When I was six, we went for a taster day in the Year Two classroom. It was the the building closest the entrance of the infant school playground. From the window I could see the spot where for most of the summer, the girls in my class and I had been trying to find four-leaf clovers and, I admit, doing sit-ups.
We spent the trial afternoon mostly making artwork on big sheets of paper. I slathered layer up layer of thick blue paint. Year One had mostly been spent focussing on toys and how they worked and I had spent longer than anyone trying to perfectly colour match the paint with the plastic head of a plastic lion toy whose head opened when you pulled a lever.
This painting - with its swirling blues - was supposed to be left to dry We were supposed to collect it when we started Year Two in the September, but I misunderstood the instructions. Realising my mistake later - having taken the painting home - and deeply embarrassed and ashamed of what I had done, I folded the painting and shoved it down the back of the pine cabinet my parents kept by the front door. It stayed there for months, gathering dust.
I have never told anyone that story, even though it must be near enough twenty years ago that it has sat percolating in the back of my mind. A similar incident occurred in Year 4, where each table made an artwork depicting part of the story of Rama, Sita and Hanuman.
My table of so-called ‘high achievers’ had the part where Ravana abducted Sita, flying through the sky in what I remember as a golden chariot type thing. I genuinely took it home in error, thinking we had finished the project, but as ever, my teacher had plans to thwart me. I didn’t feel it was right to tuck a story with religious significance - even if it was scrawled in an eight year olds writing, down the back of a cabinet. So, I put it in my wardrobe, under the red plastic box where I kept my clothing and where the cat could occasionally be found sleeping.
It occurred to me the other day that some people have to invent stories, I just remember them in immensely vivid detail. It’s probably the most useful thing autism has given me. The trick, though, is to stop remembering them all at the same time.
For many people, act of creating is an act almost of apparition - there is nothing there and then, suddenly, something. I am not creating new things, new ideas. I am just saying them as I see them. Even writing my book - which is more research based and telling stories that are not my lived experience - it feels more like coalescing than creating.
I was sat in my local pub with a screenwriter I distinctly admire and who was kind enough to lend me suitcase because apparently I only own the kind that enable you to pack for two weeks and not two days. We were - and are - both on deadlines of very different kinds. I was lamenting the fact I don’t know how to write scripts, yet, even though I have some - to use the technical term - banging ideas. I can’t begin to work on them, though. Not till my book is done.
Every time I sit down to try and write my book, some sort of catastrophe befalls me or my loved ones. I love a flair for the dramatic, but I am not exaggerating. I’m talking life or death level disasters which have lined up in such a neat succession. Some of the things I have been dealing with the past weeks and months too morbid to write about - which given this newsletter was mostly an outpouring for my depression for years - is a new standard.
A friend I met in Margate because she has two very cute dogs asked recently how I am keeping it together so well when other people would have fallen apart months ago by now. Honestly, it’s because I don’t have the luxury of falling into pieces. My mortgage won’t pay itself. I live alone; if I crumble, then there won’t be any food in the fridge and there won’t be clean clothes to wear.
And besides, despite the truly awful things going on, for the first time in my life I sort of know that whatever happens I will be okay. Perhaps this is the wisdom of age.I turn 25 on Sunday. Which means I have been working to make things better for LGBTQ+ people for a decade, pretty much. It means that I’ve been professionally working to make a better world for at least the last seven.
There’s a line in Doctor Who Series 3 Episode 6 (at least I think it is, off the top of my head) The Lazarus Experiment, where David Tennant is facing off against a mutant Mark Gatiss at Southwark Cathedral. Lazarus has monstered himself in pursuit of immortality, whilst the Doctor - in essence, an immortal - condemns him:
“Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It’s not the time that matters, it’s the person.”
It’s said with a certain snippy menace in the scene, but I think of it often.
I was in Year 3 when that episode came out. We had pasta bake for tea.
I’ll be back soon with more consistent writing when the universe gives me a break. Go have a nice weekend. Help me celebrate my birthday by petting some dogs, supporting your local LGBTQ+ organisations and subscribing for more.