Please leave your message after the out of tune tune

“Please leave your message after the out of tune, tune”.

“What is your Mark?
This was the question my Finnish son asked of my friend last New Year. He was explaining that if we can find who we are in our centre we are able to follow our own truths. This bewildered my autistic friend who had no ability to follow that line of thinking. My son then told him the story of Sir Percival from the Knights of the Round Table. In essence the story suggested that if one is to be true to oneself there are certain distractions we need to avoid, no damsels or dragons, to stay focused on finding the “grail”, probably where one does not expect it. To free oneself from the shackles of the past and to be in the moment. My friend smiled at my son and said he understood and so clearly did not. He and I talked afterwards about what this story meant and the message that Nic was trying to share with him……………………………………..

I thought when I met him, that he was different and a little weird in how he behaved, but put this down to the circumstances, where he was and how he felt. I watched him for a few weeks as he attended a centre that I ran and observed that he had some ways of being that were different to others. He found it almost impossible to make eye contact with people; he tended to walk the same route in the building and became distressed if he was made to change direction. He could not do two things at the same time. Sometimes he arrived and clearly had not washed or cleaned himself and was offended by this. He was sometimes so distressed at the world that he could not get into the car to drive the ½ a mile to the centre and then at other times he was able to make decisions and do things and then would almost seems as if the energy had been sucked out of him and would go to sleep on the sofa in my office. He was and is exceptionally intelligent. He has the ability to become completely absorbed in computers, he appears to be able sight read and memorise words and yet not understand their meaning. He takes the literal meaning to heart. He copies other peoples’ behaviours. He writes lists and more lists and becomes distressed if they are not followed to the letter.
After a few weeks of him coming to the centre he started to talk to me and I asked him if he had ever considered he had autism. At first he was defensive and said that he did not think he did and then he began to tell me that he had thought that but had been told by his doctor that this was rubbish. I was running a group and he joined it, clearly able to understand the meaning underneath the surface in the groups, asking questions and quickly working out if I was upset or distressed at all. He also started to become aware of how I looked and was starting to look at me when I was not looking at him. He did not like it if people became upset as he said he absorbed their pain like a sponge and if he cared at all for people and they were unhappy he felt unhappy as well.
We started to talk more and more about his childhood and the way that he learnt to understand his world.
He has very clear memories of his childhood, one of them being left on his own a lot, sitting in a playpen and feeling stuck behind the bars. This has left him with a feel fear of being in prison or behind bars. He told me that he has never talked freely to anyone for fear that he would be locked up. At the time I had such a little understanding of his autism, I thought he was being unnecessarily dramatic. I also, in my naivety, thought that I could teach him to not be so autistic and that if I tried really hard I could somehow make the autism recede.

I write this story as I understand it, not as it might be. I share my perception of the world my friend, who I shall call Jon, lives in, and although I might be wide of his mark, I share it as I saw it and hope that someone somewhere reads this and gets the information and help that they might need. I write it that my love for this man might be declared and seen. For all those women who love men with autism and who feel lost and misunderstood in their loving. I write it for him and I write it for me.