Lindy Kato (Writer)

My brother told me he has autism. He’s sixty-three (older now). He asked if it was ever mentioned when he was a child. I assure him that he was a weird child and nothing has changed. Actually – a lot has changed. As a child he never learned to talk, I got the blame because I didn’t shut up. He clung to the school railings and screamed. None of the other kids did that. I had to drag him off the fence and stop him being beaten up in the playground. He was so special that all the bananas were his because he would only eat bananas and jelly. He had to drink iron through a straw because the black liquid stained his teeth. His choice.

ESA/Hubble and NASA

He wasn’t ever meant to read. I had his library ticket because I didn’t stop reading. He could have gone to a home for kids like him where he would have better opportunities, that’s what Mum was told. He dodged a bullet there I reckon. Now his artwork is in three galleries, he’s retired and in possession of a ton of rare books.

People ask me why neurodiversity has increased so much since the 1990s. These days every other child in school has something or other. When I was at school there were two kids that would be diagnosed with ADHD now. I wanted to kill them both and eventually I coped by hiding out in the library. Then there was one who barely spoke, and one who regularly lost it but really, he was wound up on purpose. That’s three, possibly four, out of thirty and of course in those days it didn’t affect girls.

You know what also has risen sharply since the 1990s? Research into Autism and ADHD, or both (auADHD). Not the sole components of neurodiversity which is an umbrella term for a brain that functions in an alternate fashion, dyslexia, dyscalculia, Tourette’s. I recall being surprised when I found that other people don’t think like me! But why should they? I’ve written about aphantasia, it isn’t usually listed in the common facets of neurodivergence, but it must be. It describes a lack of a mind’s eye. I couldn’t function without the pictures in my head.

To be diagnosed takes a lot of persistence and effort and in some countries, money as well. Unless you are disabled by the way your brain works, you’re not likely to get a diagnosis but what counts as disabled? On a personal level, I am off being diagnosed with anything. You can read Bleak Expectations to see why. You learn to deal with what you have and that’s easy to say now I’m so old.

Of course these things existed before the 1990s. I don’t have to look far, Dad said his teachers were all senile and he left school at ten years old to sell stolen lavender and rabbits. The rabbits were for food, but he built and sold hutches for the people who couldn’t kill them. Mum was the rock in our house.

Then there’s Granddad, off to war as a fourteen-year-old, what was he thinking? Then his eldest boy did the same thing. He skipped the scholarship he’d won and joined in WWII instead. These days they would both be diagnosed with ADHD. Nan was the rock in that household – though my other aunts and uncles seem normal (a setting on a dishwasher)?

When I think of my daughter, who couldn’t be autistic since she’s a girl, she had a ballot box on her desk and a hula hoop around her chair so all the other kids would know to stay away. You’d get thumped for entering her space but being super-smart gave her privileges not dished out to the regular children.

My eldest, his bedroom was always in a worse state than other teenagers. Uneaten food, unwashed clothes, smelling like a locker room. The mattress is on the floor surrounded by the book stacks – already read, unread and to be read again. The soft bed always played havoc with his back.

He could never start. Nothing has changed there. His head is full of plans and dreams but working from abstract notions is simply too hard. He needs lists. Hell, I love a good list, I write things on the list I have already done so I can cross them out. I’ve found one of his old lists:

Pick up the dirty clothes and put them in a laundry bag.

Get a few bricks from the garden and two planks of wood and make a bookcase.

Fold the clean clothes and put them away.

But I know it, he’s out of the window onto the roof below and down the drainpipe. One time I bundled all his stuff out the window and left it on the roof.

He was diagnosed with ADHD aged forty.

I bet I could smash that ADHD test. Tests are my superpower. The youngest is like his father, a rock, so two rocks in our family. Then there are the cousins … three with autism, two ADHD and one rock. Out of that family of eight – only two rocks, fortunately, my sister-in-law is one.

The question should really be, who took all the rocks?

Now research has found that girls are just better at masking (appearing like a setting on a dishwasher), there’s another sudden addition to the startling increase in neurodiversity. Women of a certain age unmasked by the hormonal changes of menopause and they’ve thought;

“Stuff this, society isn’t forcing me to pretend any more.”

Rocks turned spicy. A bit like the law of the conservation of mass which implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed. A finite number of rocks that aren’t destroyed just changed. No one gives a shit anymore. And no one should. I was a teacher, micromanaged, which is how come I didn’t last, but my teaching was only good for half the class. I know this because I created a student survey and fully half the class thought they were learning by copying off the board. I wouldn’t have thought anyone would learn from copying off the board and the other half of the class agreed with me.

When I was at school there was a big hoo-ha about scissors for left-handed students. I’m of the opinion that left-handed students shouldn’t be allowed scissors considering Latin for left handedness is sinister (I am joking). I’m ambidextrous, it’s considered a good thing, I can bang and screw until both wrists are too broken to be of any use. Dexter is Latin for right, dexterous or skilled. Ambisinister is someone rubbish with both hands so why give scissors to left handers? It was considered helpful to a students’ learning to have the same access to tools as their dextrous classmates. It launched a whole equity drive in implements.

We could afford the same consideration for the neurospicy, after all the world didn’t stop turning when we gave left-handed people scissors. Oh to be a rock and not to roll.