An excerpt from STIM, by Kevin Berry (reproduced with permission)

 

CHAPTER ONE

My ‘therapist’ suggested I should write a diary to try to understand these turbulent emotions. That is because it is difficult for me to know what are emotions and what are not. All I have are the thoughts in my head—sometimes calm, logical and ordered, sometimes a combination of things I do not quite recognise, yet they seem to draw me unrelentingly into the deep like some theoretical ravenous sea monster. I guess those are the emotions. Whatever they are, they are hard to qualify, tricky to understand, sometimes near impossible to control. It is like trying to put one of those giant jigsaws together, but I have never even seen the picture on the box, so I do not know where I am with it or what it is I am trying to make. I also suspect I am missing some of the important pieces.

By ‘therapist’, I do not mean a real professional therapist, of course. I cannot afford one of those on my meagre student allowance and haphazard income from part-time jobs. I mean Chloe. She is my friend and flatmate, and she is taking first-year Psychology at University (yet again), so she must know something. Also, her father pays for her to see a psychotherapist. I suppose I am receiving some help by proxy.

Just like me, Chloe is an Aspie. That is what we call ourselves, those of us who have Asperger’s Syndrome, which is the most common form of Autism. In addition to this Autistic Spectrum Disorder (or Difference, as she likes to call it), she also has an eclectic assortment of other diagnoses, but these are probably wrong. She has at various times been diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), GAD (Generalised Anxiety Disorder) and SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), amongst others. She is numerically and lexically dyslexic, and she is hyperlexic, so when I want to say something, sometimes I have to interrupt her. She advised me to do that. She might be other -exics or -axics as well, but she has forgotten about them if she is.

Anyway, Chloe copes quite well with the NS (Non-Spectrum) world, or NT (Neuro-Typical) world, as most people call it. It must be due to all the psychotherapy she has had. Some Aspies genuinely struggle to cope with the various facets of everyday life, because the social etiquettes of life are developed and maintained by NS people, and therefore some of them seem strange, uncomfortable or disturbing. We are the square pegs that do not neatly fit into the round holes of life without taking a battering.

I feel lucky and privileged to have met Chloe, as she helps me understand how to navigate the murky seas of the NS world, avoid drowning in the ebb and flow of emotions, decode the hidden meanings of clichés and idioms, and recite the common dishonest responses that are expected when exchanging social niceties. She has already learned to solve these interpersonal puzzles, you see. I do not know if she is just an exceptionally kind person, or if she sees me as some kind of psychology project, and I do not know how I could know this without her actually telling me, and I do not know how to ask. Apparently, NS people know these kinds of things without even thinking about them. How they can do so without being told, I do not know. It is bewildering to me.

Sometimes I wonder why, when there are so many words to choose from to convey something clearly, people do not say what they mean, or mean what they say, but instead talk in some kind of code which I do not actually get, but NS people do. There are times when I think they are talking a totally different language, in which the meaning is often as twisted and mysterious as the roots of some ancient oak tree, buried and creeping in an unknown direction, and I cannot perceive it or dig it out.

I need my routines, of knowing something familiar will happen and when and how and with whom. I cannot visualise what something is like, or how it would feel, that has not happened to me yet. All I can do is remember all the things that have happened, and find the ones that are most like whatever is happening now, and assume history repeats. Apparently, it does not exactly, but it rhymes, and that is usually close enough.

All I know is how I experience the world, and that I do not comprehend much of it, and that not particularly well. I struggle to see why people do what they do, and say what they say. And that is sometimes painful, but mostly it is okay. The world does not understand me either, and that is fine. Chloe is there to help me find a safe passage through the treacherous waterways of life, to navigate the tempestuous sea of emotions of other people without being overwhelmed and sinking. At the moment, anyway. I trust her entirely.

Anyway, Chloe said I should write a diary or journal, because I can think so clearly in words, even if I cannot vocalise them especially well. And I can write them and never forget what I wrote or when I wrote it or where I wrote it. I think words are beautiful, especially the ones with neat little letters that do not extend up or down above the others, like ‘universe’ and ‘unconsciousness’, because they look so tidy on the line. But it is not possible to write a whole book like that, though I believe one person wrote a novel entirely without the letter ‘e’. I would not do that as ‘e’ is one of the letters I like.

If I write enough, and for long enough, my diary might take on a life of its own and evolve into some kind of book, like Bridget Jones’s diary, or even a series of books, like Samuel Pepys’s diary (he wrote ten years of detailed volumes). Perhaps Samuel Pepys had an entertaining life and wrote it all down. Or maybe he just did not get out much, had a vivid imagination and was terribly verbose. I cannot know this for sure because I was not there at the time.

Some diaries get transformed from a book into a movie… though Chloe tells me that the most popular movies contain four key features, which are violence, sex, swearing and explosions, and she says they are the most popular movies because that is what NS people enjoy watching the most. She has cautioned me not to rely on movies as representing a true and accurate depiction of normal human personal relationships.

Nevertheless, those four elements are what my book, or diary, should contain, and this, therefore, will be challenging. I know little of violence and nothing of sex (though it is my intention to make this a special project of mine; this year I will investigate sex and even try to take part). The swearing will probably occur sporadically as I write this book. I do not know whether there will be any explosions. Hopefully they will not be in the house. If I am lucky, the sex will happen somehow (though preferably not the violence at the same time), as I do need it as one of the four essential things for the film adaptation.

I am jumping ahead too much, because I imagine things that might happen (such as a movie based on my diary, which I have not yet written), and it is scary because I do not know if these things will happen or not, and that creates uncertainty, which creates stress, which leads me to imagine even more things. This is fretful. Yet whenever there is uncertainty, I feel compelled to evaluate all possible outcomes. But then I feel overwhelmed.

The other problem for me is that Chloe says I should write about what I know, and I do not know anything much. However, I do know about her, and about me, and so I will write about us.

This is how we met. 

 

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