I am autistic.  It’s okay, I’ve known this for a long time and I like/liked that it is/was not that noticeable.  I had a life that was very well set up for it.  It almost was a predatory life for a very timid girl, I would swoop into a social situation, flit from group to group as I moved before conversation got awkward and retreat back to my solitude to recoup.  The prey, playing with the big boys, hoping to avoid detection, the mimic and oh was I a good mimic.   I’d had a varied upbringing, I grew up poor but got a state assisted place to a very expensive secondary school so I could socialise with most social stratas at ease.  

My social behaviour was learnt and copied though, my earliest childhood memory is my mum telling me to look people in the eyes when I talk to them, showing I had a tendency not to right back then. 

Autism in girls wasn’t really a thing when I was little, but from a young age I felt different and I knew there was something different about me from the age of 10. My friend David (RIP) straight out told me so during a game of playground tag.  When I said I wouldn’t run away if he let me go and ……….. Didn’t run away.  He asked me why I didn’t run away and said that everyone else would have and I was perplexed, because I had said I wouldn’t run away and so why would I?  It was an innocuous comment but it stuck with me, the first person to say “you’re strange” straight to my face.  That was when I knew though it would be several years before I had a name for it.  

From the time I left school all I wanted to do was be popular, I was the second least popular person in the year at school and I had been miserable.  But I got grades and at uni I continued to excel academically whilst putting all my effort into my socials.  I never touched drugs but I was in the pub every day, clubbing really wasn’t my scene back then, I found the noise and crowds too much, much better give me a pool table and a pint.   

I self diagnosed at the age of 24 after being put onto the idea by another comment from my mother, at least that’s how I remember it.  I was telling her I thought I was dyslexic and she said, “I don’t think you’re dyslexic, I think you’re autistic.”  To this day, she denies saying that, and indeed has screamed in my face before that I am not autistic, but that’s how I remember it and I like to keep the memory that way. I was formally diagnosed at 37 after.  Three years AFTER I was first sectioned. Three years and 5 sectionings later.  AFTER the most terrifying experience of my life.

The fifth time was the day after I got my autism assessment results, the private assessment anyway, we’d paid to go private because the NHS was not referring me.  The results were emailed to my father as he had organised the test.  I’d been to see them at the weekend, they had the results but either by oversight of intention they did not share them with me when I was with them.  I’d hoped they would, I’d hoped it would mend the rift between us.  They, like the mental health services, were adamant that I was not autistic.  

Upon getting home, they emailed them to me with no comment.  I opened up the document and my eyes instantly fell on the line “severely autistic”, I was ecstatic and devastated at once.  Ecstatic that I had finally got the diagnosis that I had known to be true for a decade, devastated that I was learning the news on my own and had no one to celebrate with.  I felt the rift between me and my parents widen and asked for a couple of days quiet away from them to process the pain, they did not see these results as anything important, whereas to me they were everything.

I walked to the all-night petrol station, bought myself a bottle of prosecco to celebrate on my own, it was snowing and I let Percy the cat out in the snow for the first time. I wanted to whoop with joy and fall on my knees and cry in despair.  I knew I should have taken the next day off work, but I’d promised a release of the database and had an important meeting.  So I went in.  I smashed the meeting, somehow and was trying to finish up some odds and end while holding back the tears.  I wanted to set up a meeting with my manager and the head of department to discuss my new diagnosis and how I could be better deployed within the company, but I couldn’t work out what to say so I asked his PA just to set up a meeting for me.

This was when stuff started to go bad.  She noticed that I was upset and would not leave me alone, asking over and over what was wrong.  But I didn’t know this woman and I didn’t want to talk about maybe disowning my parents in the office.  I just wanted to do my work and get out of there.  Next thing I know, the head of HR is standing in front of me.  This was initially great, I wanted to talk to HR, my current role was not suitable for my strengths.  The details of what happened next are hazy but I found myself in the HR office surrounded by a multitude of people, some I knew and some I didn’t.  You can’t crowd autistic people, they can’t calm down when they are crowded.  I needed something to focus on, I didn’t understand what was happening, I asked for my laptop or even a paper and pen as I was losing the ability to speak.  People just stood around me, telling me to calm down, treating me like I was ill, when I knew I was smarter than them.  I called the police on myself, said I was going to smash something if they didn’t let me go.  Minutes later people who had been standing there watching me call the police threatened to call the police on me and I was like “I just called them!”.  I desperately wanted a cigarette, 5 minutes on my own to calm down and then I would be able to talk to anyone, but my pleas were denied.

My care coordinator arrived and after initial relief this too turned to despair as rather than come to me and clear people, she just joined the throngs of people looking at me like I was a freakshow.

So I sat there, in the office, very slowly over the course of 10 minutes or so, rolling and toying with a cigarette, then I put it in my mouth there and lit it.  To which I was greeted with “You can’t smoke in here”, like that would be news to me.   It worked though I was allowed to leave the office and go to the smoking area.

From there I was done, done with Airbus, done with all the people and I left, got in my car and went for a drive.  I didn’t know where I was going, but many people find a drive calms them and I was one of them.  I ended up in Hitchin at my old local, where I emailed work and handed in my resignation.  Then I drove past the house I used to share with my husband, as I passed it it felt almost as if the wheel turned itself to make me turn in and take a look, it was the first time I had seen it since I left over three years prior.

Next I made my way to B&Q where I was hoping to buy an automated cat feeder but instead I was intercepted by the police.  My care coordinator had reported me missing!  I, a 37 years old adult, was reported missing and picked up by the police after 4 hours.  The time for a missing person as an adult is 24 hours, but as someone with a mental health condition you are no longer considered an adult.  It was terrifying.  I was put in the back of a police riot van for some reason.   On being taken to the ward all structure of time became meaningless and I was so traumatised that I could not speak by the morning.  For the first couple of days I had to communicate entirely by written note.

I didn’t do anything, I took myself away from a stressful situation and I was locked up for a further month.