A cross between Alan Partridge and Eeyore

When I went to the Latitude festival with the family earlier this year, I met up with my brother and his girlfriend after Belle & Sebastian’s set, and amongst other things, he told me to go and check out a young female poet-cum-rapper he’d seen performing around London. Her name was Kate Tempest, and she was performing in the Poetry Tent. She also, it turned out, is from Brockley, the same area I lived in when I was a baby.

Kate Tempest looked pretty innucuous; she had long, curly blonde hair and was wearing jeans and a sweater, and looked more like a first-year student than a rapping poet, but then she opened her mouth, and I was hooked. She spoke of south London, of teenagers growing up on dismal grey estates where she and her friends would ‘paint rainbows’, of troubled youth, of self-destruction and getting drunk and having a fag and saying and doing regrettable things and then writing poems about said regrettable things on wine-stained paper. Watching her in action was incredible; it wasn’t a poetry reading so much as a tornado of language and sound, and I wished fervently that I could articulate myself so well when I opened my own mouth. I can write poetry, sure, but I totally fail at reading it.

One of the reasons why I blog, and why I am writing this, is because I find it immensely hard to articulate myself when I speak. Some people tell me I’m articulate, but I open my mouth and I hear this sound that’s half Alan Partridge’s daughter and half Eeyore, and I stumble over words and sound like some mouthbreathing Baldrick. I hate speaking to people I don’t know and speaking in front of big groups of people, and although I dream of doing a talk for the NAS, or being an advocate like Chris Mitchell, I worry that I’ll start speaking and utter bollocks will come out, but give me a pen or a computer and I’m fine.

So you can imagine how pissed off I was to hear that – and yes, I know this article is a couple of weeks old – Andrew Marr thinks most bloggers are, and I quote, ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting’. Aside from the fact that Marr actually seemed like a decent guy and one who would surely be above such juvenile crap, I actually disagree with his statement. For one thing, it smacks of the whole ‘hurr hurr there are no girls on the internet’ argument so beloved of trolls. The feminist blogosphere say hi, Andy, as do I. Yes, I am blogging and I am a GURL.  (Also, my mum doesn’t have a basement, and I moved out of her house four years ago, so nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. Ahem.)

Yes, the internet does attract people with rather…unique views on life. Yes, there are a lot of angry bloggers out there who spew nothing but hate and paranoia. Yes, there are bloggers who are sexist, racist, misogynist, homophobic, eliminationist, and just plain disturbing. But please don’t lump all of us in with them. For those of us who find it hard to speak, blogs help us. They are a way out, particularly when they can be used to help others – for instance, the Mutual Madness blog, where people will post their worries and queries, and Mental Nurse regulars will do their best to answer them. Mental Nurse itself has done its bit to (to paraphrase Zarathustra, the evil enabler / mod) expose all kinds of liars in the medical profession, and also gaps in psychotherapy egulation that jeopardise mental patients’ welfare. Net result: Mental Nurse has been in the papers. People are sitting up and taking notice. It all smacks of the kind of work my dad did in the early days of nuclear power in the UK, and long may they continue.

Blogs are also a great way to learn about other issues, through the eyes of the people they affect, and not all bloggers of this ilk are the kind who insist Barack Obama is some kind of magical space Muslim Communist Jew ninja pirate. I have an American online friend, for instance, who often blogs about reproductive rights, healthcare, fundamentalist Christianity and general politics in the US, and her blog makes for very educational reading at times. Certainly, she links to news, but also to sites such as Sadly, No! and PZ Myers, whose comments are as worthwhile as the articles themselves. As well as the above mentioned friend, I also read the blogs of queer people who blog about their experiences of homophobia, institutionalised or otherwise; of transfolk and genderqueers who discuss transphobia and gender identity; of people struggling with mental illnesses and physical conditions; and so on. Through the internet, I’ve found a good few people who share the same interests and values as me, and corny though it is, it’s reassuring to know I’m not alone. One of them became one of my best friends. (Hi, Chloe, if you’re reading this.) For those of us who struggle with talking to people in real life, the internet is a valuable tool.

I also find it a great form of release. Some say venting is counterproductive, but not always; I feel better when I’ve picked up the phone and ranted to my mum or a friend, but sometimes I don’t want to dump my problems on other people and force them to listen to my incessant whining. So I write them down. If it’s on a public-ish space, I may get comments, and that’s nice if I do, but the main reason is just to get it out of me. It’s certainly more healthy than picking up a razor blade and slashing my arm. It doesn’t always deter me from doing that, but sometimes it does.

In conclusion: please don’t judge all bloggers by a few idiots. Many bloggers are good people doing good work and talking about things that need to be discussed, and which the media doesn’t always touch – and many of us see our blogs as a lifeline. We can’t say it with sound, but we can say it with writing.

Happy Mental Health Day. If ‘happy’ is an appropriate adjective.

Today, it’s World Mental Health Day.

I’ll be honest. I feel kind of strange making a post in relation to mental health. Amongst all the other Mental Nurse bloggers, I feel I don’t really belong. I have it easier than a lot of people with mental health difficulties. I have a job; I’m not on Incapacity (yet) or DLA; I’ve never been institutionalised; I’ve never been prescribed anti-psychotics; I was never abused as a child, and I had two wonderful parents who loved me; I am white and middle-class; I completed my university degree, albeit after interrupting; I have a support network of friends and family; I have a roof over my head; I am able to socialise with others to an extent; I rarely hallucinate or hear voices. But I’m going to write an entry anyway, because mental illness runs in my mum’s side of the family, and because the past five to six years have been some of the hardest years of my life. December 2004 was when everything changed.

I’d always been a melancholy kid. Think Marvin, Eeyore, Cassandra, the Ides of March. I just went along with it. In my teenage years, I had moments where I was suicidal, and I started self-harming at 14, but I just put it down to teenage angst. Depression wasn’t an illess, I believed. It couldn’t happen to me. Even though my mum turned into a wreck after my dad died and spent days in bed, even though she had panic attacks in front of us and seemed to be more temperamental and headachey than usual, even though the doctor gave her pills to take, I just thought she was sad; I didn’t realise she was ill. After she married my stepdad, I began to internalise some of his attitudes towards weakness and depression. I believed it wasn’t an illness, and that it could only happen to someone who’d been through trauma.

I was stupid. Stupid and ignorant.

My second year of university was one of the worst years of my life. It started with coursework and rushing around like a headless chicken doing stuff for Unite Against Fascism and the LGBT Society and the Student Union Council and its extracurricular groups and the Women’s Group and the Vagina Monologues and the Rock Soc and my course, had an overdose and the loss of four people I considered friends in the centre, and ended with me living in halls with a load of rugger buggers, trapped in my room, and then staying with my parents, only able to read the Beano because my attention span was too short, fooling around on silly websites, and wondering how I ended up like this.

At my very worst, I could barely drag myself out of bed (this was before the ME hit). I was sleeping during the day, comforting eating and throwing it up, cutting myself at least once a week, crying a lot. I did go back to uni to repeat the bit I missed, but it took ages to get accustomed to sitting through classes without crying and running out of the room, I was still cutting a lot, and spent way too much time sleeping and eating pick ‘n’ mix. I was having CBT, which did help somewhat.

The Disability Department at Manchester were great. I know some people will disagree with me, but they helped me get accommodation and extensions for my coursework, and the lecturers – the German ones in particular – were so supportive. I worried that because of this stigma, this bullshit that depression is not a real illness, I wouldn’t be taken seriously, but it was quite the opposite. I sat my exams in a special room for students with disabilities and mental health issues, knowing that if I were to have a panic attack, they would stop the clock and I would take time out to recover, and then go back in when I was ready to complete the exam. I never needed the clock, but having it there was a comfort. I also got all my coursework done to deadline and did not make a hideous mess of my course. However, I did miss out on the year abroad, as Occupational Health thought sending me to Spain and Germany for a long time was a bad idea, and it did bite me in the arse when we had to talk about our years abroad (I got round this by talking about the places I would have visited), and I did feel left out, but I wouldn’t have been able to go abroad, realistically.

I admit that while writing this, I feel like the archetypal upper-middle-class Gap Year student, volunteering with the disadvantaged, throwing their arms open and proclaiming, “I am Just Like You! Respect me and allow me to bestow my whiteness upon you, and be thankful!” I almost feel like I’m slapping other people over the head with the fish of privilege. I say this because in the Daily Mail recently, there was a story about a Nice Young Middle-Class Woman who became a Victim of much Depression and spent some time in a Terrible Dickensian Institution with the Great Unwashed (hey, this is the Daily Mail – this was a psych ward in a London hospital, by the way, that treated a lot of local people, many from underprivileged areas), and how Terribly she suffered. I feel like her. I am one of the lucky ones. What I have been through is nothing compared to what the people in the article have been through, and believe me, I am well aware, although thinking this and counting my blessings is not going to help – and there! The internalised stigma rears its ugly head. Stop whining, Lotte, there is someone worse off than you.

That revelation will not make the depression go away.

The other reason why I decided to blog is because I recently reduced my dosage from 40mg of Citalopram to 20mg. It is a big step, but thankfully is going great. I feel like shit, but it’s more due to overwork than the meds change.

Although this blog was originally about Aspergers Syndrome, there will be mental health stuff on here too. So watch this space. The two issues are interconnected, twined around each other like mating snakes, so it’s inevitable they’ll tread on each other’s toes. Or whatever the snakey equivalent of that is.

My brain is a small cupboard

In my living room, where I am typing this, there is a piano. It belonged to my mum and has been handed down through her family, and as I was always playing it whenever I went over to see her, she passed it on to me. As well as being my favourite instrument out of all of the ones I own (a trumpet, a flute, a bass guitar that used to belong to one of my cousins, a Squier guitar, a keyboard, and assorted bits of drumkit), it also serves as a handy surface on which to put things, as does my kitchen table. As well as various music books, there is also a pile of paperwork on there that varies in size. There’s a similar one on my kitchen table. It is comprised of everything from bank statements and bills to bumf from Manchester City Council about the cute little green bins for kitchen waste and a ticket for the High Holy Days from my synagogue.

I surprise myself at how messy I am. You’d think a woman with Aspergers would be extremely houseproud and tidy, a place for everything and everything in its place, etc. This one isn’t. My mum has some kind of weird compulsive habit of tidying my house whenever she comes over. I don’t think she realises she’s doing it. At least she doesn’t move the furniture, she just tries to make some order out of the chaos. Maybe it’s a genetic thing – my dad was messy as well and you could always tell which side of the bedroom was his, i.e. not the tidy one. My brother is even worse than I am. I have my books in vague alphabetical order and categorised, but that’s it. I can’t be arsed re-sorting my CDs.

I have a problem with paperwork. When I put my mind to it, ticking off things on a virtual to-do list, I can sort stuff out. I make sure my bills are paid on time, I set up direct debits and standing orders so that the Council or whoever won’t have to keep sending me arsey letters going “GIVE US YOUR MONEY OR WE TAKE YOU TO COURT, BITCH” (or words to that effect), but when it comes to other bits of paperwork and mundane tasks, I forget. It took me weeks to get my garden sorted out, as I don’t have the energy to maintain it myself, to donate to the synagogue Yom Kippur appeal, to take over the freehold for my flat, to write back to someone who’d found info on my family tree. I am admittedly terrible about getting back to people. It’s a good thing I’m only a legal secretary and not a lawyer.

I think the problem is that I cannot concentrate on too many things at once. I tend to do the mental equivalent of shoving bits of paper into a to-do tray and then ignoring it as the pile builds up. Forget what people say about women and multi-tasking; this one is crap at it. I can Google stuff or type when I’m talking to a client or a colleague or a barrister or whatever, as I have to take attendance notes on important phone calls, but when it comes to dealing with all the paperwork, or indeed, the housework, I forget. My mum was not happy with the state of my last house, as I nearly always forgot to hoover, dust, wipe surfaces etc. It wasn’t laziness or sluttiness so much as the fact that it just didn’t occur to me to do these things. I’d be so preoccupied with my dissertation or my research for uni or whatever that housework would be pushed out of my mind. If my brain was a storage space, it would be a small cupboard. There is only so much crap that you can fit in a small cupboard before things start to fall out.

I don’t know whether this is an Aspergers thing or not, but it’s a frustrating one. My mum has offered to pay for a cleaner in the past, but I feel far too ashamed to hire one. I guess I just don’t like admitting I need help. I hate being made to feel like a dirty slut who can’t take care of herself, but maybe this is what I am. I guess Mum sees things I don’t see. The dirt does not register on my radar. The last place had a damp problem and the amount of cleaning it needed was ridiculous, so at least the new place is easier to look after, but it’s still messy. Apparently it’s also depression related. Indeed, when I was at my lowest, I was dependent on my family for everything, including contacting the NHS for a referral for therapy, which I could not do as I was in too much of a mess.

I try and keep up with housework these days – at the very least, I wash up, I do at least one wash per week, I clean the toilet and change my bed, which I only did once a month back in the old place (sorry), but I don’t always hoover, wash windows, dust or clean the kitchen and bathroom floors, although now it’s because I don’t have the fucking energy to do housework most of the time. Even though I only work four hours a day, and in a desk job at that, I spend most of the rest of the day resting up and recovering. Probably due to the nature of my job, I am getting better at organising stuff and prioritising what needs to be done, even when it’s not flashing on my screen in red type marked ‘URGENT’, but it’s a pain in the arse trying to fit everything in the cupboard. Housework, job, synagogue, bills, sink, floor, bathroom, exercise when I have the energy, blog, return library books, transfer direct debits to new account, and so on, and so on…but the paperwork isn’t letting up any time soon.

Rudy Simone is made of win

Last Monday, August 16th, the Telegraph featured an article on women with Aspergers Syndrome entitled ‘Help at last for the “Aspergirls”‘. Notwithstanding the fact that I wish I’d invented the term myself (I love puns like dogs love humping your leg), I was extremely happy to discover that at long last, there’s a book out there focusing on women with Aspergers. It’s called Aspergirls: Empowering Women with Aspergers Syndrome. It’s by a woman called Rudy Simone, who unsurprisingly has Aspergers Syndrome, and apparently you can order it through the Telegraph website, and with any luck it’ll be on Amazon.

According to the article, the National Autistic Society states that women are far less likely to be affected by Aspergers than men – over four times less, to be exact. And yet, in the same article, out of every five people on the autistic spectrum, Aspergers included, one will be a woman. But not everyone with Aspergers is correctly diagnosed. Another woman with Aspergers interviewed for the article, Sarah, states she was originally thought to be schizophrenic, and wasn’t diagnosed until she was twenty-six. I wonder myself how long it would have taken for me to be diagnosed if my dad hadn’t died and I hadn’t started acting up and worrying my family and primary school. I probably would have been thought of merely as just another weirdo, an eccentric loner, no justification or reason needed.

Simone, like me, wants to challenge the old misconception of Aspergers as a ‘male condition’, and to suggest how it might manifest itself in women and how we and the people around us can deal with it. She has a partner and a teenage child, proof once again that people with Aspergers can – like, ohmagawd – actually have families and lead ‘normal’ lives, rather than spending our entire lives in our mothers’ basements playing World of Warcraft and playing with string or whatever it is people think we do. (My mother doesn’t have a basement anyway, but that’s beside the point.) Sarah, meanwhile, is married and is working for BT, thanks to Prospects, a service provided via the NAS which helps people on the spectrum find jobs. I made use of it myself when I was at university.

Simone and Sarah’s stories struck a chord with me because both had similar childhoods and experiences to my own. Sarah admits to having been terrible at sport and badly co-ordinated, and used music as a means of escape. Simone, meanwhile, has habits which I recognise all too clearly as my own; re-reading the same books – something my mother has never understood, since you know what happens – and listening to the same songs again and again, just like me. Even now, on my iPod, I have certain tunes which I listen to again and again and never get tired of, although I admit having album fatigue after listening to Space’s Tin Planet, an album which admittedly hasn’t aged well but which I loved when I was halfway through high school, one too many times. Both women were bright as children; Sarah was even given an unconditional place to study music at Goldsmiths, but dropped out after one year.  Simone is also very sensitive to certain smells and textures, and I still remember as a teenager nearly throwing up after accidentally inhaling the stench of my stepdad’s rancid old dog’s basket, and disliking clothes made of wool because it itched me something rotten.

When I read something like this, it’s hard not to immediately start jumping up and down and shouting, “Me too! Me too!” It’s like discovering someone ships the same weird pairing as you, gets a nerdy cultural reference you make, or was at the same Rammstein gig at the Manchester Apollo in 2002 when American Head Charge and Raging Speedhorn were supporting, and Till Lindemann pretended to buttfuck the keyboard player with a fake dildo and squirted fake jizz over the front row. (Yes, I have met a good few people who were at that gig.) Knowing that there are people out there who grew up with the same quirks, the same problems and the same dislikes and fears and anxieties as you did, caused by the same condition that you have, is in its own weird way a great comfort. One of the most painful parts of the article was when both women described the problems they had fitting in at school, and with making friends with other women. Simone admits to having no close female friends, while Sarah finds interacting with women difficult, what with unseen hierarchies, peer pressure, social niceties and the other subtle little things that come with friendship groups among women, not just in high school, but in adulthood. I’m not suggesting that men cannot be two-faced, deceitful and subtly cruel. One of the worst betrayals I have ever suffered was from a so-called male friend. But I have had far more problems with girls in high school than boys. At least you knew when the boys were being cruel.

I’ve been lucky in that most of my closest friends are women, but they’re not ‘ordinary’ women. They are women with mental health issues, unusual fetishes, eccentric dress sense, intellectual interests such as archaeology and queer theory, good (in my opinion anyway) taste in music (and that includes the one who likes hair metal), tattoos, piercings, baggage, personality quirks, a black and often downright wrong sense of humour. Most importantly, they appreciate me for who I am, and anyone with Aspergers who can find friends, male or female, who genuinely care about them and enjoy being around them are lucky people indeed. However, ever since I was a nipper, I’ve always found men easier to talk to in some ways. I knew where I was with men. With women, I more often than not found myself second guessing.

So Rudy Simone, I salute you. Here’s hoping that you give girls and women with Aspergers strength and hope. I’m probably going to buy the book, and if I do, I’ll review it here. So watch this space. If any readers have read it, let me know what you think.

“But you can’t have Aspergers!”

I think I missed some kind of meeting. Apparently I am supposed to look at the floor, flap my hands, mutter strange nonsensical things, talk in a stilted monotone about trains or volcanoes, be a maths genius and a savant, and possibly have a quick one off the wrist in public or drool over myself or something. When I tell people I have Aspergers Syndrome, generally the reaction is “no way, you can’t have Aspergers.” In other words, gor blimey Charlie, we have a normal person here. My normal reaction is, “you’d notice if you lived with me.” To be fair, if someone very briefly met me, they can’t be expected to know all my quirks and eccentricities and habits which drove my family up the wall. But it does, if I’m honest, annoy me a bit.

When I was in my first year of university, doing a degree in German and Spanish – the latter from scratch as I only knew some rudimentary Spanish from a night class I took in my gap year – I went to the campus doctor to get, I don’t know, a morning after pill or something. I forget what. He was asking me about my degree and he may or may not have had access to my medical records, but the subject of Aspergers came up and he said, “I don’t believe you have Aspergers Syndrome because you’re doing a languages degree. People with Aspergers normally do maths or science degrees.”

WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN.

Yes, some people with Aspergers are indeed maths and science experts. Daniel Tammet, for instance. (He apparently can recite pi to 22,514 numbers, whereas I can only remember three. Jammy git.) But not all of us are. Being surprised that I am actually not that great with figures is one thing, but outright telling me that I can’t have Aspergers because I’m doing an arts subject is, frankly, bollocks. I had been diagnosed with it by at least two different doctors by the time I came to Manchester.

I really do not like being shoved into a box by people who ought to know better and can’t see beyond the stereotypical view they have of people with Aspergers or autism as the number-crunching, statistics-remembering, socially incompetent savant. We are not a hive mind, we are at various different points on the spectrum (if you’re thinking of it as a rainbow, some of us are red, some of us are blue, some of us are green yellow etc.), and we can and do deviate from the stereotype.

“You can’t have Aspergers, you’re outgoing!” No, I’m not. I’m actually quite shy. There are situations where I have to be outgoing, such as when I was at the Freshers’ Fair trying to entice fresh meat into joining the Rock Soc, or at a job interview, but it doesn’t come naturally. It is something I really have to work at. I can schmooze, but it’s a total strain. I’m certainly outgoing when I’m with my friends as I feel I can totally be myself, but around people I don’t know, I’m more reserved and the part of me that I don’t want them to see doesn’t come out. I force it back down and hope it keeps quiet.

“You can’t have Aspergers, you have great eye contact!” Again, it’s something I’ve had to work at and does not come naturally, and when I get nervous, my eye contact falters. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve looked at my supervisor’s table when I’m in his office, or I’ve looked at the floor or the wall when talking to people and not being in a good mood at the time.

Maybe this is my paranoia talking, but sometimes I wonder if I even look like a stereotypical person with Aspergers, whatever they look like. And I’m not just talking about having two X chromosomes. I wash my hair, my posture is no worse than most people’s, I don’t stand a nanometre away from people when talking to them or get all up in their personal space, I don’t smell funny (I hope not, anyway – thanks to my mum kindly pointing out whenever I had BO as a teenager, I’ve had a bit of a thing about not smelling bad), my clothes are generally clean(ish), I don’t flap my hands etc., although I do wear glasses, due to crap eyesight being hereditary in my family and doing a job that involves sitting in front of a a computer. Are people actually thinking, “Heavens to Murgatroyd, she can’t have Aspergers, she washes and stuff”? Probably not, but sometimes I do wonder.

Maybe I’m being a total bitch. After all, I suppose I should take it as a compliment that I seem neurotypical (and yes, I know that word is annoying to some but it really is less of a mouthful than ‘people who have not as yet been diagnosed with a mental disorder’). On the one hand, perhaps they’re saying I cope pretty damn well with my disorder and that I’ve managed to suppress some of my more unsavoury characteristics in order to get ahead in life. On the other hand, it does feel as though a big part of me is being denied. I am not Aspergers and Aspergers is not me, but it has made me who I am.

What really does grind my gears is when people tell me to stop labelling myself, that Aspergers is just a label, that it’s no different from social awkwardness. No I won’t, no it isn’t, and yes it is. It is not a question of sticking a dirty great label on myself to remind whoever is stacking the shelves in the supermarket of life that I am to go in the Aspergers section and not, say, the wheat-free section. I am not a bloody tin of food. Aspergers is not a label; it is a part of me, it is as much a part of me as my mad hair, my wonky eyes or my toenails. And as much as it seems like that part of me doesn’t exist, it does. I’m not asking you to put me on a pedestal; I’m asking that it be acknowledged and accepted as one of the parts that makes up my identity.

Life in the Hidden Village

When I mention I have Aspergers Syndrome, one of the questions I often get asked is, “What does it entail? What are the symptoms? What’s it like having Aspergers Syndrome?” Thankfully, no-one’s mentioned Rain Man. Yet.

More and more people are aware of Aspergers Syndrome than was the case back in 1994. More people are being diagnosed, and Aspergers is making its way into popular culture. We’ve had The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. We’ve had Adam, which – from what I’ve heard – was an incredibly moving and true-to-life portrayal of a young man with Aspergers. (Memo to self: rent movie.) We’ve had Jerry Espenson in Boston Legal, Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory and – hurrah, a female character! – Karla Bentham in Waterloo Road. We’ve had Naruto fans discussing whether the character Sai has Aspergers, on account of his lack of tact and social skills, and inability to deal with emotion (I think it’s because of his ninja training, myself, but I digress). We’ve had Craig Nicholls of the Vines and Pip ‘Ladyhawke’ Brown coming out as people with AS. My mum will phone me up and mention there was a programme on Radio 4 about Aspergers Syndrome. And so on.

I’m beyond happy that we have increased visibility. The more people know about us and our condition, the more realistically we’re portrayed on TV and in books and movies, and the more people ‘come out’, the more accepted we will be, and hopefully, the more people in general will understand the condition. However, not everyone knows exactly what Aspergers Syndrome entails, so I’ll summarise.

It is not just social awkwardness or lack of social skills. It is not another form of OCD. It is not being a little bit eccentric, a bit of a loner. It is not just shyness. And no, not all of us have mad counting skills. There are some AS and autistic savants, but there are also a lot of people on the spectrum like me who are, well, ordinary. I did do well at school, but I’m not a genius – I just worked hard. And I hated maths and preferred languages (though some people do think maths is a language, so maybe there’s some connection there).

Since this blog is called the Hidden Village of Aspergers, I’ll use a metaphor. Bear in mind that what I’m saying is very generalised – Aspergers comes in all varieties, to the people on the extreme end like Christopher in The Curious Incident…, to people like me, to people who are right on the borderline.

In the Hidden Village of Aspergers, the people live by a strict timetable. You get up at 7 o’clock, have a shower at quarter past 7, then a breakfast at half past 7, then organised activities. Lunch is bang on midday. Then you have more organised activities, then dinner at 6 o’clock, culminating in bedtime at a designated time. They must adhere to these times. If anyone does anything off-schedule, people will get nervous. They don’t like it. It makes them uneasy.

‘A place for everything and everything in its place’ is one of the Village’s favourite sayings. These people do not like you moving their stuff, and that’s an understatement. Relocating workplaces or homes just isn’t done here. The thought of moving to a strange and unfamiliar place frightens them. They do not want to go beyond the borders to which they’ve become accustomed. Their parents, grandparents, ancestors have always lived here, and so will they, and their children, and their grandchildren and other descendants.

The people like hobbies and collecting things; everyone has their own interest. Dinosaurs. Trains. Military history. Pretty seashells. Transformers. Their five kittens, named after the Sailor Senshi. Metal Gear Solid. You get the idea. Like Adrian Mole and the Norwegian leather industry, they can bang on about the interests for literally hours, perhaps not realising that the person they’re talking to couldn’t give a flying’s rat’s bollock unless they come straight out and say, “Look, hun, I couldn’t give a flying rat’s bollock about your collection of Sylvanian Families.”

There are no lies, no mind games, no passive-aggressiveness, and no subtle manipulations. People speak as they find; they say what they mean and mean what they say. Tact is some kind of weird foreign concept. They can be inadvertently offensive, but may not notice. They’re bloody awful at making small talk; they don’t care about the weather or what you did over the weekend, and see no point in asking you about it. They like to talk about themselves. Sometimes they socialise, but in general they’re a suspicious lot. They can’t read each other’s faces and body language and tone, and they don’t always look you in the eye – not because they’re rude, because it just doesn’t occur to them. Some of them speak in a monotone, or quickly. You’re always on the edge, not being sure how to react to another person, not knowing what they’re implying.

They are not rude or cruel. Thoughtless, maybe, but it genuinely does not occur to them that what they are saying and doing might hurt others. Of course, some of them do realise that they’re Doing It Wrong, but not all.

They bump into each other and trip over things. They walk with their hands in their pockets, their shoulders slumped. Some of them can’t dance or play sport. They have a sense of humour, but it does not involve sarcasm or subtlety. Loud noises and bright lights terrify them. What might seem a minor annoyance to an outsider is, to a citizen of the Village, nightmarish, and akin to making a dog watch bottle rockets going off. They find parties difficult. They can form relationships, sometimes with outsiders, but don’t always know how to make the relationship work. They may be mistaken for unfeeling and cold, but that’s not true at all. These people are not robots. They can love. But strong emotions of any kind can overwhelm and confuse them. They can read many things in books and learn facts, but no book can entirely teach them how to deal with their own feelings. It takes more, much more.

Other Hidden Villages might find the people of the Hidden Village of Aspergers weird, antisocial, psychotic, clumsy, crude, stupid, cold. They isolate the Village and sometimes talk of declaring war on it, but then decide it’s better to leave the people to each other’s mercies. Some villages will try to make contact and build relations; sometimes they will succeed. But the Hidden Village of Aspergers is a bizarre kind of place indeed for an outsider. Better be careful. Take this map, and also this kitten. You could get lost in there.

The obligatory introduction

Well, here we go. I hate doing this bit, but it’s only fair readers should know what they’re getting into.

First, I’d better explain the name. People with Aspergers have a reputation for obsessing over stuff, such as volcanoes or Harry Potter or, I don’t know, spoons or something. Obsessions I’ve had in the past include: Sonic the Hedgehog, Asterix, buttons, the band Space, and people who I will not name. One of my current obsessions is a manga called Naruto. It’s somewhat of a guilty pleasure as it’s a shounen manga, i.e. aimed at pre-teen and teenage boys, but it’s also popular with older fans. It’s based in a village called Konohagakure, which means ‘village hidden in the leaf’, and which is responsible for producing ninja, including the title character. Hence the name of this blog. I was going to call it Aspiegrrl, but that title’s already been taken. It’s also where I got the name ‘Kankurette’, a feminised version of my favourite character’s name.

There are two things that inspired me to write this blog.

Firstly, I was inspired by an article in the Guardian in 2009 about how more and more women are being diagnosed with Aspergers Sydrome – and yet, it’s always been the case that fewer of us have been diagnosed with it than men because of the way women are socialised. We’re told to keep our heads down, to not make a fuss, to fit in and be ‘good girls’. We suffer from peer pressure. We cannot be too thin, too fat, too tall, too short, too clever or too stupid. We must wear the right clothes, listen to the right music, have the right hobbies, the right image, the right sexuality. Deviate? Well, as I found out the hard way, you’re screwed. Having Aspergers Syndrome, a condition which affects the social skills you so desperately need when you’re a teenage girl – indeed, that you generally need as a human - really does not help.

Secondly, I came across a website that had stories written by people about their experiences with Asperger’s, and me being into writing (and a bit of a closet attention whore), I thought, “Hey, maybe I should write something for this.” So I did, and you can read it here. I thought nothing of it at the time, but what I didn’t really consider was how people would react. I received a good few emails from people with Aspergers thanking me, telling me how much me sharing my story had helped them. One that particularly touched me was from a teenage girl called Abi who also has Aspergers. I won’t share it here as I respect her privacy, but reading it really brought it home just how much writing can help.

That said, I don’t really know what I want to achieve by writing this. Maybe it’ll become clear in time. I do know that there are other Abis out there, and if I can help them in any way, then that would be pretty awesome. I also, I suppose, want to look at the relationship between Aspergers and gender and socialisation and all that jazz. Maybe one day I’ll talk about it at a NAS conference or something.

(By the way, this is not an academic blog. It is not a project. I won’t be interviewing people or anything like that. However, I do have a friend of a friend whose daughter has Aspergers, and who is interested in women with Aspergers, so hopefully this blog will help her.)

Other things about me: I also suffer from depression (which runs in my mum’s side of the family) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the latter caused by a particularly nasty incidence of flu in the summer of 2009. It may or may not have been swine flu. The depression and the Aspergers are intertwined at times; they feed off one another, so to speak. Sometimes the symptoms overlap and you can’t always tell which is which. I am bisexual. I have a BA in German and Spanish and an MA in Translation Studies, both from the University of Manchester. My best friend is from Belize and likes drawing birds and insects. My favourite band are the Pogues. My favourite colour is green. I look a bit like a cross between a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and Alan from Modern Toss, and I’ve been compared to Eeyore and Marvin the Paranoid Android.

I come from a loving, eccentric and close-knit family. Dad’s side are Scottish; Mum’s side are apparently Jewish. My mum works in the cafe at M&S in Chester, and spent a lot of my childhood raising us alone as my dad was in and out of hospital. We had a very up-and-down relationship when I was a teenager, and it took her a while to come to terms with me having Aspergers, but we’re a lot closer now, thank G-d. From her, I inherited migraines, neuroses, feminism, being crap at sport, and music taste.

My dad was a journalist, activist and one of my heroes, and died in 1993. I like to think I get my writing abilities from him, and also my love of language, although I’ve also inherited bad skin, migraines, and a tendency to put on weight. And a dislike of porridge, which is pretty ironic as my dad was Scottish.

I also have a younger brother who is 24 and doing a Masters in something music-related at Goldsmiths. We also had a pretty turbulent relationship when we were kids, and that’s putting it mildly, but again, we’ve become much closer over the past few years. The fact we don’t live together really helps now.

I should note that there will be a lot of swearing. Apologies. There will also be some content which is potentially triggering or painful to read. I self-harm, although thankfully not as much as I used to, and I have had a lot of issues with eating in the past, not helped by anti-depressant-related weight gain.

So there you go.