The ridiculousness of writing a memoir aged twenty-six is not lost on me. It’s obviously a complete joke. I’m neither a politician, rock star or sportsperson – I’m just a gobby little shit with a lot of things to say who has managed to wangle an editor who has the unenviable job of making it readable.
It is a truly human desire to make stories out of the events that befall us. We all simply want to understand, to come to some sort of conclusion, to weave what is in reality a thousand loose threads into a tapestry of meaning. We are desperate to take the chaos of existence and turn it into something beautiful and full of substance. Ultimately, we will fail. Life is not a pretty throw from Urban Outfitters with a general thrust and message. Life is screaming pain and confusion with a few moments of respite and, if you’re lucky, a couple of really good puddings. I have embarked on an impossible task and all I can hope is that you enjoy reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
I should address why this is a memoir. I could have written a thinly veiled autobiographical fictional novel. One garners more respect for that, I think. But it is my duty to tell my truth and label it as such. Also, you don’t get an advance for fiction you haven’t written and I like to get my money upfront.
I have spent much time debating internally late at night when I would much rather be sleeping. I have wrestled over what events I would put in this book. Should I include my sexual awakening in gory detail (Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted)? Should I include a series of heartbreaks from friends, lovers and family members? Do I write about my father’s adoption? Do I write about the long line of child abuse that ends with my mother? (This is my next project, so please be patient.) What is mine to tell? All of these things are intrinsic to me, my life and my identity. They are the building blocks of who I am.
But in this instance, I am going to be a tease and not talk about those things at all. This book contains a deep dive into my experiences with education, creativity and neurodiversity. My story is that after an unconventional school route I found myself, against the odds, studying at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. But after failing some exams at the University of Oxford, I was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia. Not only did I have no clue what those words meant, I had no idea that they could be applied to me. This book is an exploration of that journey and an attempt to understand how on earth I could have slipped through the gaps for the first twenty years of my life.
With this very specific theme, I ought to clarify a few things. Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs) is the general name for a family of differences in learning. It is basically about how the brain processes the world around it. We all have different cognitive profiles, which is to say we each have strengths and weaknesses, but SpLDs are diagnosed by looking at the disparity in those strengths and weaknesses. That is to say: the focus is on the gap.
There are many ways in which we can be neurodivergent: Autism/ASD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Tourette’s, Anxiety, ADD/ADHD, Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia, Developmental Language Disorder, to name a handful. I am not going to write long and scientific definitions of each of these; you have Google and there are educational psychologists and individuals with PhD brains who would be horrified by my bastardisation of these complex subjects. I deal in stories and jokes and feelings. But here is my very brief attempt at explaining the SpLDs that feature in this book:
• Dyslexia: language and words are tricky and slippy. Don’t ask us to spell.
• Dyspraxia: space and time is weird. We fall over and have trouble organising.
• ADHD: if it’s boring we need to find something more interesting, and when we do we have laser focus.
• Autism: feelings, sounds and the environment can be very intense and hard to translate.
In other words, SpLDs make us see and experience the world in a very different way. This means that we have an incredible arsenal of strengths which include: compassion, creativity, originality and resilience.
Oh, and some names have been changed to protect the guilty (in my eyes) and the innocent (theirs). Everything I have written is true, or at least I believe it is, and so surely that is even more telling than anything else. This is what happened as far as I’m concerned; if you think differently – write your own book.