vegimite sandwiches were brought to her on a plate,
brought to where she sat next to me in front of a mirror. Picking
up one of her sandwiches, she fed herself independently and
without difficulty. As she did so, she looked deeply into my
eyes smiling, reached across to me, and began to tap me as
had tapped her six months ago. I felt she was saying she remembered.
There are other forms of language beyond words.
jenny had been moved to this school from the other special
school. She had been reassessed since being at the special school,
where her only prospects were for life on a production line.
'Hello sweetie,' she said with the same smiling freckled face.
I went into the room in which she was sitting alone at a table.
'I'm in trouble,' she said. 'You'd better go.'
Later, I saw her outside. 'Where do you live?' she asked.
'Are you going out tonight?' 'Are you going out tonight?' I
asked her in reply. Each of us answered the other. I was so
glad to see her here where she would at least get an education
of sorts. She had so much more potential than being a human
vegetable in a room full of the babysat, with no foreseeable
future beyond stuffing plastic cutlery endlessly into bags. The
public that would use them would probably never have given
a damn about her lost potential or her wasted humanity.

WENT TO say goodbye to the Mareks, then decided to
stay there for my final night. Tim drove me there and
after coming inside to drop off my bags and say a brief
hello, we said goodbye outside.
Sleeping my last night in Australia surrounded by blue
floral wallpaper, I took the liberty of amusing myself with
the patterns and lines they could create. Somehow in the back
of my mind I knew I was saying goodbye to this country.

I86

HAD ONE more bit of publicity to do in another Australian
state before leaving for the United Kingdom. I had asked to
visit a deaf/blind school. I had already visited one and had
heard that my own behavior resembled that of some of these
people. The way I illustrated what I was speaking about by
using objects and diagrams, by touching and tracing so much I
came into contact with, by using my eyes so much as my ears,
and my hands as my eyes, was similar to what some of these
children did. I was curious to see any similarities for myself.
Some of the children here were deaf and blind and others
were one or the other. There was also a tiny handful of others
who were neither. 'Why are they here then?' I had asked.
The principal explained that they functioned as though deaf
or blind and so had been accepted at these schools. 'Are
they autistic?' I asked. 'Well, they come in here with all
sorts of labels, some "autistic", some "retarded", some said
to have "autistic tendencies". Some of these children, like
Kathy, my autistic friend from St. Louis, were children who
had contracted rubella as infants.
There were 'blind' children using computers for learning
and communication. There were 'deaf' children answering the
spoken word in picture sentences, sometimes even making up
their own picture cards to form sentences in the absence of
appropriate cards. I also saw deaf and blind children using
objects to stand for words or experiences, as I had. Talking
through objects.
I recalled my own words, Cmeaning-deaf' and 'meaningblind'.
I reflected on jody, who was like these children. I
reflected on the possibility that a specific group of autistic
people existed whose primary difficulties were sensory ones.
There were those who had trouble standing the world as well
as understanding it. Were children like jody more likely to be
considered hopeless and remain labeled retarded at schools that
did not specifically, as here, address sensory impairments?

ARRIVED BACK in the United Kingdom to the pinks and
whites of trees in blossom. I was immediately swept up
in a swirl of publicity. Although I was living out of a

I87
II

I,~

fl

l~

suitcase, the small cottage-style English hotel gradually felt like
home. The crystal birthday cake chandeliers in the hall, with
their familiar rainbows and clack-clack -clack as their crystals
clattered together (with some help), the tall antique mirror on
the wall, and my own full-length cheval mirror made me feel
'in company'. I had even taken to occasionally saying hello to
the porters.

As a long-term resident there. the hotel had allowed me to
use the staff kitchen. Olivier was one of the employees. He
avoided looking at me when we passed each other there.
His transient smile would come almost to the surface before
disappearing behind the curtain that came down over
his expression. Occasionally his voice would escape him in
an almost expressionless though thoroughly genuine hello almost
as staccato as my own. He was tall and willowy, his
footsteps a gentle patter. It was as though he crept everywhere.
He seemed hugely solitary.
Every day he had watched me leave the hotel and go into
the frost of winter mornings wrapped up in my long black
coat. I was now back for the spring and breezed out the door
into streets lined with pink blossoms.

I stood in the foyer of the hotel thinking about going out.
Olivier was knocking off after a long shift. 'Why do I have
to spend my life walking around in a cage?' he said out loud
to himself despairingly. He looked at no one as he said it.
The words were spoken into a void that, by coincidence,
happened to contain people. It was like watching a ghost. It
was as though the me I had been before writing the book was
now standing before me. Olivier left briskly, a vampire fleeing
into the late English afternoon.

'Hello,' I said to Olivier as I came in through the foyer. Ever
composed and totally in control, he would look at me with
dead eyes, which day by day came a little more to life with
each hello.
I had been observing Olivier and was by now almost sure
he would understand me. I had overheard him address himself

I88

to

to
T
le

alhis

)
or

it.
cc,
It
,v,as
ing

-jre
.,elf
on the tortures of having to apply himself to the useless task of
eating in order to keep his body alive. I had seen him pacing the
border of the Persian rug in the foyer - around and around and
around for hours. I had seen him sitting staring transfixed at the
crystal he wore on a chain around his neck, turning it around
and around in front of his eye, catching rainbows. When his
shift was over, I asked if I could talk to him.
We met in the hall downstairs. Olivier was dressed again in
civilian clothes, outfitted in black from head to toe.
' I want to ask you some things that may sound a little strange
to you,' I said. Olivier stood looking poised to run. For me the
most central aspect of what made a 'my world' so important
had been difficulty getting consistent meaning from what I saw
or heard.
'What is language like for you?' I asked him, careful not
to lead his answers. Olivier seemed totally oblivious to the
purpose of my questions or where they were headed. 'I have
trouble with language,' he said. Then, as if aware of my next
question, he said, 'It's the same in German as in English,
though.' I asked him why. 'I have trouble getting the words
out,' he said. 'I can't find them. It's okay if I know the
situation,' he explained, cif it's a practical situation where I've
been taught what to say or I've rehearsed what I'm going to say,
but with other kinds of talking, like conversing, I have trouble
understanding what other people are saying to me and I don't
work out what I am supposed to do about what they say to me.'
'Does anything strange ever happen to your hearing?' I
asked. He looked at me in surprise and a faint smile appeared.
'It gets louder sometimes,' he said in a whisper, shaking. 'Do
you think you understand better from what you see or what
you hear?' I asked him. 'I have no idea what people are feeling,'
he said. 'I never know what they expect from me. I always get
into difficulty because I haven't understood the signs people
think they give me.' 'Does anything strange happen with your
vision?' I asked him. 'Things seem suddenly closer sometimes.
Sometimes things get suddenly brighter,' he replied.
I asked him about relationships and touch. 'I find these things
very hard,' he said. 'Sometimes I am so close to someone, so
close that it hurts, but I am behind a mask. Sometimes when

I89

I am close to someone, I want to be touched but then when
they want to sleep with my body, they make me feel bad.
They can't see me.' Olivier felt that the expectation that sex
was part of a relationship was a betrayal of his closeness
by the person he felt close to.
Olivier had grown up in a remote little village in the mountains.
He had been extremely quiet and shy as a child and at
school had slept wrapped up in his blanket in a corner well into
his primary years. He had been afraid of the other children and
sucked his thumb up until he was in his teens.
Olivier remembered his father as sadistic and abusive. 'I'm
like this because of my father,' said Olivier. It hadn't occurred
to him that this may have been coincidence rather than
cause.
Olivier had never read my book, and we hadn't discussed
it, either. He hardly read at all in English. 'There's something
I want you to see,' I said, and handed him the German
translation of my book. Nervously he took it and I went to
my room.
A few days later I received a letter. It was signed, 'Your
friend and mirror ... Olivier.'

I could hardly bear to see Olivier after I received the letter.
He smiled and I understood his smile. It touched me. I shook
from head to toe as we sat in the hotel foyer, me in my long
black coat and him in his black suit. He shook, too.
Olivier loved his emotions. He loved his 'happy', he loved
his sad', he loved his 'afraid and he sat there being washed
over by ocean waves. 'How can you stand it?' I asked him.
It was clear that his emotions were as intense as mine. 'I fear
far more feeling nothing,' he said. 'Sometimes I can't find any
feelings at all.' just as I was unable to know I needed to go
to the toilet or eat until I was ready to wet myself or faint,
Olivier was emotion-deaf to anything but the most intense
levels of his emotions. Below overwhelming, they just didn't
connect or register. All the in-between levels left him as lost
as the concept of color to someone blind from birth. When he
felt emotions he knew he was alive.
I had faith in my mind but had feared my emotions terribly.

I90

Olivier feared the sense of self he found in having a mind but
could go willingly into the arms of emotions so intense that
he lost his bearings.

'I lost my legs today,' said Olivier excitedly. 'I had no sense
of my body from my waist down. I felt like I was flying.
It was wonderful.' It was strange to hear him so excited to
experience the same things that frightened me. I liked to
'disappear' but I hated to feel 'dead'.
Olivier made sense to me. For both of us. functioning was
a sharing of scarce resources within a person who can only
function on a few tracks at a time. We probably couldn't
consistently experience things with the same level of integration
as others could but our experiences seemed all the more intense
for being unintegrated and single-tracked.

'I got lost in my reflection today,' said Olivier. It was an
obsession we shared. 'I was lost in my eyes and by the time
I "woke up" it was several hours later. What was so crazy,
though, was that I was so far "asleep" that at first I couldn't
tell which side of the mirror I was on until I moved.'
Olivier had made it into 'Carol's world' (the mirror-world
part of 'my world') and back, again and again, and survived.
One cannot fly with a physical body they say. Nor can one
walk into a mirror. There were, however, perceptual boundaries
beyond which lay something like a twilight zone. Olivier
was sane. He had no hallucinations or delusions and yet he
could cross those lines almost at will (the will to tune out,
not the will to tune in). They were illusions, not delusions.
If you had asked him if people can fly, he would have told
you straight, no.
Olivier had made his first friend when he was in his teens
and it was around this time that he developed his version of
Carol, named Bettina.
Bettina was an alternate personality modeled initially on
Boy George. Boy George was a tried and tested personality
that came with guarantees of popularity. Through being
Boy George, Olivier could escape his own undeveloped and
inexpressible true personality. Talking about Boy George, he

I9I
I

I

finally had a 'the world' topic he could use to talk through and
make friends. Underneath makeup and outrageous clothes he
could overcome his fear of unfamiliar places and people. All
energy focused into being Bettina, he could be anyone as long
as he wasn't himself. Placidly he could accept people touching
him, because he was not there.
Bettina was the embodiment of a fear mechanism rather than
a true personality. All of her moves, likes, dislikes, wants, and
mental emotions were mirrored responses to what others did
or appeared to want. Olivier became Boy George and Boy
George left the little village, hit Paris, and got swept up
in the tide of the gay scene. In Paris, Boy George got the
nickname Bettina and popularity was to entail being used for
sex. Olivier's sanctuary became his prison.
Bettina had verbal expression at the cost of Olivier's selfexpression.
She had involvement at the cost of him having
a self to be involved. She had acceptance at the cost of his
emotions being able to gain much from it. Bettina gave him
an identity and a system of beliefs that he carried about
like baggage, waiting for his own to show up one day.
Olivier's other character was male. His intellectual self, the
storage compartment for all things practical, logical, responsible,
and learned by rote rather than experience he had named
the Manager.
-i@

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT Olivier and I brought things for
each other to experience. We were communicating,
Ctouching', and being moved through the medium of
sharing objects. Olivier had collections of sequins and beads
and spent hours and hours sewing them into intricate patterns.
I left him flowers and he would talk to me through them. I did
not need to explain to him that objects stood for or symbolized
people. Olivier already used this system.
Olivier and I spoke silently and indirectly through the music
we shared. We stepped into the night armed with Walkmans.
We were able to 'simply be' within company. We picked
leaves and gave them to each other, velvety ones to feel and
dead ones to hear as they crackled. We snapped twigs near

I92

each other's ears and were tickled by the sound. We picked
grass and snowed it over one another and laughed as we let it
drift into the wind. We looked at the way light played upon
things and sometimes laughed if we noticed the inexplicable
strange reactions of people who stood so clearly 'out there' in
(the world'.
Olivier looked at me with a deep sadness. 'Why isn't the
rest of the world like this?' he said. 'They only know cheap
thrills, nightclubs, blah-blah-blah. They only want to own you
and have sex with your body.'
Olivier had two tapes of the Boy George song 'Victims'.
'This song tells my life,' he said, handing me a copy to listen
to in my Walkman. Together we played this song again and
again. We laughed to ourselves on the underground tube, 'the
world' held playfully at bay.

Every night we went out to walk around the streets. Vlodamir
was an old Ukranian statue I had to greet each time we passed
him. We stopped to touch the shiny marble stone upon which
he stood. It was like a religious ritual. We entered the street he
seemed to be guarding in silence.
This street branched off into a winding path. The cobblestone
path spiraled off into the darkness, ending in an archway down
at the bottom. It stood for the depth of our own emotions; a
bottomless pit, so much more frightening because of our not
knowing where it ended, or if one could survive the fall and
the total abandonment of self-control the fall entailed.
The tall terrace houses loomed over us in this eerie yet
beautiful street that we had come to call 'the tunnel'. The
night sky enclosed us with stars and a gentle play of violet
and blue hues surrounded the moon, which haunted us with
echoes of our own enforced inner solitude.
There were cobblestones beneath our feet. Olivier was in
rapture over the clack, clack, clack as we walked along. Without
explanation, he had sent me his special crystal in a letter. I held
onto it, thrilled by the mere thought of its fiery colors and the
grrrrr it made when run along its chain.
We put on earphones and loaded our Walkmans, ready
to play 'Victims'. We looked wildly at each other and then

I93

-  P . F

I;
without a word we ran in silence along the length of our tunnel
to the light at the other end.
Running through the arch together we finally reached that
other side. We sat on the other side of our tunnel. From what
was now the safety of the other side, we looked back on where
we had been. 'You and me will never be victims again,' I
said out loud to the night and collapsed in an exhausted
heap.

THE PUBLICITY TOUR of Europe was over for the next
six months. I was on my way back to Australia. My
bags were packed and had been sent off with a shipping
company. Olivier's heart was heavy and so was mine.
We had discussed my going and we both knew our friendship
would survive it. 'You will always be with me wherever you
go,' said Olivier. 'You are my mirror.' But the days leading
up to my departure were like a countdown.
I picked up Moggin, the black cat puppet I had made during
one teaching round. There had been an ocean of tears cried
over him. Silently I gave him to Olivier as a way of leaving
a part of me behind even though I was going away. I left
for the countryside to think.
I was due to leave in two days. My luggage had sailed. I had
many reasons to go back. I had even more reasons to stay.
A friend sat with me and we lined up matches to stand for
all of the 'fors' and 'againsts'.
Back at the hotel, Olivier's eyes were full of goodbye. 'I've
canceled my ticket,' I said. 'I'm not going.' His face lit up like
a chandelier.

HAD TO find somewhere to live. I didn't have the slightest
idea where. I had made acquaintance with a family
down in the south of England. They had a fifteen-yearold
autistic son I had met. I asked them if they could help
me find somewhere to stay. The wife made a list of places
available not far from them. In my mind I had a picture of
the place I would live: how it looked, where it stood, what

I94

color it was. The first place they came across was a little old
free-standing cottage for one.
I could see myself living in this little cottage. I phoned up
the real estate agent. Some people had seen it the day before
and said they were moving in.
I resigned myself to taking a look at all the second choices I
had made a list of. Finally I came across one that seemed okay
enough. I was ready to sign the lease but decided to give the
first real estate agent another call just in case the people who
had seen the cottage had changed their minds.
They hadn't shown up. The real estate agent gave me the
address and I caught train after train, arriving at the place I
had seen in my mind. I knew this was going to be my place.
There were workmen there. I knocked and entered. The house
was 'me'. I phoned the agent and said I was moving in. Then I
phoned up a company that rented pianos in order to arrange
for one to arrive the day I moved in.

0LIVIER WAS SAD about my leaving the hotel, which
had been my home. I was moving two hours away and
we both seemed sure this wouldn't be so far after all.
We would both miss our tunnel-ritual and the time we spent in
each other's company simply being.
Olivier wanted to meet others like himself. He wanted to
find out where they all were. Without having yet met them he
thought of them as 'his people'.
I got in touch with a parent who ran an organization for
high-functioning autistic children. Olivier and I were going
to meet them. We stood outside the train station nervously
awaiting one of the mothers who was coming to pick us up.
At the first house we met two children, both of whom
were clearly very clever and verbal. They seemed to have no
aversion to each other's company despite being fairly oblivious
to everyone else's. At the second house we met an inquisitive,
well-spoken little boy and an older girl named Susan.
Susan was thirteen and had only found out she was autistic
the year before. She had come across the reference to her
being autistic when she read through some of her mother's

I95

letters. 'What does "autistic" mean?' she had asked her mother.
Her mother, who thought autism had more to do with behavior
than a system of making sense of things, explained
to her that she was 'no longer autistic'. Susan was left to
wonder why, in spite of being able to act normal she felt
she was not like other people.
'What was I like when I was autistic?' Susan had asked her
mother. 'You lived in your own world,' she had told her. Susan
had gone to school and written an essay called 'my world'.
'No one wants to hear about these sort of things,' the teacher
told her. 'I'd suggest you get rid of it.' The message that it was
shameful to be autistic was loud and clear.

Olivier and I sat on the grass. Susan joined us. Olivier and I
were picking grass, tossing it, shredding leaves, making tiny
weed bouquets, and snapping twigs and building piles with
them. Susan joined in quietly.
Susan knew I'd written a book, but neither she nor her
mother had yet read it. 'What's your book about?' she asked
me. 'It is about "my world",' I told her. 'I will tell you about
MY world,> she said. Her mother sat down to listen.
'My world was beautiful,' said Susan. 'It was full of colors
and sounds. There were no people in it,' she said matterof-
factly. 'One day I made a friend. That's how I lost my
world.'
I asked her how this happened. 'Well, when I was five I
became interested in the way my friend did things and more and
more I stopped visiting my world and I lost it, she explained.
Susan was very close to her mother. But Susan had chosen this
friend. She had discovered her own want.
'I remember my own world very well" she said. 'I used to
try to share it with kids as I was growing up but they didn't
understand it. They thought I was silly or mad. In the end, I
gave up and decided )ust to be like everyone else.
When Susan was finished, she got up as matter-of-factly as
she had sat down and without expression or response went off
for a walk. A 'the world' success story, I said to myself.
At thirteen Susan was like a ninety-year-old looking back
on the life she once had. It was as if 'her world' was the only

I96

place of belonging she had ever known, a beautiful world of
colors and sounds, a world without meaning or interpretation.
A world where one can simply be. She had left it
behind and buried it in all but memory in exchange for acceptance
for 'acting normal'. Olivier and I felt blessed to
know each other and to have not given up totally on our
true selves despite the knocks.

WENT TO visit another autistic boy. Malcolm's mother
met me at the station. She was nervous but glad I would
meet her and her son. I had not long made myself acquainted
with her house when Malcolm came through the door.
Only in his late teens did Malcolm's mother finally find out
why Malcolm was not like other children and now not like
other adults. Yet Malcolm. like Susan, hadn't been told he was
autistic. In the last two years, according to his parents, he had
become more and more disturbed.
As soon as I met Malcolm I was struck by his characterizations.
Like me, he had an endless repertoire of commercials
that he wove through his language and used as a way of
being entertaining and accepted, as Carol once had. I soon
saw that most of what Malcolm appeared to be was a fa~ade
of triggered responses: constant, almost manic anticipation of
expectations; and the most extensive store of copied gestures.
accents, facial expressions, and standard verbal anecdotes I
had ever seen outside myself.
Malcolm liked me right from the start. He had no friends.
No one came to visit him. No one rang him up.
Sitting together in a room on our own, Malcolm ran through
a repertoire of one pose after another. 'Why do you use these
poses?' I asked. 'Because it looks good,' said Malcolm, putting
on a series of stances which seemed to have nothing at all to
do with what he was doing or saying. 'Where are your own
poses?' I asked. 'These are mine,' he said. Malcolm seemed
to think that because he had chosen them, this made them
spontaneous expressions of himself. 'Where did you get them?'
I asked. 'Some are from the TV,' he answered cheerfully. 'Why,
don't you like them?"They're not you,' I said. 'How about this

I97

a
one?' he asked, putting on yet another with a sort of mockingly
sexual pout to go with it. 'Yuk,' I said, 'it doesn't suit you.'
'Why not?' Malcolm wanted to know.
'Poses are meant to say something,' I said, 'they're meant
to go together with what you are saying or feeling.' 'What
does this one say?' asked Malcolm, randomly putting on yet
another piece from his repertoire. 'I don't know,' I said. 'I
am not very good at reading poses, I just know that other
people use them to go with what they are saying or feeling
and that you are supposed to use ones that come from
your feelings and not just ones you have copied.' 'People
wouldn't find me interesting if I used my own,' said Malcolm.
'These ones are more interesting.'
Malcolm had such great skill in accumulating repertoires that
his ability to function distracted people from the depth of his
difficulties. That he probably experienced little of what he did
or that his true emotions were unquestionably absent paled in
the shadow of his manic fagades. Malcolm seemed to play life
like an endless series of chess moves.
Malcolm's mother, who had not yet read my book, took me
aside.
'Do you think he could be developing a multiple personality?'
she asked. 'In the last two years he has become seriously
disturbed.' 'No, I don't think he is,' I said, 'multiple personalities
are something different.'
Malcolm and I sat alone in the living room together. As
I spoke to him he answered me in several variations upon
his accent. 'Where is your own "yes"?' I asked. 'Yes,' said
Malcolm, putting one on at random. 'That's not yours,' I said.
'How about this one?' he said, trying another and then another
After he had done five he cut through the performance. 'Okay.
he said defeatedly, 'this is it.' His own voice was full of such
spontaneity and realness that I felt almost knocked off the
couch by it. His real self and his own relaxed, fitting intonation
contrasted sharply with the others he had run through and
this frightened me. I was frightened not just by his own
capabilities, talents, and complexity but also by how they
illuminated and reflected upon my own. I was in awe of the
power of fear as a motivator.

I98

--qqoo
'
How much of the real you do you think your parents see?'
I asked him. 'What percentage?' 'About fifteen percent,' he
replied seriously, using his own voice, sitting with his own
body language, his face with its own matching expression. 'Do
you think they know who the real you is?' I asked him. 'I hope
not,' said Malcolm with a shock. his face and body registering
his mood. 'How do you think that makes them feel?' I asked
him. 'Pretty bad, I suppose,' said Malcolm without apparent
compassion or guilt - his face calm, his stance composed. I
knew that to him it probably felt like a matter of survival. I
also knew that, ironically, his own self-denial strategies were
getting way out of control and were costing him a life.
I went for a walk in the garden. I came back and handed
Malcolm a petal. Its color and its lines, its texture and its
smell, seemed entirely lost upon him. Again and again I gave
him little bits and pieces. In many ways he was not like me
although he did find that meaning dropped out of what was
said to him and his sensitivity to sound sometimes became
painfully sharp. He also had trouble reading and writing, more
indicative of dyslexia than illiteracy.
Meeting Malcolm showed me the contrast between what I
had once termed 'my world' and that which I now called the
world of 'simply be'. 'Simply be' was a place of richness and
beauty where language did not need to be through words in the
usual 'the world' way. 'My world' outside of 'simply be' was a
place where the only bliss is nonexistence, and survival strategles
are those that maintain the security found in not existing.
Within the system of 'simply be', the point of all company
was to better experience a sense of one's self without fear
of losing control. The system of 'simply be' was a way to
experience the self you are normally deaf, blind, and dead to
in 'the world'. Malcolm had his own world. He had either
never known the addictive beauty and peace of 'simply be' as
Susan, Olivier, and I had, or else he had lost it too long ago
to remember. In its place seemed to be the empty world of the
prison sanctuary that is autism, and his repertoire of rehearsed
(the world' faces. The world of objects, nature, pattern, color,
sound, rhythm, and texture seemed as dead to Malcolm as the
people-world around him and his own dead fa~ades.

I99

-&v,

k~
I was going. I looked into Malcolm's eyes and put my hand
up. 'Mirror hands,' I said to him and put his hand up to my
hand. I caught his fear with my eyes and gave back only
peace. For a moment a real Malcolm was there, without fear.
I took my hand away. 'Bye,' I said. Malcolm broke back into
characterizations and verbal diarrhea.

SETTLED INTO the cottage and its garden of weeds and
broken concrete. I put up floral curtains and collected
weeds and dried-out flowers and hung them around the
place so that the indoors was more like the outdoors. During
the day I played the piano and composed, painted pictures
very alive with subtle rainbow skies, and set about writing
my second book.
Day after day letters arrived from different countries. There
were letters from parents, relatives, brothers, sisters, professionals,
and 'people like me'.
I was feeling content with having so much time to myself
and owning myself totally without characters. I bounced into
the bathroom. 'Hello,' I said to myself in the mirror.
Sometimes I would spend some time there conversing. Sometimes
I would just get deeply lost in my own eyes.
I painted a mirror that sat against the living room wall.
I painted long grass in the foreground and vines of wild,
multicolored roses around the boundary. I lay in front of it,
so that I appeared to be lying in long grass in the mirror world,
the sunlight in the picture playing wildly upon the grass and
turning it every shade of green, gold, and brown.
I brought my lunch in to eat in the company of myself in
the mirror. Both of us sat together in the beautiful, wild, tall,
animated grass. Together, surrounded by roses, there was only
I and me in the mirror. There was no room. No world. No
loneliness. Other people were now not so much of an invasion
because I had so much time to be with me.

200

I
DECIDED To buy myself my own piano. I made a call and
caught a train to go and look at one.
The dingy and crowded old shop tucked away from
other shops was stuffed full of second-hand pianos. The smell
of wood and varnish and dust filled the air. A blind man made
his way around the clutter with a combination of sixth sense
and a good inner map.
I found a piano I could afford and decided to buy it before
realizing I had no money. I would have to go to the
bank. I took off down the road.
I had always been captured by music shops. When I was
small there had been a hardware shop and a music shop down
the road.
The hardware shop had jingling keys and wild doorbells
I could set off into a symphony of bells and chimes. There
were clack -clack -clack shiny plastic toilet seats and chz'nkchink-
chink glass and porcelain tap and door handles. There
were shiny silk-like bathroom tiles with patterns to trace and
enamel bathtubs to categorize. There were rolls of linoleum. I
would stand among them as one of them, run my hands along
the shiny surface, and be caught up in the smell of them.
Music shops were the same. There were percussion instruments
made of ting-ting-tz . ng metal. There were clonkclonk-
clonk wooden musical bits and pieces painted brightly
in enamel paint and varnish that cracked under your teeth.
There were guitars with pattern pieces of mother-of-pearl and
false tortoise shell to visually swim in.

On my way to the bank I stumbled across another music
shop and entered. This shop was relatively boring. Rows of
latest-style electric pianos were set out for latest-style trendy
people to explore the mechanics. It was the sort of place
where would- be-if-they-could- be musicians dropped in to talk
pseudo -professional hoo-ha.
I thought I would have a look at the instruments in this shop
but there was little to discover. If the sales people approached
me, I figured I would feign interest and ask what one of
their contraptions might do for a would-be~if-she-could-be
songwriter-composer like me.

20I

I was talking to some Mr. Impressive Salesperson type whe
a quiet and willowy figure began to hover about. He ba
overheard me talking about something and it turned out that w
both wrote music. He seemed totally in control, partly indiffer
ent, partly serious, partly poised to run. He was very reactive
with occasional bursts of spontaneity breaking through.
I remembered how I had sensed a sameness between myself
and Bryn. I remembered how I had felt so exposed by
feeling this sameness after meeting someone else like Bryn
when I had met the Welshman years ago on a train. The
Welshman was only the second person I had met who was
like myself and I had only been with him for about fifteen
minutes when I had known he was like me. We had used the
same system. Right now, something about this man's ways
was again hauntingly familiar.
'Play me some of your music,' I said. He found this hard.
I paid little direct attention to the music. He got nervous,
ridiculed his music, took out the cassette halfway into a song,
and wandered off into the other room. I smiled to myself. I
was in the company of someone familiar.
He came back out. We had been talking on and off. In contrast
to the other salesman working with him, his approach to
me was strikingly indirect: involved but distant and impersonal
in spite of an abundance of polite friendliness and pleasant
smiles.
We seemed to disarm each other by seeing in each other
the exposing reflection of our own defensive self-control. We
considered getting together to write. He had written his name
on a business card that he left sitting on the counter for me
to pick up, then he left the room. I felt somehow voyeuristic
because I had some idea of why he was like me and he probably
did not.
As he entered the room again, I addressed him by the name
he had written on his business card. I was curious and wanted
to see )ust how much like me lan was.
He appeared momentarily struck by his own name as though
it were a slap. Then, a casual fa~ade again fell across his face.
Ian was good at 'disappearing', too.

202

I

T HAD BEENfour weeks since I had spoken to Ian. I had
told him I wouldn't be able to call and had left him my
number. lan had finally called.
'Can you read music?' I asked. 'No,' he replied, 'I have
trouble with reading, all types of reading.' This struck a chord. I
wondered if he was dyslexic. A large proportion of the brothers
and sisters of autistic people were dyslexic. Maybe this had
something to do with why I found him to be like me.
'What happens with your reading?' I asked. 'Oh, I can
read, he said, 'it just all ends up a jumble of words and
I don't know what I've read.'
'Is your hearing the same?' I asked. 'I'm a bit deaf,) he
said. 'Do you mean you can't hear the sounds properly?'
I continued. 'No, I can hear the sounds,' he said, 'I just
don't understand what people say to me a lot of the time.'
'I hope you don't mind me asking these things,' I said. 'No,'
he said, 'I'm just shocked how you seem to know things about
me which nobody else does.'
lan was both afraid and intrigued by my apparent understanding
of him. We decided to meet at the train station.

Ian stood waiting outside of the station with a sort of posed
expectancy. We were going to visit a castle not far away. He
seemed curious about this strange person he had just met. I
think I seemed to break all the rules.
lan's version of being social was to apply himself totally to
working out the other person's expectations and wants and
meeting them unquestioningly. He searched for my expectations
and wants, for some kind of expression to read or
read into, for some verbal cues to pick up on, but there were
none. lan was stumped, unable to find an image to meet my
expectations because I had none.
I got into his car and looked at the circles on the visor, the
slots along the interior roof, and the shiny paint. I mentally
mapped where everything was. lan got in.
'So what style of music are you into?'
said lan, falling
back on a well-rehearsed, standard musician's line. Oh God,
I thought. 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'It doesn't matter,'
he said. 'It was just something to say.'

203

.9
--jA
I0

I
I
We drove past a Chinese restaurant and I saw a chandelier
there that made me buzz. lan seemed taken and somehow
strangely familiar with my reaction. He smiled to himself and
looked straight ahead.
We arrived at the castle. lan was very composed. In his
rigidity, he seemed somehow dwarfed and vulnerable in the
shadow of my own spontaneity. I bounded off ahead, captured
by the castle and still secure in his strangely familiar
company. It was as though no amount of image mattered. I
knew who I was with. I could sense it.
lan looked at me strangely. It was like he was knocking
upon glass, watching me in a private world. I could feel the
atmosphere climbing. I could see he was visiting some distant
and buried part of himself through me.
'Have we met before?' he asked, his eyes staring into my eyes
like someone face to face with a dream. His face was almost
chiseled in its seriousness. 'How do you know so much about
me?' He seemed almost afraid to hear an answer.
'Close your eyes, can you see me? In your mind am I
real? In your heart can you feel me? Do you dare believe
in time beyond the present, past, or future? Can your mind
conceive of a place where someone's thoughts can reach you?
Do you recall I've seen you there? For when we met, I saw
you look beyond the "when", beyond the t~where",' I recited
the lyrics to a song I'd written.
lan seemed stunned and yet moved. He said nothing. He
seemed to be crumbling in on himself. I sat down on the rocks.
I buzzed on the flowers. I climbed up in the castle ruins and
looked out at him through the bars down below.
lan faced into the wind. 'I feel I was born in the wrong
time,' he said out loud to himself. 'How can you be like this?'
he asked. 'I own myself,' I said, matter-of-factly. He looked
at me, understanding from inside himself the words that his
Cthe world3 ears were not yet accustomed to. 'I love myself,'
3
I clarified. 'I am at home with me.' 'I don't like myself at all,
said Ian, staring straight ahead, 'I am not at all happy with my
life.' 'You have to own yourself,' I told him.
'I don't know who I am,' said Ian. 'I have a different face
for every different situation, every different person.'

204
I

Where I called these images 'characters', he called them
his 'faces'. He had one for family, one for work, one for
friends, and one he felt most sad and disturbed about - one
for bedroom performances. He was a programmed 'the world'
success story.

Like I had once been. lan became terrified if someone who
knew him as one 'face' entered a context where he normally
functioned as another 'face'. He spent his life not
only anticipating people's every expectation and buying their
day-to-day acceptance but also concentrating on keeping these
spheres sharply cut off and unconnected from one other, a
world of guarantees within his control.
Many people put on an image in a certain situation. Many
people have vague hints of an alternate personality. The difference
for lan, as for me with my characters, was that our
images were too total, and involved a total denial of self. It was
like entering into an altered state of consciousness, like living
dream-selves. We were the actors who couldn't get off the stage
because we hadn't admitted we'd got on in the first place.
The choice of words used, the stances, pitch, intonation,
belief systems. likes. dislikes. facial expressions, and interests
were distinct for each image, a merging with the people they
were stolen from. We were like single-bodied clones.
Like me. when people threatened to expose him by bringing
one face's sphere into collision with another, lan would rather
give up, disown, or move away from whatever he was involved
in. The cost is never too high, as much as it is feigned
self-convincingly, there is no personal cost to such losses
when there is no self to lose out.

We kept walking. I looked at the golden, rolling hills and the
hay bales. I picked up a piece of straw and split the fibers,
making a cage out of it. I turned it before my eyes and then
looked at lan through it. He was safe to look at. He was in
a cage. 'Do you know what it is?' I asked him. 'Straw,' said
lan. 'It is a cage,' I said, twirling it before my eye and looking
at him through it against the background of a blue sky. 'I am
looking at you through the bars of a cage.'

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a:
We stopped as a procession of cows passed by. I was moved
by the angles, the balance, the symmetry, the color. I put them
all into a picture frame made by my fingers. lan could see it
as I did. His perception seemed to come to life, his rigidity
temporarily put aside. I smiled within myself.
As we left through the gate, I placed my straw cage upon
the post. I was leaving it as a marker for 'the world' people.
This was to be our special place. I explained that in ten
years, it would be lucky if even one person would pass by
this straw cage and understand.

'Do you want to see an island?' asked Ian suddenly on the
way back.
We rounded bend after bend before stopping at a pub. lan
and I went in to get drinks. I sat at a table near the door. I was
concerned he would sit near the people. Tuning into the sound
of their voices and their blah blah, I would be unable to focus or
feel comfortable. 'Outside?' he inquired. I was relieved. 'Yeah,'
I said. 'I can't stand the bright lights in there,' he said. 'It's too
noisy and everybody's moving about.' I know. I thought.
I went straight for the grass embankment. Ian, composed,
looked at me as if to say, 'I'm meant to do that, too?' At the top
of the embankment, I heaved myself up onto the sea wall.
I was almost convinced he was like me, and was reveling in
the secrecy. He looked at me, exposed, discovered, enquiring.
I asked him questions about language, conversation, school
years. learning, childhood friends, and how he felt about his
family.
His answers confirmed all I suspected. He had trouble reading
faces, emotions, behavior, and body language and getting
consistent meaning from spoken and written words. Yet he
could imitate and mirror and merge with the skill of a great
illusionist.
He could teach himself but had a lot of trouble being taught,
was good at certain things and very poor at others, had trouble
making friends and had been bullied throughout his school
years for being different. I asked him about hunger, pain,
tiredness, and cold. All of these sensations either eluded him
or had to be pushed to extreme limits to be felt. His own body

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messages were very inconsistent and poor. I was ecstatic.
'How about the need to go to the toilet?' I asked him finally
'Do you hold on, or not notice until you are about to go on
the spot?' I asked. 'Is this written on my face or something?'
said lan, full of embarrassment, not at the question of toilet
matters, but at the exposure of quirks that he thought were
private and somehow unique to him alone.
'You are an alien,' I announced boldly, quite overjoyed to
have discovered a comrade. Bouncily, I jumped from the wall
and walked off along its length, throwing my hands suddenly
into the air in joy and disbelief.
I walked back to where lan was still sitting rather bewildered.
I did not realize he had thought he had stuffed everything up
and that my comments in 'the world' terms were taken to mean
I rejected him. He thought he had, yet again, failed to read the
messages and done something terribly and unforgivably wrong.
I was so happy to be with him. I was so happy that he was like
me. His searching eyes made chinks against my invisible glass
wall. I, too, was knocking from my side.

lan went to get another drink. Bright lights overhead, noise
from every direction, and a room full of people who didn't
seem to give too much of a damn about personal space; I would
not go inside with him. He came out and I walked ahead, going
down onto the rocks at the other side of the sea wall.
I pointed at the lights and the lines, tracing them, my hands
sweeping through the air, cutting lines, my eyes speaking
far more than my words. lan pointed out the symmetry of
everything in this same way. We spoke the same language.
We both looked at the sparkles on the water, my fingers
dancing out in front of me as though I were playing piano
upon the air. lan glanced quickly at me and smiled. I felt the
wind and smelled the ocean on the air. lan was a comrade who
had come home after a long, long journey. I was speaking to
him in a language that was mine and, I felt, had once somehow
been his, too. It was the language of 'simply being'.
I climbed down the slippery rocks toward the water. lan put
his hand anxiously up to his chin. He seemed scared. 'What's
wrong?' I asked. 'I won't be able to help you if you fall. I

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wouldn't be able to touch your hand, he told me. 'Is this be
cause of how I feel about touch?' I asked him, 'is this for me or
for you?' 'It's for me,' he said; touch was difficult for him, too.
I didn't mind at all. I understood this totally. I knew it meant
that I could be safer in his company than with anyone else.

On the drive back, lan talked about symmetry and the lines
of lights. He talked about looking into the reflection of his car
bonnet and driving into what appeared to be an inverted world.
It was Ian's version of my mirror world, though different from
mine because his mirror world had other people and their things
in it. He talked about picturing symmetrical lines bouncing
off everything, creating imaginary, uncrossable, untouchable
boundaries through the air and upon the road. He talked about
trapping cars that drove into his borderlines, which he created
by viewing the traffic in front of him through two fingers
positioned on top of the steering wheel. He talked about his
own special piece of sky and the way he felt himself flying out
in a direct line when the overhead lines of power poles lined
up in perfect symmetry in front of him.
lan seemed to have come to life but also seemed a iittle sad.
Perhaps it was because he had never had anyone to share such
things with. Perhaps because having had no one to share them
with, he had almost given up, turned his back upon them and
lost them.

We went back to the cottage. From the time we entered, Ian
scanned the room constantly, not eyeing what was in it but
mapping its every curve and angle. Occasionally he set about
straightening things here and there that were not symmetrical,
even, neat, categorized, or systematic.
Ian sat in one of my two chairs, hugging the cushion and
looking like a cornered rat - the cushion, a wall between himself
and me.
We ate coconut and he played a tape with a song he had
written. I asked him to play me the music he had considered
I might put words to. 'I don't want to,' he said, 'I'm
ashamed.' 'Why?' I asked. 'It's all commercial crap,' he said.
He had written what he thought other people's version of

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good music was. I think he must have realized I had had a
bad dose of reality and ti-iat commercial crap would not have
impressed me one bit. I think, in my company, he was hit
with the impact of his own falsity and it didn't impress him
either.
lan seemed to become more and more vulnerable as he
sat there. His reliance upon his learned 'the world' reality
began to seem more and more irrelevant, meaningless, and
redundant in my company. My own ways were so devoid of
the performances of 'the world' roles and playing to 'the world'
expectations. His own adherence to them began to disintegrate
too easily. Perhaps this was because they had been learned but
never really identified with in the first place.

We arranged to get together again and lan arrived with a picture
he had drawn. it was a black-and-white picture of the interior
of my cottage with everything in detail down to the placement
of objects in the room and the skirting boards and curtain rods.
He handed it to me in silence.
It was late and my muscles twitched and drove me crazy.
I felt anxious and wanted to walk. I needed the rhythm of
walking.
We found ourselves at the skeleton of an outdoor market.
The uncovered bars of row upon row of market stalls created
lines. lines. lines, and more lines. lan was watching, sort of
distant.
He told me about painting his room with red stripes. He had
visualized the symmetrical lines bouncing off everything and
had painted them across the roof' the furniture and everything
that got in the way.
I was on the edge of 'my world', distant and somehow 'over
there'. He looked like he wanted to share it on my terms. I
felt lan could easily become special to me, but I told myself
he had become a 'the world' person, even if he was once like
me. He belongs to them, I told myself. He knows his lines,
performances, and images too well. Sharing 'simply be' with
him would be to condemn him if I would not be around to
share it. I asked myself if I was capable of sharing it in any
ongoing way even if I was going to be around. I wasn't sure.

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3
'I'm going overseas,' I said. Ian seemed to sink. 'I'll be back,
I said. He looked like I was abandoning him. He looked at
me like Bryn had, as though the special friend he had always
waited for was here only to make a token appearance and
disappear.
'Do you know anything about autism?' I asked him on the
way back to the cottage. 'No,' said lan. 'Have you ever heard
of autistic people?' I asked. 'Yes. They are people who can
do special things aren't they?' said Ian. lan had not read my
book, and I had not told him I was autistic. I also never
mentioned that I thought he was autistic, though I strongly
suspected he probably was.

Some people believe that certain autistic people can grow out of
autism. Some people believe that some autistic people become
cured (and those who see no 'cure' on the horizon often give
up). When 'cures' happen, some people decide the original
diagnosis must have been incorrect. Some believe that the only
true autistics are incurable ones.
I believe that autistic people have a wide range of social
awareness. language skills, and sensory and perceptual deficits
or excesses. I believe some environments are good at chiseling
off edges or producing robots. I believe there are even occasionally '
success' stories of some autistics finally appearing
non-autistic.
I don't believe you can teach autistic people to experience
everything they are able to perform. I don't believe you can
make them feel emotionally for their images, 'faces', performances,
and repertoires as though these are part of true
self-expression. Actions are inspired by feelings. Trying to
do it the other way around is a matter of analyzing the
feelings a person might have felt doing the action. You might
come up with an idea of a feeling but that doesn't make it
your own, and an idea is never a feeling, just a memory or
stored mental repertoire of how one appears. Some things
just can't be done back-to-front.
Like files in a computer, people can mentally store copied
performances of emotions, retrieve them, and act them out.
But that doesn't mean the performance is connected to a

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-9woo

real feeling or that there is any understanding of a portrayed
emotion beyond the pure mechanics of how and possibly when
to emulate it.
I believe, though, that no matter how much you succeed in
distorting the various forms of expression that can be squeezed
out if you are working back-to-front, the system remains an
autistic one. Any other process of more real growth takes
time and nobody advertises slow miracles.
lan and I went walking and walking until I crossed the road
to look through a paling fence. Beyond it was a wheat field.
The sky was blue-purple and the wheat created a landscape
of lines. I wanted to go in there. It looked like a painting.
I called Ian over to look and found the way in. I lay down
in the wheat field (I had always wanted to do that), looked
up at the stars in the night sky, and thought of Vincent van
Gogh.
Ian lay down in the wheat, too. We discussed 'wisps' and
'floaters' (dead cells inside the eye that can be seen sometimes
on the surface of one's eyes), 'stars' and 'spots' (charged energy
particles that fill the air and that most people tune out as
irrelevant background information or do not have sensitive
enough vision to see).
lan ate some raw wheat. I joined him in silence. That is what
best friends are. I said to myself.

Driving along, lan and I decided suddenly to go to the ocean.
The roads were winding, with an endless visual symphony of
curves and lines.
We found ourselves on a bridge above a stream. 'I want an
island to escape to,' said lan. 'Me, too,' I said. I walked down
to the water.
I slipped and hit my hand sharply upon a rock. lan felt like
I so often had as he stood there unable to physically help me.
I didn't mind. I understood. I was fine. I wouldn't have been
able to cope with the fuss anyway.

We were both captured by the sky and the clouds. 'It's like
the ocean up there,' I said. lan wanted to walk up the middle
of the road and was annoyed at the cars stopping him.

2II

We walked on opposite sides of the bridge. We were living
symmetry. I knew him very, very well, without words, without
history.
We came to a camp. It happened to be the same one lan
had been to as a child. He came to life with the smells and
familiarity. He looked like he had been lost for a hundred
years. We made our way over an embankment to the ocean.
He looked at me as though I was so familiar.
I think he felt sad for all he'd lost and missed. At first, I
think he had wondered if I needed help, perhaps to succeed
in being more 'the world'. But his gentle smile now seemed
to tell me that he realized he was not there to help me and that
my reality was a full one, with the exception of someone like
myself to share it with. He seemed to reach out to 'my world'
more than ever before. 'Sometimes I feel there is no other real
person in the world except me,' lan had said. 'Sometimes you
seem like the only other real person outside of myself.'
To lan my invisible walls were not impenetrable. All he
needed to break them down was to speak my language totally
as his own. I was not teaching him this. He was rediscovering
it. I could have stopped him. I didn't try to, even though
I knew it would mean the end to my ability to disappear
into myself, unreachable. because no one else but me had the
keys.

Standing at the ocean's edge, I saw lan as he had left himself
once upon a time. We were both children in bodies that
happened to be grown. lan wanted to share. I was in 'my
world' and this seemed against the law. What we had, however,
was 'simply be'. We felt and smelled and saw and heard and
were the ocean, the sand, the wind, and the shells under
our feet. We were the long grass, the blue sparklers (jelly
fish) appearing elusively in the water like magic lights. We
were with our own selves and yet in company, together. For
once, 'together' was not a dirty word and 'we' did not mean
you plus my body minus me'.
I think this was the first time I had seen lan so totally at
home with 'simply be'. He gave in to it and seemed to have
come home to his own beginnings.

2I2

AN BEGAN TO own himself and his life. He began to know
what his own wants were and had a vague outline of his
own personality. I was happy for him and still very much
with my own self. I was happy that we could share being
with our own selves in company instead of being with each
other and losing perception of ourselves. I felt glad I had
held onto 'simply be' even without anyone to understand it
(even though I kept withdrawing further into 'my world' at
times). Seeing Ian gave sense to the concept of having faith
in the tunnel consumed by the Big Black Nothingness. I was
out of the tunnel, and in each other's company, we were
safe, accepted, and felt belonging.

T WAS NIGHTTIME and lan and I built a fire together and
sat around it in the backyard. The fire was a city of red
lights.
I felt at home in company and was puzzled by the experience,
uneasy at its newness, and confused by how far removed it was
from how tense I had always been as the characters. lan was
like my best friend and brother.

We talked about sexuality and the lack of it. 'The worst part is
feeling that you're missing all of these feelings you're supposed
to be having and having to pretend you've got them,' said lan.
I talked to lan about my own asexuality. I talked to him about
how, in the absence of physical attraction and sexuality, I
had learned to feign and perform them, and how, in the
absence of any connected inner body sense, I had learned
to function regardless. We both talked about how it felt; we
were a pair of comrades discussing a decade each of self-rape,
a pair of prostitutes talking trade.
We both talked about how we'd come to accept the
(the world' view that having no sexual feelings was extremely
abnormal and how being taught to perform sexuality
was an extension of having been taught to perform being
social.
'I thought there was something wrong with me,' said lan.
'I thought maybe I'm gay. I thought I was frigid. Even when

2I3
i

I

I
'I

I could go through the motions, though, there was no want.
There was no attraction.'
'Asexuality has nothing to do with frigidity or being celibate
or being gay,' I said. 'I bave no interest. I'm not holding myself
back from anything. I think it is more normal to admit a
lack of feelings and interest than to pretend to have them.'
lan looked sad. 'What's wrong?' I asked. 'I think of all the
things that would have been different if I had understood all
this before,' said lan. 'Nobody talks about things like this,' I
said. 'People know about homosexuality or fear of sexuality
or a choice not to have sex, but they can't imagine an absence
of it. They can't imagine that as a normal state anyway and
nobody's talking about it because the lack of it is meant to
mean there's something even more abnormal.' 'I wonder how
many other people are out there who don't know,' said lan.
It seemed crazy that people assumed that because you have
an adult body that your stage of mental, emotional, social,
or sexual development is necessarily in sync with it. People
know about mental retardation or emotional immaturity but
they have no concept for a fixed state of social immaturity
and the undeveloped or underdeveloped sexuality this often
entails. The way an adult feels going through the motions
of sex without a developed sense of sexuality is the same as
in the case of a child. He or she feels molested, abused, and
confused.
Ian and I talked about the status badges of so-called normality:
the performance of being just like everyone else. We also
talked about the ever-present fear of them finding out you are
not.
I did not know why I had no sense of sexuality. It could
have resulted from abuse, misuse, or my autism. All probably
played a part. The causes were not important. The choices
left in society for rewarding expression of intimacy with other
people were the issue. There were so few who were like this
and even fewer who were able to admit it.
lan and I both experienced sensuality but it was sexuality
that was always thought to be the ultimate end result of
closeness. Those who didn't see it this way too often ended
I

I

2I4

up at the mercy of hi-ho-Silver, save-the-world martyrs and
their let-me-teach-you performance programs. lan and I had
both met our share of these. Guilty that we couldn't 'grow
up' despite their best efforts to teach us, we had both done
the same thing - denied the 'problem', smiled, and polished
the performance.
'Do you know anyone else like this?' asked lan. I told
him about two other autistic people I knew of. 'There's one
who writes to me about his "bedroom academy awards",'
I said, 'there's another who laughed to me about being out
of his body and watching it going through the motions. He
took this to be so normal that he never even thought of
the extreme anxiety he must have been under to cause him
to have to cut off to such an extent. He doesn't know any
different.'
The lives of these people were filled with the day-to-day lie
that this form of passive self-rape was called an expression of
'love' and that the act itself was meant to be proof that one was
worth something. They lived with the fact that there appeared
to be no alternatives or, at least, no one was speaking about
them.
I wondered if lan would be better off not knowing. Perhaps
he would know no better. Perhaps he would like the structure
of knowing his role and performance in a 'the world'
relationship. 'I can't deny my experiences,' he said. 'I can't
deny how it makes me feel inside, feeling afraid they'll find
out, feeling ashamed at not being "normal".' He looked at
me helplessly and then asked, 'But what are the alternatives?'
'YOU could be in a platonic relationship with someone who
was more special than a friend,' I said.
There was absolutely no suggestion that this person could
be me. Intimacy had had no place in my life. It had had no
place in 'my world', where closeness to people and touch were
against the law. It held no allure for me in the world where
it was haunted by too many sickening echoes of its limitless
distortions.
I thought of the chances of lan finding a 'the world'
person who would understand him as himself, someone who

2I5

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would accept a platonic asexual relationship as a first choice.
I knew how he would feel spending his life being understood
only from the outside, forever alien, the only albatross for
miles.

HERE WERE ROADSIDE gravel pits and winding driving.
Ian was happy to 'simply be' in the world he
had just begun to rediscover. I was trying to reconcile
how to break the laws of 'my world' and contemplate the
possibility of being intimately and asexually involved with
someone else in a 'simply be' way.
We stopped and sat in the sunshine. lan was exploring the
concept of relationships. He would have to find this with
himself first, I thought. Until he did, he would be incapable
of self-love, let alone beine able to freelv be with an one o-t.
of want and not just out of insecurity. 'If you had the cl hoice of
being alone and living according to your own reality or living
against it with someone else, what would you choose?' I asked.
'I'd choose to stay alone,' he answered. That was what I needed
to know.
We went walking. I threw visions of his possible future at
him. I saw him as a puppet at the hands of someone who
played to his characters, his meeting their every expectation
with a mechanical, well-rehearsed smile: all world, no self all
self, no world. lan had known this for the past ten years
and had the chiseled edges to prove it. Condemning him to
his inability to assert his own reality had visibly stung. 'What
about Ian?' he asked with tears in his eyes. So he did have
a self to stand up for after all.
We went walking in the wheat field. In the heat and sunshine,
I could feel his tension as my own but I could not
reach him until he learned to reach and fight for himself.
Otherwise, I would reach only a shell., a performing fagade
obsessively anticipating my wants.

Ian picked up a crystal with birds on it and approached the
shop assistant. 'What are you doing?' I asked. 'I'm buying it,'
said Ian. 'Who for?' I asked. 'You,' he said. I didn't want it.

2I6
'I

'Crystals are for discovering more than owning,' I said (even
though I had a few). Gifts that come from one who has no
self are devoid of the person giving them. There was too much
'I want to please you' in the air. There was too much 'let me
escape me by focusing totally on you'. I could accept nothing
in this atmosphere. 'Put it back,' I said, 'I don't want it.' I felt
bad but was sure of how I felt and why.

WE DECIDED TO take a trip. lan arrived to pick me
up. Bags packed, he had called me the night before
to tell me that our proposed one-day trip could take
up to four days if I wished because he had taken time off work.
We would go away together for four days.
Both of us feared the bedroom arrangements but said nothing.
Finally beds were mentioned and we were both hugely
relieved to hear that we were equally insistent that we wanted
single beds.
I was nervous. What if he ended up like every other guy? I
thought. What if he moved on me? I was sure of one thing,
no characters would play along in order to help me deny I
had been made a victim once again. I would catch a train back
straightaway, no matter where, no matter how late.
We drove into the night. The green and gold of the fields
whisked by, the sunset played colorful visual symphonies
through the car window and crept slowly behind the hills.
The symmetry of the overhead powerlines created a visual
rhythm. We drove and 'simply were'.

It was getting late and we pulled into a plastic, mass-production
Travelodge. I felt really bad. I was so worried about staying
in the same room. But I also wanted to. I wanted to
know sooner or later if I was safe with lan. I wanted to
know if he was really like me.
At the entrance to the Travelodge were two people in the
midst of a great slobbery kiss. My stomach turned. Bad omen,
I thought, full of echoes. I looked at Ian. He seemed as
anxious and haunted by echoes as me. He is a comrade and
an equal, I thought. I will survive.

2I7
II

The Travelodge was full.
Hooray! I thought.
We drove on until we came to a hotel. The tall, shady trees,
the gravel drive, a huge old building, and a sign over the
door told me this was the place.
I went on ahead. Lanterns, bridges, a stream, and colored
flowers. I was buzzing. Velvet, wood, carved furniture, and
the smell of age and homeliness swept me away.
Up the wooden spiral staircase we went, around and around,
looking up at the skylight dome overhead. We entered the
room and claimed a bed each. We were both nervous about
going to sleep. Both of us got dressed and undressed in the
bathroom.
I got up early and went out into the frosty morning. It
was strange to creep out - without the feeling I was avoiding
sex while a man slept in my room. It was strange to be
outside in the frost without the feeling I was biding time
until the next bedroom performance. It was strange to have
a good memory of having stayed overnight in a hotel with
someone without it having been poisoned by them having
gotten good value out of the hotel room at the expense of
my soul.
This was so foreign. It was sad that it should have been.
I picked some purple flowers that had caught my attention.
Purple had always been a color that I feared. I took them
back to the room to show lan.

WF- DROVE THROUGH the day to arrive not far from
the Welsh~English border. We were on our way to
a country homestead where lan, with his'family face,
had stayed with his father. Ian seemed distant, his eyes
staring out into nowhere as though he had fallen into a trance.
We stopped by a lake. 'What are you feeling?' I asked.
'Nothing,' said lan, 'I feel nothing at all. It feels strange but
familiar. Do I seem the same?' 'No,' I said. 'I feel like I've
died, he said.
Suddenly lan didn't have any feelings to care about. He
would have been scared about being like this, but he didn't
even have any capacity for fear. He was in a state of

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I
total emotional shutdown. He was entering the void of the
Big Black Nothingness and there was nothing I could or
would do to help him. He would have to fight for his own
self.
Normally, this was the state that led to my own breakdown
into characters. lan squatted by the side of the lake unable
to work out what he thought or felt about anything whatsoever. '
I feel nothing. I think nothing,' he said helplessly.
He needed something or someone to react to as fuel to break
into one of his 'faces'. With me there were no expectations
to meet. I simply had no wants to do with him. There was
nothing to read well enough to react to. I was giving out
none of the cues to his learned triggers. lan sat there stuck
in limbo and I watched myself.
I picked up a stone and drew a circle around him. You are
under glass, I announced silently to myself. You are in the void
of the Big Black Nothingness. It is a darkness you cannot see,
a silence you cannot hear. It is a coldness you cannot feel and
a deadness you cannot mourn for, I thought to myself.
I picked up a handful of rocks. 'These are light,' I said out
loud, and threw them one by one into the boundaries of his
circle. 'You are in the darkness') I said, (you need all the light
you can get.' lan could not even smile. There was no smile to
be had. There were no feelings to be tapped. There was almost
no self for any to come from. The only thing holding onto the
lan space in which he had been was the absence of any fa~ade to
take its place. lan was winning. Even dead. he was still holding
onto the space his self belonged in.

On automatic, lan drove to the homestead we were going to
be staying at. He seemed strange. His voice and stance and
facial expression began to change every five minutes. He was
like a TV with a broken channel changer. I had the feeling
I was in the company of a series of strangers and yet even
this was frighteningly familiar.
A man approached us along the road to the homestead. lan
pulled the car up and words were spoken. It was a stranger's
voice I heard come from lan. His stance and expression were
foreign. I had seen glimpses of these changes but I had never

2I9

In,

a
seen lan actually become one of his 'faces'. The man walked
off.
We arrived at the homestead. I felt frightened and alone.
lan was changing minute to minute. Whoever he was at that
particular moment suggested we go for a meal. I went along,
saying very little.

The meal was ordered by a precise, somewhat professional
version of lan and we sat down. This 'face' was on the defensive
but it was a 'defensive' even lan was unable to acknowledge or
control. It was like watching myself when my own version of
'defensive' was to break into Carol or Willie.
Basically lan had no 'defensive'. The characters were his
defense as they had been mine. In the absence of self-assertion,
they merely stepped in and took over when things got to be
too much.
His 'faces' different conversational angles were all inconsistent
with each other, yet they didn't seem to realize it.
I was frightened. I knew Carol and Willie had destroyed,
contradicted, and discarded each other's stomping grounds,
interests, beliefs, and 'friends' but had they actually done so
in the space of an hour?
As though each moment were detached from the next. frozen
in time, lan had no recognition of the inconsistency in the shifts
from one to the other. I was not even really with lan. He was
merely fighting with himself in front of a physical image some
part of his brain knew went with the word 'Donna'. He now
knew me as no more than a role.
There was another reason I was not with lan. I was afraid. I
was afraid of the way his own dissociation echoed my own. I
was afraid to see it finally so clearly from the outside. I could
finally see why others had sometimes been frightened by my
sudden shifts, changes, and contradictions. I was frightened as
I sat not with one stranger but a series of them, each of them
putting me through a different psychological and emotional
g*Iling, none of which had been expressed by Ian.
ri
I looked at lan's form for the slightest hint of the person
buried there. There was none. A smiling character beamed at
me, suddenly gloating. 'lan feels nothing!' chirped the character

220

gleefully. I felt chilled. It was as though I was caught up in a
horror film; lan was like a ventriloquist doll operated by a
phantom puppeteer. It shifted to another 'face', serious and
severe, the one who had ordered the meal. The tone of voice
changed to social-worker style. I felt sickeningly patronized.
Ian could not 'see' me. I was merely a form sitting before
him which was vaguely familiar without knowing why. I was as
anonymous as an audience member his characters played to.
Then came another shift, a performance that was deep,
emotional, and caring. I almost jumped out of my seat with
the sharp change. The words, apologetic. The eyes searching
deeply into mine as he reached across the table like a priest
consoling the relatives of the dead. You could imagine the
violins coming out as he launched into a gentle let-down scene.
lan could not see me. He was asleep. There was nothing left
to do but to point out the inconsistencies and wait.
I asked the 'face' before me how he could have said one thing
when he had just said another thing that contradicted it five
minutes before. The character changes quickened, each pouring
forth a different angle or changing the topic. Excuses poured
forth. denial poured forth, psychological distancing warfare
went on full alert. The comments stung but I continued.
I'm not losing you to the same war I just came from, I
thought. You're in there somewhere.
Then lan came back and collapsed in a heaving mess of
tears upon the table in front of him. He was exhausted and
disoriented. He didn't know quite where he was, what had
happened, what he had said, how to coordinate getting out of
this place, or even how to speak. I had seen this in myself. I
sprang into order.
I paid the bill quickly. I grabbed lan's things from the table
and put them into his pockets. He was frightened. I encouraged
him to get up. 'Come on, let's get out of here,' I said. Ian was
nonverbal. We walked along in the darkness of a long stony
road. The hedges enclosed us under a deep, purple starry sky
as we walked in the misty rain to nowhere. lan was crying uncontrollably.
Suddenly he stopped and crouched in the middle
of the road, his long arms wrapped around his knees. 'It hurts,'
he said. 'it hurts so much.' 'It's emotions,' I said, pausing, 'they

22I

,!-M~
zw,
can't hurt you.' 'I'd do anything to get rid of
this,' said lan,
shaking violently and uncontrollably, the image of a junkie
going through withdrawal. 'Would you want to feel dead like
before?' I asked. 'No!' said lan, crying uncontrollably again.
'It hurts to have a self,' I said. I reached out and rocked him
gently as he sat, a giant crouched in the middle of the road.
lan got up and walked away. 'I'm so glad to see you,' he
said. 'I'm so glad you're back,' I replied. 'I wish I could hug
you,' said lan in a choking whisper to himself. I was not
sure I had heard correctly. 'What did you say?' I asked. 'I
wish I could bug you,' lan repeated quietly to himself, his
eyes fixed straight ahead. 'I would like to,' I said. We gently
stood up against each other, our faces turned away from one
another, resting upon each other's shoulders. Our arms held
onto each other's forearms lightly by the sleeves as we cried
together, glad to 'simply be'.
We walked back toward the car. I looked to lan to name
things that were familiar to him, helping him to orient himself
again as I had learned to do for myself when emerging from
such a sleep state.
We got some hats from the car and walked off in the misty
rain. There was a white gravel square that sparkled wildly
in the rain and in the light of a tall, old lamp. I had to
hear it. I had to hear my footsteps. In the light the mist
looked like the stars around me when I was small. It was
magical. lan and I went and stood under the light among
rainbows and stars, enclosed and safe.

WE ARRIVED IN a town full of bright, colored lights.
I felt part of the rainbows dancing upon a shiny,
black, shimmering surface. I got lost in becoming
part of bright, red, squiggly patterns. I 'disappeared' into a
haunting, blue square high up above us, beyond black, curling
patterns that went on and on.
My senses went on red alert. I had fallen into meaningblindness,
and my visual hypersensitivity was absolutely skyhigh
without any interpretation at all but I had been too
hypnotized by beauty to notice it coming on.

222

an,
kie
ike
j,in.
iim

he

,vas
:)ng

hts.

ing
Ian was scared for me, although scared was no longer a
concept to me. I mirrored his facial expression. It seemed
purposeless and meant nothing.
I was like a person on drugs looking at this incomprehensible
paradise around me, racing from one form of heaven to the
next. I looked at Ian. He was form without meaning, yet still
familiar.
I began to become afraid. I tried to name the things around
me. I could not. The shapes and patterns and colors could
not be interpreted. I began to get more frightened. Would
this person with me understand? Was I safe? Should I run?
Thoughts drifted by me and I couldn't touch them.
Darkness. I turned down a long stretch of darkness away
from the colors. I had flown too high. Each height had topped
the last one until I was almost flying.
I hit the hard surface under my hand. Splat, said the surface.
'Bricks,' I said in reply. I hit another surface, commanding
my mind to bring interpretation back. Thud, said the surface.
'Wood,' I said in reply. 'Yes, wood,' said lan. 'Stone,' I said,
stomping upon clack-clack cobblestones. 'A laneway,' I said,
looking around and finally getting a whole picture of where
I was. 'Are you okay?' asked Ian. 'Yeah,' I said, 'hair'. 'lan's
hair,' said lan holding it up. I smelled his hair. 'lan's hair,' I
said, smiling. It was so familiar.
We walked back. The blue square up high beyond the
black pattern was a room with a blue neon light that lay
beyond a Victorian lacework balcony. The red, squiggly lines
were a red neon-light advertisement on a shop window. The
overwhelmingly beautiful rainbow shimmering upon the shiny
blackness was the reflection of city lights in the water of a river
we had passed. I was so embarrassed. 'I accept you as you are,'
said lan, 'I don't just pick and choose and take the best bits.'

T WAS LATE. We had spent the day climbing hills, buzzing
on the tiny details and explosive colors of flowers, grass.
rocks, and sky, and exploring the perceptual changes that
came with a fluctuating sense of background-foreground. We
pulled into a hotel for the night. There were chandeliers and

223
I

the smell and feel of wood. There was the shine of brass
knick-knacks and there were mirrors absolutely everywhere.
We entered the room. I was so excited - my own chandelier
over the bed. I jumped up on the bed, spun the chandelier and
ran my fingers over the crystals making them clack and getting
lost in the colors. I was in heaven.
I raced into the bathroom. I was in rapture. There, wall
to wall, were mirrors of every description. I felt I was in
paradise. I would need no one. I was at home with 'me in the
mirror' everywhere I looked. I looked at Ian, sure he would
be happy for me being so happy and at home. There was a
look of concern upon his face.
'I'm sleeping in here!' I announced, buzzing from one mirror
to the next. 'Donna, it's just a reflection,' said lan as he
slipped away from my awareness along with everything else
Csignificant'.
lan was on the other side of my glass wall. I beamed from
ear to ear oblivious to him as I sat myself down in front of
Cme in the mirrors' on all sides. lan entered the room like
an intruder. I didn't want him to see me with 'me'. He had
no place in this. I turned away.
lan came and sat down beside me. I turned toward the mirror
and did mirror hands with my comrade in the mirror. 'It's a
reflection,' said lan. 'I know,' I said, snappishly shrugging off
his intrusion. 'You aren't in there,' he said.
He frightened me. I glared at him. 'Yes I am,' I snapped.
'Look, you're in there, too,' I said, hoping he would come to
see it with as much beauty and addictive captivation as I did.
'I am not in the mirror,' lan said, looking concerned, 'I'm here.
I'm real. That's not real. You can't touch a reflection.'
'Yes you can,' I said sharply, fear rising in my voice. 'Look,'
I said, my hands upon those of 'me in the mirror'. 'Here,' said
lan, this is real, he said, his hands stretched out to do mirror
hands, indicating that we were in the 'real world'.
I took my hands from the mirror slowly, looking from
(me in the mirror' to 'him in the mirror' to my hands on
his side, to his hands on this side. I reached out and did
mirror hands with lan in the 'real world', my hands gently
up against his. lan was crying.
I

'She's watching,' I said. 'I can't bear it. She's watching.'
'She can't watch,' said lan. 'There is no she. It is just an
image. She is not real. She is a trick. She is caused by light
bouncing from you onto the glass and being bounced back
by the silver on the back of the glass and into your eyes so
that you see a picture.' 'But I can feel her,' I said. 'No,' said
Ian, 'you feel glass and that is all.'
'What is reflection?' asked lan, checking that I had understood. '
It's light, and glass, and silver on the back of the glass
making a picture in my eyes,' I said getting it mixed up. He
repeated it simply, a step-by-step, rote lesson. To know it in
theory didn't necessarily change the subjective experience. I
repeated what he had said, struggling to reconcile it with the
emotional and visual experience of touching the other me in
the mirror.
Anger washed over me. I was angry because the mirror world
was my last bastion of escape. It was my reassurance I could
relate to people because, as with characters, they would always
be third person. Impenetrability is the ultimate security.
I was angry at the mirror. 'A fucking piece of glass with
silver on it,' I said, wanting to strike at it and spit upon
it. Such a fragile security shattered as easily as the mirror
itself. My solid steel walls became as fragile and brittle as
glass. 'I want to get out of here,' I said, as the feeling of
being trapped began to choke me. the blocked-sink effect
rising with the implications of echoes of years and years of
time spent in a twilight zone.
lan and I went into another room. I was battling within
myself. 'I want to do something,' said lan. Hurriedly. he went
into the bathroom and covered some of the mirrors.

We discussed my reflection-obsession. I discussed how I got
all the intimacy I needed from getting lost in the gaze of
my own reflection. I discussed how I sat eating with my
reflection so that, in comparison, eating with anyone else was
uncomfortable or, at least, second best.
I discussed how I didn't need or want company because
I felt I had had my quota of company from being with my
reflection during the day. I came to realize that although the

225

i T-T
mirror had begun as an excellent strategy for breaking withdrawal.
learning how to be social, fighting isolation. building
language, and having body awareness, I had become addicted
to its security. I had taken things too far. I would not truly
learn ongoing closeness, touch, inner body awareness, and
true sharing until I gave up the addiction. I sat up most of
the night wrestling with myself.

WE DROVE ON into Wales, arriving late at night in
a little town. We awoke to the sound of the ocean
and to a view of a long, wooden bridge disappearing
into grayness. lan and I walked along the bridge, caught up in
the smells and sounds and colors and textures. We watched
the shifting sands racing toward us. We heard the howl of
the wind in our ears. A seagull hovered overhead. 'Looook,'
he squawked. lan and I smiled
us how easy it is to fly,' I said.
We walked down to the beach - crunch, crunch, our feet
at each other. 'He's showing

upon shells. The blue-green ocean tide drifted rhythmically in
and out. 'How could I be like you?' lan asked out loud, more
to the wind than to me. I did not answer. 'So, I'm autistic,' he
announced, out loud to himself. I said nothing.

WE WERE ON the way home. Ian was concerned about
breaking up into characters again. I was afraid of
the mirrors in my own home.
I decided to paint over all of my mirrors. I painted a
landscape on the one I used to sit in front of to eat. I avoided
the other one and when I found myself staring and getting lost
in it, I recited what lan had told me: 'It's a reflection. It's
caused by light bouncing from you onto the glass and being
bounced back by the silver on the back of the glass and into
your eyes so that you see a picture.'
It was hard to hold onto the logic when your perception
told you it was another moving version of you. But in spite
of the illusion, reciting the logic was beginning to work, if
only because it confirmed ny commitment to ending the

226

I

emotional addiction. It always broke the compulsion. Closeness,
awareness, and self: these were the weapons against
the addiction of the mirror world, for in the mirror world
there were none of these things.

SAT IN a living room talking to a pianist. There was talk of
a film based on Nobody Nowhere, and the book had contained
poems and lyrics from songs I had written. We had
gotten together at his home to work on some music I had
written that could be used for the film. The pianist had been
blind from early infancy and now had glass eyes. I spoke
to him about being meaning-blind. I talked to him about
seeing objects without meaning. He talked to me of depth
of meaning without seeing. I talked to him about not
knowing where my body is in space consistently without
checking it by finding my reflection, tapping myself, or watching
someone's reactions. His experiences were the inverse of
this. Without sight, his outer body sense and sense of self in
space was not easy but his inner body sense was something
consistent he felt very sure of.
I spoke of being deaf to my own words, of hearing my voice
in the echo on the end of each word that left my mouth, my
mind often unaware I was making sense. I spoke of loving
to wear bells because then I can always hear where I am.
I spoke of merging into the person I was with. I spoke of
how long it had taken to find any sense of my own self,
identity, and personality because becoming others was my
way of experiencing them as well as the disappearance of my
selfhood.
I spoke to him about the shifts in self and others that left
me feeling like little more than a pair of disembodied eyes
and ears. I came to understand a sort of inner body sense
that persists in the absence of functional sight, hearing, and
touch.

227

YOU CAN DEFINE a whole life in terms of what you do.
You can also define a whole life in terms of a range
of things that happen because of you or to you. I
define a whole life in terms of my inner experience of the
things that happen because of me or to me. My grasp on
a direct, in-context, in-company, inner experience of whole
life would probably always be transient, but my emotions and
my thoughts and the connections between the two would be
a consistent thread to hold it all together. My talents and the
knowledge I accumulated would always be my playthings in
a void of fluctuating inner-meaning silence and inner-meaning
darkness. My skills and knowledge would be the bridges by
which I could make connections and live a full life in spite of
a hidden disability.

EXPERIENCED HAVING an outer~body sense by seeing
and hearing where my body was. My inner-body sense,
like everything else, was mostly mono.
If I touched my leg I would feel it on my hand or on my
leg but not both at the same time. My perception of a whole
body was in bits. I was an arm or a leg or a nose. Sometimes
one part would be very much there but the bit it was joined
to felt as wooden as a table leg and just as dead. The only
difference was the texture and the temperature.
This was one of the main reasons I didn't touch myself for
enjoyment and had little interest in being touched in any
unexpected, consuming, or whole way. There was simply no
point. It only made me face again and again the realization of
my own deadness and partial physical self and the shameful
inadequacy that goes with it.
I had worked on the role of touch until I could accept it as
a role and a topic. What was left was the experience of it and
(want'.
I had worked on reducing the hypersensitivity of my hands,
back, and neck (success at this was elusive because during
total shutdown they were all dead, even though they could be
irritatingly sharp during overload). I worked on getting some
inner sensitivity in my legs, arms, face and torso, which I often

228
I

-"qqiop

ge
I
he
on

be

ng

rig
se,

or

-iie
en
felt no connection to. I brushed my body, despite tears, despite
deadness, and despite the sad realization it belonged to me in
spite of the feeling that it didn't.
Slowly I had come to tell temperature better than before.
I now pulled away sometimes under the hot tap and I felt a
tingling sensation, which was called 'being burned', when I
spilled boiling water upon myself. I could bear to hug myself
and had begun to initiate basic touch with certain special
people. I was getting a better awareness of when I needed
to go to the toilet and could go at full instead of bursting.
W ITH IAN MY emotions were reaching five on a scale
of one to five. Both of us were afraid yet both of
us knew we would be safe with each other. despite
the inner battles and compulsions to run that came with fear
of losing control in the face of big emotions.
'Something awful is happening,' I said to lan, 'I have a feeling
I don't understand. I want to walk.' lan went to get his coat.
'Is it something you ate? Are you upset? Do you need to
eat?' he asked. 'I don't know what this is. I've never had this
feeling. It's scaring me,' I replied.
It was overwhelming. My sense of hearing became intense.
My hand was placed randomly upon my leg. Suddenly I became
aware of inner feeling in both my hand and my leg at the same
time. 'I can feel my leg!' I shouted in fear. 'I can feel my hand
and my leg!' I was afraid and shaking. lan was smiling. His
eyes filled with tears. He was 'happy-sad'.
I moved my hand to my arm and fearfully whispered, 'I've
got an arm.' I felt it not on my hand from the outside, as usual,
but from the inside. My arm had felt it from the inside. 'Arm'
was more than a texture; it was an inner sense.
It was foreign, and the foreignness was frightening. I felt
like an alien suddenly acquiring humanness. I was a stranger
in the vehicle that carried me about but which was only now
telling me it was here, it was real, it was mine, and it was part
of me.
I felt my hand, then my forearm, then my upper arm. 'Is
this frightening?' I asked lan. 'No, it's not frightening,' he

229

I"
reassured me gently. My hand moved to my body and traced
a line down to my leg and along its length to my foot. I
was crying uncontrollably. I had never felt so wholly alive.
Repulsion and anger now faced me as fear, and fear stood
back-to-back with happiness, who was ready to celebrate.
My hands went up to my face. My face was there from the
inside. My body was more than just a series of textures that
my hands knew, an image my eyes knew, a series of sounds
my arms knew, and a pattern of movements. I cried out in a
desperate whisper, 'Oh my God, I've got a body.'
lan was hugging himself, smiling through his own silent tears
on the other side of the room. 'Am I safe?' I asked. 'Yes, you are
safe,' said lan. 'I'm afraid to walk,' I said to him. 'I don't want
to move because it might all change.' Olivier's words echoed
in my mind: 'I lost my legs today.' I was getting mine back.
I moved one leg and felt its weight. I stood on it. My balance
was shaky. I was totally overwhelmed.
I walked across the floor like someone trying out new legs. I
felt the distance between my shoulders and my feet. I knew how
big I was, enclosed within the space of my own whole body.
'Oh my God, I'm so short!' I squealed in a surprised whisper.
'I am not big at all!' I had always had the impression that I
was as big as whatever person I was with, and, at five foot
two inches tall, most of them were bigger than I actually was.
If I was with short people, I assumed I must be a short
person. If I was with tall people, I assumed I must be a tall
person. In the absence of an inner body sense, they had been
my mirrors, my external 'map'.
It was one thing to have an idea in theory of your own size,
but another to feel the subjective experience of it. I had always
known my height and size and knew in theory that these were
socially defined as short and skinny, but I had nothing other
than the visual comparison to test it by. Anorexics often feel
fat. They have a distorted body sense. Beyond my vision and
reflection I had no body sense at all. Up until now other people
had provided this when a mirror was not around.
I was so happy. 'You don't know how good this feels,' I said
to Ian. It was the greatest tangible security of self-ownership I
had ever known. 'Is this what other people have?' I asked. lan,

230

like Olivier, had 'lost' his legs occasionally and had self~other
difficulties but generally his inner body sense was far more
intact than mine. 'Yes,' said lan, 'this is what other people
have.' 'It's so beautiful,' I said.
I had wondered what I wanted a body for. Now I knew.
There was no greater feeling of self-security. This was the
first security a baby knows long before it knows its mother.
This was the first security in life, which had been missing.
Connection with my body was the missing bridge across the
impassable gorge that had stood between me and being in touch
with feelings.
'Will it go again?' I asked lan. 'If it does,' said lan, 'It will
come back again, like everything else.'

OW LONG HAVE we known each other?' I asked.
'Five months,' said lan, sitting across from me on the
'Hfloor eating Chinese food. 'Are you sick of knowing
me yet?' I asked, between mouthfuls of noodles. 'No,' replied
lan, 'am I boring yet?' 'No,' I replied.
In five months our fax machines had gotten to know each
other well and we had gotten to know each other better.
It had been three years since I'd written Nobody Nowhere
and lan felt he had lived six hundred years since he'd met me
and unburied himself. He and I were now able to be ourselves
in each other's company in an ongoing 'specialship, a place of
belonging.

lan,
Hi. I was so glad you called just to say bi. But I
could not really show it. It was a battle to show it.
Sometimes I wish you could be here or me there to
help hold us each away from the inner monster that
makes us be what we are not.
I am close to you. I feel safe with you. You are the
person I feel a 'belonging with'. You are the person
with whom I have a 'specialship'.
The safer and happier I feel, the more it will make me
want to run and escape. Do you realize this? Do you

23I

~I7
I

m
care enough, have patience enough and understanding
enough, to support my fight against this stupid compulsion?
If you do not, it is okay. But it would just be too
hard if you didn't understand.
Today I was running away. I wanted only to reach out.
Could you ask me, 'What does Donna want?'Then I could
be free. I could tell you what I want even if my actions did
the opposite. I could tell you that I wanted to reach out
but that my actions would not let me ... that my brain
wouldn't let me control my actions.
When autism wins like this (or you mistake autism's
reaction for being one of my true ones), I feel so trapped
inside that I want to give up on the whole world. I
feel scared you won't be able to see me apart from my
autism. This would mean I am alone ... you would have
abandoned me to this inner monster.
It is hard for you ... sometimes the monster robs you
of your friend. Sometimes it hides your friend from you.
Sometimes I am hanging from a cliff and you have my
hand and it makes it too hard for you to hold onto
me. I don't know if you have the strength to help me
fight it for as long as I will need to. I believe so, because
in fighting for me you are fighting and proving
the same things to the monster within yourself. You
would also need understanding. You have this. I am
sure of that. But this monster outruns us sometimes.
It is bigger than us sometimes. This is why sometimes
it convinces me that I should give up and that no one
can help me.
When I am driven to give up on people it is not what I
want. I would not be happy that way. I would merely not
have to fight so hard anymore. But it is worth fighting. I
have seen such happiness with you that I know it is worth
it ... but the tiredness ... sometimes it exhausts me ... it
is so hard to fight and outrun and outsmart an enormous,
overwhelming, invisible monster sometimes.
I am not sorry. I couldn't help how things went. You are
not sorry. You couldn't help it either. Things will maybe

-"qpp

always be hard for us but never in the same way as they
have been with other people. I will not run from you
leave or replace you, because I am fighting for me. This
life does not belong to autism, it belongs to me. Autism
is not on the side of 'simply be' any more than Cthe world'
is, but I am on the side of 'simply be' and so are you and
I will fight for that right or die trying.
Your friend always ...
Donna.

A UTISM IS SOMETHING I cannot see. It stops me from
finding and using my own words when I want to. Or
makes me use all the words and silly things I do not
want to say.
Autism makes me feel everything at once without knowing
what I am feeling. Or it cuts me off from feeling anything at
all.
Autism makes me hear other people's words but be un~
able to know what the words mean. Or autism lets me speak
my own words without knowing what I am saying or even
thinking.
Autism cuts me off from thoughts and curiosity, and so I
believe I think nothing or am interested in nothing. Or autism
makes my mind almost explode with the need to reach out
and say what I think or show what I am interested in b
nothinl- comes out
... ut

from my words.  not even on my face, in my eyes, or

Autism cuts me off from my own body, and so I feel nothing.
Autism also can make me so aware of what I feel that it is
painful.
Autism makes me feel sometimes that I have no self at all,
and I feel so overwhelmed by the presence of other people
that I cannot find myself. Autism can also make me so totally
aware of myself that it is like the whole world around me
becomes irrelevant and disappears.
Autism is like a seesaw. When it is up or down I cannot see
a whole life. When it is passing through in the middle I get to
see a glimpse of the life I would have if I were not autistic.

233

I
The most important thing I have learned is that
AUTISM IS NOT ME.

Autism is just an information-processing problem that controls
who I appear to be. Autism tries to stop me from being
free to be myself. Autism tries to rob me of a life, of friendship,
of caring, of sharing, of showing interest, of using my
intelligence, of being affected ... it tries to bury me alive.

The second most important thing I have learned is
I CAN FIGHT AUTISM ... I WILL CONTROL IT ...
IT WILL NOT CONTROL ME.

234

Anyone wanting further information about sensory-perceptual
difficulties can contact:

Ann Wright
Irlen Centre for Perceptual and Learning Development
4 Park Farm Business Centre
Fornham St Genevieve
Bury St Edmunds
Suffolk IP28 5TS
ENGLAND

Pat Stanley
Irien Clinic
PO Box 240
Applecross, WA 6I53
AUSTRALIA

235
0284 72430I

"W,"
_m

. *0

INDEX

abuse 24, 49-50, 99-I00, see also
self-abuse
alcohol I7, 59, I40
allergies 52
aloneness 67, 75-6
anger I02-3, II4-I5
Angle I56, I58, I60
Anita 74-5
art see drawing; France; painting;
Tom
Asperger's syndrome I84-5
assessor (for second to last teaching
round)I48
auntie I37, I39
autism I-4, 64, II3, 233-4;
Asperger's syndrome I84-5;
battle against 232-4; common
ideas about 5I-2, I4I-2,
I6I; explaining to others I8,
78-9; high-functioning 3, 40,
I84-5, I95-200; nature of
233-4; theories 2, 47, 49-50,
84, 2I0-II; treatment of I9-32
autistic school see special needs
teaching
automatic pilot 42-3

belonging I50
'Bettina' I9I-2
Big Black Nothingness 55, 99-I02,
I06-7, II3-I4, I53; Ian 2I9; in
London I76-8
blind and deaf school, visits I87
body 27, 228-3I; feelings about I00,
I29-30
body language II7
'Boy George' (character) I9I-2
brother, older 20; younger 45, 52-8
Bryn I39-42, I83, I84-5
buildings, as simile I26
business 90, II5-I6, see also Nobody
Nowbere

'Carol' 4, 7-8, I2, II8, I39, I4I,
I7I, I75-6; adoptable image
23-4; in book 86; and friendship
II6-I7; and jobs I6-I7; and

237
kittens 4I-2; and mirroring
6Z~5; in play I04-5;I the 'real'
Carol I4-I5; and Robyn 96; and
sexuality I24; and soiling 4I-2;
and teaching assessment I05; and
tidal waves I3
castle, visit to 203-4
cats 9, I0, 4I-2
characters 3-5, 69, 76; absence of
82-3; and Big Black Nothingness
I00-I; and Bryn I40, I4I; lan
204-5, 2I9-220, see also 'Bettina';
'Boy George'; 'Carol'; 'Manager';
'Wlllle'
childhood I2; abuse 5, I0, 24, 47-8,
49-50, 99-I00, I73-4; father's
description 46-8; fear 5-6;
hardware shop 20I; hospital 45,
47-8; school 24; soiling 4I-2;
Tom's memories 56-7, see also
mother
chinese family II9-2I
Christmas 36, I63-78
closeness 57, I49; and anger
II5; and Marek family I46-7;
Moggin I30-I; as weapon I29;
and words I06-7, III-I2, I50
color 6I, 92-3, II2-I3, I99, 2I8;
and emotion I22-3
control 9; of self 28, 3I; and sleep 6;
use of German 7I
conversation, difficulties with I06-9
cottage I94-5, 200, 208-9

coughing 47
cousin 49-50
crystals I-2, I89, I93, 2I6-I7

dancing lessons 60
deaf and blind school, visits I87
deafness 47-8, see also meaning-deaf
denial 43, 48-9, see also
self-denial
diploma of education course see
teaching course
'disappearing' I0-II, 20
discipline 24-5, I6I
dolls 60

h,
domestic violence 47, 49-50, 59, see        'holding' 55-6
also abuse            'Holly Hobby' 89-90, I50, I52, I65,
'Donna' 7-8, 49         I67
drawing II4, 209; and emotions II4,         homelessness 9, I7
I47; lan 209          hospital 45, 47-8
driving 42-3           hugging 57, I30, I32-3
'dropping' 20-I        humming 29-30, I0I
dyslexia I03-4, 203    hyperactivity 45
hypoglycemia I75-8
echolalic 3
echopractic 3          Ian 202-I0, 2II-27; holiday 2I7-26;
education I7, 77, see also teaching          letter to 23I-3
course                intelligence 38, 79-80
emotions 22I-2; and Big Black               interviews I50-I, I53-4, I68; uk
Nothingness I0I-2; drawing                  I73-4
II4, I47; efforts to understand            islands 206, 2II
I02-3; expressing 54-5; and
eye contact I2I; Ian 229;                  jack 27-8, 30
Olivier I90-I; unallowable 28              jan 75
employment, for disabled people 24,         jenny 23-4, I86
40                    jim I82-4
jobs I6-I7, 50-I, see also special
Eric 26                 needs teaching
facial expression 54-5, 95-6                jody 27, 29-30, I86, I87
family see brother, father, mother,         joe 72, II0-II, II7-I8, I54-6; in
cousin, auntie         lecture I54-6
'family' III-I2
family background 78   Kathy 52, I8I-2, I83-4
farm owned by Millers 6I-2, I64-5           Kerry 77-8, II8, I6I, I64; and
father 40; and childhood 44-5;               mirror hands I3I-2, I36; and
family 49-50; memory of the past            mirrors I3I-2; and touch I35-6
45-8; and specialles 44-5; and
Tom 56                language I6, 98-9, I06-9, I89, 2I2;
father's girlfriend 40-I, 42, 43-4, 45,      use of German 70-I, see also
50, 5I-2               speech
food 29, 90-I; with the Millers             light 74, II2-I3, I7I, I89; at Dr
87-9, I75-6, I78       Marek's house 92-3; in pub 206,
France I78-80           207
friendship 76, I09-I0, II6-I7; and          literary agents see Nobody Nowbere
the Mareks I23        London, problems in I75-8
games 33-5, 80
german 70-I; teaching in I25-7, I48         Malcolm I97-200
Germany I78            'Manager, the' I92
girl in crate 22-3     Marek, Mrs 92. I62
grandmother 58-9       Marek, Dr Theodore 36-40, 66-7,
guitar see music        84; explaining emotions I02-3;
goodbyes I62-3, I68, I86; his
hair 6, 8I, I30, 223    house 9I-4, I23, I35; letter to
hatred 54-5             about communication 98-9; letter
health 52; hypoglycemia 52, I75-8;           to about his help 63; letter to
under pressure 90-I    about loss of characters 83; letter

238

--"v,

to about Millers I07-8; letter
to about people's reactions 79;
letter to about personality 78;
letter to about progress and view
of 'the world' 69-70; letter to
about remorse I38-9; letter to
about social skills 75-6; letter to
about social touch I33-5; letter
to about teaching 39-40; tackling
problem situations 62-3, 64;
talks to his students I42-3, I6I;
and teaching 73; and touch I63
Marek family 92, I46-7; tea
with Millers I48-50, see also
Marek, Dr Theodore; Marek, Mrs
meaning-blindness 222-3, 227-8
meaning-deaf 6, 47-8, 78-9,
93-9, I83, 227; in teaching
I25-6
memory 48-9
Michael 32-5
Millers, the 85-6; and book 86-7;
and closeness I06-9; and families
III-I2; goodbyes I65-6; and
hugging I32-3; invitation to
dinner 87-9; invite the Mareks
to tea I48-50; and teaching
assessment I05; and touch I36-7;
and 'training' 89, I09
mirror hands I25, I3I-2, I36,
I62-3,200
mirroring 9, 35A, 64-5, 85,
I36-7
mirrors 6, II, 63; at cottage 200; as
doorways I4; explained 224-6;
in hotel 224-5; and Kerry I3I-2;
La Geode I79-80; and Olivier
I94; painted over 226; and touch
I25, I28-9, see also reflection
Moggin I30-I; gives to Olivier
I94
mother 49-50, 58-60;
difficultl*es 47-8; and Tom
56
Mr Reynold I39
music 29-30, 35, I95, 200, 20I-3;
lan 208; and Olivier I92-4; in
teaching 8, I57, I59-60; and Tim
9, I0

Nancy II9-2I
nature I78-9, I99, 206, 2II, 223;
relationship to 5I; response to
6I-2
Nobody Nowhere I-2, II, 85, II8;
American literary agent I80-I;
Australian book promotions
I50--4; Canadian publisher I8I;
contracts 90; effect on family
46; effect of writing II8; film
227; french translator I79;
New York promotion I80-I;
publishers 89-90; respones
200; second Australian trip
I65-8; tour in France and
Germany I78-80; UK book tour
I63, I65, I70-8; writing of I2-I3
noise 29-30, 74, II2-I3, I30, I99; in
pub 206, 207; voices 42, I50--7

objects 40-I, II3, I99; nature of 65,
67-9; and Olivier I92-3, see also
crystal
ocean I3, I69, 2II-I2
Olivier I88-94, I95, 230
Orsi Bear 68-9

painting I22-3; at cottage 200; in
New York I80-I
Paris, La Geode I79
park I4-I5
peripheral vision 2I

photographs 56, I48-9
pianist 227
pianos I0; for cottage I95, 200,
20I-2
psychiatry 35-6, 49
psychologists 35-6, see also Marek,
Dr Theodore
psychology 36, 38-9
public relations person I73
publishers 89-90, I7I-3
punishment 24, see also discipline
reflection 6, 68, I28-9; explained
224--6; La Geode I79-80; looking
away I3I-2; Olivier I9I; in silver
foil I2; and touching I25, see also
Carol
respite care house 25, 32
rhythm 29-30, I99
Robble I9-22

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4r
self-abuse 6, 55I I30
self-denial 9I, II3
sensory perception see touch, smell,
light, noise
sensuality 2I4-I5
sexuality 50-I, 2I3-I6
shoes 22, 64, see also objects
,simply be' 69, I99, 207, 209, 2I2
sl(,cp 6, 69, 97
smell, sense of 8I
smiles 54-5, I09
social skills 73-4, 75-6
social touch I rig 30, 74-5, I26-9,
li~2-4
sorting 23-4, 43-4
special needs teaching I8-25, 26-35,
I86
speech 95-6, 98-9, I06-9; learning
28; parrots I5-I6, see also
language
speech therapy 34-5
Sri Lanka I68-70
Susan I95-7
swimming 30-2, 80-2, 83-4

tapping 8, 29-30, 3I, 35, 8I, 87; and
hands I30
teaching 39; in German 7I; language
II9-2I; special schools I7-32
teaching course 57, I54-62;
beginning 7I-3; dance 80; dancing
I26-8; drama 80, II0-II, I30;
final assessment I59A2; final
teaching round I56-62; first
assessment I05; first teaching
round 74-5, I03-5; german I60-I;
physical education 80; second
teaching round I25-7; second
to last teaching round I43-8;
swimming 80-2, 83-4; touch
I26-8
Terry I39
tests 45, 47-8
texture 22
tidal waves I0I-2
Tim 8-9, I0-I2, I64-5, I66, I86;
and silver foil II-I2
tolletting I9-20
Tom (younger brother) 45, 52-8
touch I00, I26-30, I36, I89-90,
228; with children I26-9; and
Dr Marek I23-5, I30; fear of 57,
8I-2, 83-4, II5; in friendship
I09-I0; lan 208; and Kerry
I3I-2, I35-6; pain of 79; and
reflection II, I28-9, see also
mirror hands; social touching
training, and the Millers 89, I09
Travel Dog 68-9, I30

Vanessa I03-5, I44, I45, I47

washing I67
weapons 4, II9, I20, I53; language
98-9; pretense 68-9; and
publishing book I72
Welshman 28-9, I83, 202
'Wlille' 3-5, 6-8, I2, I40; in book
86; driving 43; interviews I7,
I50-I; in London I77
words, with young children I57
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