I find something rather upsetting about warm, bright, summer evenings as they make me wish I still had a girlfriend. I always feel that it is the perfect time to be out, walking by the sea (or any picturesque place of one’s choosing) with someone you love. I think about that and how it used to feel to share the magic of the golden hour with someone you adore and then I feel a crushing sense of loss for not having it anymore.
And then I remember… or as with the other night, a good friends reminds me. For every perfect, magical, moment, there was so much more grief, anger, frustration and deceit.
I remember one evening that should have been perfect, golden hour, beach and then one of those “I know what you are hinting at but I’m not even going to grace your jealous nonsense with a response” conversations where I listened to the convoluted analogy that was clearly supposed to be about me and just let it sail over my head; pretending to be clueless and daring her to pull me up on it.
I remember having to explain why I, as a forty something man, didn’t want to go to a seedy club that started at 2am to listen to music that left me cold with people I despised and being incredulous that I even had to justify me response.
I would remember the times where one of their friends put one too many people on the “just the pair of you coming over for dinner” guest list and the look on her face when I had to put my foot down and say that there was no way I could go as it would be way too peoply, yet again, and knowing that it would count as a black mark against myself and not them.
I remember me being bullied and ganged up on and my girlfriend siding with the bullies because she was so desperate to be popular, no matter the cost.
I remember trying to make dinner while someone sulked about me not wanting to go to a party with people who had been abusive to me, only to realise that I had become so rattled that I had not turned the oven on an hour before.
I remember the unused tickets, that I couldn’t afford in the first place, for things we never went to because they picked another fight about something that didn’t matter, just before we were due to go.
I remember listening to them justifying appalling things they’d done with terrible people and getting too tongue tied, muddled and exhausted at having to communicate with a compulsive liar that I inevitably gave up arguing.
I remembered how someone used to memorise where my best cups were on the shelf because that way they could tell what visitors I had had since they last came over by how they had moved.
I remembered their children doing appalling things and being shocked at what terrible parents they were and being too scared to say a word.
I remembered being perfectly aware that I was being cheated on but grimly fascinated by their excuses, inconsistent stories and how far they would take them.
I remember being gaslit over and over again until I didn’t know who I was anymore.
I remember how quickly they would repeat the same nonsense with someone else after we broke up, before dropping them like a stone as well, and repeating that same garbage ad-infintum.
I remember the hypocrisy, the cruelty and the spite.
The sunny, summer, evenings are very quiet about these things because all they serve to do is make me feel relieved to be alone and that wouldn’t hurt me, would it?
Perhaps it would be easier now, knowing that I’m autistic. Perhaps I would make better choices and romance wouldn’t equate to a litany of misery.
It’s a beautiful day! That should be a good thing shouldn’t it?
Well, if you are autistic and you live in an urbanised (and gentrified) seaside town and it is the weekend, it really isn’t. I will be trapped in my own home today and that ain’t fun. The views from my windows are grim, high density housing squeezed in amongst Victoriana and lovely weather means cars with wound down windows, not great if they are replete with mobile pa systems in place of a car stereo; and this self imprisonment is my best option.
It will be hell out there today, Sunday in Shoreditch by the sea, the seafront cafe blaring music and spreading its furniture along the lower prom and beach like a tacky dayglo tumour, the upper promenade will be a rat run for cyclists, badly trained dogs and families walking four abreast so you are forced into the cycle lane and get abuse hurled at you… and then there are the motorbikes. If I were to have a tattoo, it would read “L’enfer c’est les autres!” Hell is indeed other people.
It is actually painful for someone with autism to be exposed to all this, not only does it hurt our ears and cause anxiety, panic and trigger meltdowns and shutdowns, it has a knock on effect for days to come.
Today won’t be wasted though, I am aware of the damage this can all cause and regretfully take precautions but it is important to acknowledge how disabling it all is. In Britain today, my own government is actively trying to belittle those with problems that are “just in our heads” and are laying out a strategy to rob us of vitally needed support. Because a bunch of greedy, dead behind the eyes and dead inside the soul tories want someone to blame, they have picked those with ‘invisible’ conditions as the perfect diversion.
I lead an incredibly limited life and while I make up for it in terms of creativity and a better than average ability to express myself due to hyperlexia, it is still necessary to acknowledge that the world I live in disables me. I only wish the government and the kind of bovine minded fools that read the right wing press would at least leave the likes of me alone.
Tomorrow will be better as most people will be back at work but it’s also expected to rain too… Erm, yay?
You can read more about my experiences of autism here.
I am going to be a prisoner in my own home for the next two day. There is no nicer was of putting it.
Every May bank holiday this town descends into absolute chaos with a Whicker Man-esque pagan festival and (and this is my utter nemesis ) tens of thousands of motorbikers who circle the town and bomb up and down the seafront for days on end.
If I walked down the road and punched everyone that crossed my path hard in the face, I doubt it would take more than five minutes for the police to turn up and cart me off. Yet it is perfectly legal to scare the life out of people and torment autistic folks for no other reason that because they like to do it… I wonder how far “excuse me officer, I just like hurting random strangers” would get me with Lily law… Not very far I suspect.
It never used to be such a problem but as the only place I could rent is near the sea front (no pretty view though) I have forced exposure to more of the chaos; The loud music, the chaos, the drunks, the crowds, the whole business is too painful for someone like me to be exposed to.
To boil it down into one phrase; I suffer for your fun.
I used to live in an area with lots of gardens and there would always be some arsehole having a barbecue, a bonfire or a party and sometime all at once. I even had some thoughtless gits wheel out a pa system and have bands playing all day, in all the planning it must have taken, I doubt that they gave a second’s thought to the distress it would cause to anyone with sensory issues, just as those that love burning stuff don’t think for a moment about those with breathing problems.
A friend of mine has been struggling recently because people keep sucking up their time for the most grandiose of social events, eating away their time, their energy and their money because they seem to think that is acceptable to do to another human being. I couldn’t imagine forcing anyone to do anything on my behalf for a moment, I don’t think that I could be that thoughtless.
There is a lack of empathy endemic amongst neurotypical people and they seem to be unable to comprehend that their idea of ‘fun’ is actually hell to someone like myself. I and others like me are aware of the painful cost of selfishness and go out of our way not to do it to others in turn.
There is precisely no reason for a loud motor vehicle to exist anymore, governments have been steadily removing those with harmful emissions from the roads quite successfully and it wouldn’t take much more effort to get rid of the noisy ones. The same goes for car stereos; if you can here it outside the car when the windows are closed, it’s too loud, it’s a vehicle, not a disco!
Society also needs to be educated out of the default belief that everyone loves a party, they really don’t! And the same goes for those that play load music in public spaces, like parks and on the beach. Many people want to hear the sounds of nature, not some dickhead with terrible taste in music inflicting it on other people.
I’m still in shock after listening to Rishi Sunak’s latest word vomit regarding those with mental ill health and one question has been running through my head ever since, “How does he face his children?” How does a man as wealthy as he is look his children in the eye each day and come to terms with the fact that he is an utter monster?
Depending on which figures one chooses to use, austerity cuts have caused between three hundred thousand and a million deaths since 2010 and the Work Capability Assessment alone has caused over one hundred thousand. We have a problem with statistic fatigue here in that these numbers aren’t numbers, they are people. They had families, friends and children; they mattered. Sunak’s spiteful proposals will make the first lot of Work Capability Assessment deaths look minimal and however he chooses to frame this garbage, Rishi Sunak will be responsible for those deaths, that will be on his conscience, assuming he ever had one.
An interesting aside is that Sunak actually quoted the statistics of those found ‘fit for work’ in twenty eleven with a straight face, knowing just how many of those people died and how many of those were eventually found to have long term health issues that were later acknowledged after having to attend a tribunal hearing in court; I was one of those people. I still have nightmares about it now and the terror of going back there has haunted me ever since. I have never forgiven those responsible and I never will.
In a way, it’s telling that Sunak has run out of viable, Daily Mail and Express, right wing fodder in terms of his Rwanda Bill and resorted to ‘giving the cripples a quick kicking’ as it shows that he has scraped through the bottom of the barrel and into the ground; he is losing this badly.
It is important to state that the chances of any of this drivel making it into reality are next to none but this narrative needs to be challenged now.
The biggest misnomer that Sunak was spewing was that work is good for your mental health; the answer is far more nuanced than this reductive statement. After university, I went back to my old civil service job to do the right thing and finish my time after taking a career break, but in the meantime my little local office had been closed and moved into a massive building in central London with hot desks (you sat wherever you could find as space was limited) fluorescent lighting and hundreds of people; it was effectively a call centre. I lasted six weeks before I had a breakdown (it was actually an autistic shutdown but it took twenty two years to find that out) and that was the end of my working life for a decade. I could not cope with the building, the lighting, the lack of stability, the change, the people, the bureaucracy or the journey in each day and my brain just popped. Company may help some people, pressure might help some people, but not all. Much of the work on offer in our broken society is high pressure, low pay and frankly degrading and undervalued while, at the same time, we have to listen to overprivileged, clueless, twerps like Sunak, Gove, Hunt and Stride talk about things that they have no comprehension of. Trying to force the mentally unwell or neurodiverse into ill suited employment, for which they will still need to claim Universal Credit, will just ruin more lives.
It’s the injustice that I can’t stand, like Iain Duncan Smith, David Cameron, George Osbourne, Terese Coffey and all the other criminals in the war against the British poor, Sunak will not rot in the prison cell he so richly deserves.
I am told that Sunak is a Hindu and as such, here is my wish… I wish that for every new reincarnation, from now until the end of time, he comes back as a tapeworm. I hope he spends eternity living in filth as that parasite of the world that he has shown himself to be. History will not be kind to you Sunak and hopefully karma won’t either.
It’s been a rough couple of months; It’s been a rough decade, truth be told. This, though, is something I can’t really solve (although someone pointed out a pattern to my current problem that might solve itself, given time) Anyway, one thing you learn after going through years of trauma and that is, if you want to keep your friends, you need to make use of mental health services from time to time. And so, I had to make a couple of phone calls today. I spoke to one service and it seems that I’ve fallen off their ‘books’ because they hadn’t seen or heard from me for a while…
There used to be a time where if you’d been quiet, you would get checked on, you’d get a phone call to see if you were okay. Now, it’s seen as a reason to put your file in cold storage and bump you off the live cases system… (Probably not the best turn of phrase, thinking about it.) Part of the problem is that many support services now want to see groups of people at the same time which is absolutely useless if you are autistic. Neurotypicals feel better for socialising and group activities are viewed as beneficial for their mental health, for autistic people, it can have the exact opposite affect.
What I need is someone I can talk to with whom I don’t have to regurgitate all my history of horrendous occurrences and all the reasons why what has just happened has knocked me off my perch. (one of) The problems with someone like me is if you have spoken to enough mental health professionals, you spot when some rookie is using their newly acquired skills on you; I don’t need someone to repeat back exactly what I’ve told them in a slightly different order. Sometimes you need someone to acknowledge how awful things are, sometimes you need someone to make you laugh and today I just needed a neutral party to acknowledge that I’m not going mad and a situation has been as awful as I’m thinking it was / is. And yes, the situation is awful, the person causing it is out of order and I am right to have been upset by it.
I have been gaslit in the past, including by the person causing me problems right now and once that has happened to you, you end up being unsure of everything; I needed a second opinion and I got it.
So after finding out that I’d been put in suspended animation at the mental health drop in, I thought I’d better get a proper check up from the neck up and book myself a mental health review at the doctors, only to discover that I have to now ring back tomorrow at 8am for a pre-booked appointment in two weeks time… There is even a mad scramble to talk to the mental health nurse it seems.
The thing I have come to realise since my autism diagnosis is that I would be perfectly fine if I didn’t have to engage with this world or indeed, the people in it and it’s other people’s untreated mental health problems that cause me more trouble than anything else. Whether it’s the sociopathy, psychopathy or narcism of politicians or the borderline personality disorder and covert narcissism of people closer to home, it’s their unwillingness to get themselves treated that causes no end of hurt to myself and everyone else.
This one is a bit of a two parter as questions go… I think it’s best to start with the first part and I suspect you may know what the second part will be by then…
I have asked myself this question constantly since March 2003 but it’s only over the past 7 years that it has become much more personal and more nuanced.
“Do bad people know they are bad? Do evil people know they are evil?”
I gave up smoking on the 19th of March 2003, it was the only thing I could do to stop the Iraq war. Isn’t that pathetic? I figured that it was the least I could do to deny the government of that tax money in case some of it went towards killing some poor sod in George W Bush’s quest to finish what his daddy started. I often wonder if Tony Blair knowns what he is, does he roll out of bed in the morning and think, “f%%k me! Did I kill a lot of people?” Clearly not, as his actions since are those of someone who regards themselves as a great statesperson rather than the war criminal that everyone outside of his close circle thinks him to be. That is part of question too I guess… is good subjective? Depending on who you speak to. Or is it that people specifically choose who they speak to so as to elicit the desired response? If that is the case though, do people know they are doing that? Do they hang around with those that will reinforce their conformation bias as a means to safeguard their self image? We are definitely into ‘inception’ territory here aren’t we?
I have had a lot of bad and evil done to me over the years and it is still happening. I could never have imagined that sham medical assessor Atos and the Work Capability Assessment could be unleashed on the sick and disabled and I am still amazed now about how few care or even remember the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people under the first wave of Tory austerity. The man in charge throughout this, Iain Duncan Smith, clearly thinks that he is a thoroughly decent human being, so much so that not only did he insist that protesters calling him ‘Tory Scum’ were arrested, charged and brought to trial but that they be tried again when the first trial found them innocent. The amusing upshot is that after the second trial upheld the defendants’ description of Smith as ‘Tory Scum’ we can all call him the same. Thanks Iain!
I’ve had evil upon evil done to me and everyone else for as long as I can remember, from Thatcher onwards, the Conservative party have torn this country to shreds. Do they know they are evil? Again, they band together with likeminded folks to justify their appalling actions. To the Tories, evil is contextual, they ‘other’ the rest of the population and tell themselves that they deserve their success and it had nothing to do with family money, school connections or some other systemic unfairness.
When I was being thrown out of my home I couldn’t believe just how many people would happily sign up to work for letting agents and do the bidding of greedy, vile, people. I would be threatened by court orders just because I didn’t want to vacate my home during covid in the coldest months because some potential buyer wanted to poke around in my home of 13 years that they only saw as a money making opportunity.
Most evil or wrong doing seems to be diluted in some way or another, the estate agents, the surveyors, the builders and trades people that make a living working for these people all make up little excuses in their heads to tell themselves that they are ok people. They can point a finger at someone else up the food chain and tell themselves that they are the bad guy, not them.
I wonder how that applies to the property developer that gutted the entire building around me over 6 or more months (I’ve blotted a lot of this out). He knew my mother had just died and he threw me out of my home because he saw he could make a lot more money if he jammed in a second bedroom; sure, there would be partition walls halfway across windows and rooms in perma-darkness but… money. he really liked money. He exposed me to constant noise and torment for all that time, invaded my space and poisoned my lungs when I should have been grieving for my loss in peace. If done out of sheer spite, that’s a prison sentence, if done as he did it, he’s an entrepreneur. Evil is indeed a matter of context.
I have had awful things done to me by those that know me for even less and those events hurt even more. I have been cheated on, lied to, had people try and intimidate me on the internet (hence no comments) and in the real world. Partly through this annoyingly autistic habit of speaking the truth and partly through the blowback of someone trying to cover their tracks whilst two-timing me. Was evil intended? I don’t think so, but it happened regardless. The concept of good and evil gets very muddied when the notion of virtue signalling comes into play. I was attacked by people who live in the most ostentatious house in their street, Where everyone around them scrapes by as renters in one floor as a flat, they own an entire building and yet woe betide anyone that questions their socialist credibility. Hypocrisy comes into much of this; homeowners gentrifying the area, championing renters rights after they have indirectly caused their plight in the first place, anti capitalists with awfully nice homes and cars and the fanciest of houses in the fanciest of areas, environmental campaigners who jump on a short hall flight at the first opportunity. It’s amazing just how quickly these people will turn on a disabled person who has suffered at the hands of the Tories, the Department of Work and Pensions and bad landlords when their left wing values are put into question.
The reason I put myself through hell to write a book about my experience of the housing crisis was to put a human face on it. Most evil is carried out through ‘othering’ as mentioned above. It’s easy to take someone’s money away if you tell yourself that they are lazy, it’s easy to move into an already crowded area and force the prices up if you tell yourself that you are improving the area, it’s easier to put up rents or force people out on the streets if you can tell yourself that you worked harder or they are lesser people. I wanted to show that you can be a tea total, drug free, hardworking, ‘decent’ human being and have your life utterly destroyed by a combination of bad luck and greed, there is not much in the way of those but the most dedicated of fascists or the most rabid of capitalists who could claim that I in any way brought my situation upon myself. Not that, in a fair and just society, those things I described should mean anything but, sadly, they do, everyone deserves a safe and warm home, they are just the basic building blocks of a sane and healthy society. I wanted to create something real, shockingly real, and very human to possibly nudge a few consciouses into some human beings that are clearly lacking them. From everything that I have learned about people, though, it is a bit of a fool’s hope but then I am not denying that I am a fool.
Imagine how I felt, though, when the person who had already aimed human hand grenades in mine and other peoples’ (I later discovered) path had now declared themselves to be an expert in the area of rental housing, despite owning their own home for longer than many of their fellow renters rights campaigners have been alive and being involved in numerous enterprises that have indirectly whacked up the housing and rental prices… Can you imagine how that felt?… Hang on! Can you though?
Much of what I have described is about empathy, could Tony Blair put himself in the position of an Iraqi child as smart bombs rained down upon Baghdad? Could the ‘healthcare professional’ that described me as perfectly fit for work despite being a shut in for the decade prior imagine the toll of a year of appeals had on my mental and physical health? (I have had ptsd from that ever since). Does Iain Duncan Smith ever imagine how many deaths he directly caused and feel the fear and desperation of all those that died? Did Margaret Thatcher ever stop to consider her destruction of British industry, the deaths of soldiers for a rain sodden island in the middle of nowhere or just what would happen when the council housing disappeared? Do the people who nailed my photo to lampposts still believe that I am a ‘bad man’ because someone else told them so and I dared to question the sense of what they were doing and the damage it could cause, did they imagine how it must feel to have that much hate and those sort of threats directed at you from unnamed sources? Do the estate agents who threatened me with court action even remember my name? Would the guy who profited from my being slung out of my home of fourteen years so he could make an extra few thousand pounds even recognise me if he passed me in the street? It’s amazing the mental gymnastics that some people go through just to make what they do seem okay and the juggling that they go through to justify their continued wrong doing.
Which brings me to the situation right now. Does the person who knew me and now is blocking my path to promote my book on the housing crisis locally know that they are causing harm to me and to the whole cause of improving the housing crisis and, if so, do they care? The truth is, I haven’t a clue. To be honest, I honestly don’t know who that person truly is and I doubt that I ever did. Their actions seem entirely insane to me and completely unfathomable.
This brings me, finally, to the second part of the question… Am I a good person?
Surely this one fact must have a massive effect on who and what I see as wrong or indeed evil.
In a way, I am the last person to even judge that as I cannot separate myself fully from my actions to judge. The fact that I don’t think I am is actually a sign that I’m probably better than I think but we are getting into the realms of circular logic here. I can be ratty sometimes, I swear a lot and I am less forgiving than I’d like to be, I could be better at recycling, I didn’t go to my own mother’s funeral and I would never go on a protest march, however the last two are down to autism but I still didn’t do them and they haunt me. There are things I know upset other people that I don’t feel in the slightest bit sorry about, like not going to weddings or their social gatherings (autism again) but the ones that really upset people are the drawings… I have done some horrendous drawings of people over the years (I can’t judge as to their technical competence or ‘badness’) but, to be frank, I’ve just held up a mirror to them or the situation so those that are offended always deserve it (although , to be fair, I would say that, wouldn’t I?)… and that is about it, I think. There are a lot of people that hate me though… although I have a good idea who instigated most of that and why.
Autistic people can put people’s backs up, there is no secret to that. It’s sometimes because of the uncanny valley thing of trying to act more ‘normal’ (whatever that is) and allistic people sensing that somethings is ‘off’ or the complete honesty thing upsetting someone or the sensory processing disorder meaning that we have massively misunderstood something or have been misunderstood ourselves. We are disabled in some very unique ways that are hard to comprehend and these are some of them and it causes us to often be disliked ‘just because’.
I don’t even want to write this bit as I can’t bear vanity or virtue signalling and I make a point of keeping much of what I do very private…. Do you know what? I’ve written and deleted this paragraph of good things that I’ve done a number of times and it nauseates me. I don’t keep a score of this stuff and it would be indelicate to list who I’ve helped and why. You are going to have to trust me on this… But that is part of the point isn’t it? I have found that if you look in the papers and online sites, the shittier a human being is, the more mentions they seem to have. You will not have heard of the nicest people I know and never will as they hate publicity.
We have hit an impasse then in that how can we actually know who is good and who is bad? If the bad think they are good and the good won’t admit that they are, then how can anyone judge anyone’s actions? And my answer to that is….
Have you had a good look at the state of the world recently?
You can buy my book about the housing crisis here.
Two of the highest grossing films of all time are about something I am experiencing now… So why do I feel so out on a limb? Both James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ and Kevin Costner’s ‘Dances with wolves’ were tales of how someone realised the horrors of colonialism and made the drastic decision to side with the colonised.
It’s the bloody autism innit? I look at something and see the wrongness and out it blurts and there I am, upsetting people again. But… it was the right thing to do! Honest!
Now, as everybody else will happily point out to me, the right thing to do is very rarely the smart thing to do and it is often the polar opposite, and when you slap a chapter in your book about the housing crisis about the damage caused by an influx of very insular (mostly) Londoners, don’t be surprised when the local paper that is riddled with them will not touch you or your book with a bargepole. I could quite easily have whipped that part out and got a bit more local interest but I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself as they are a major cause of the housing crisis where I live.
I was talking to a local friend this morning who was complaining that they had been recommended on social media. What is wrong with that you might ask? Well the problem was that it was on a page dedicated to and run by these interlopers. Not all (I hasten’t to add) but most want something for nothing and are constantly complaining and throwing their weight around and many local people simply won’t deal with them anymore. Those born here watch their children struggle to rent pokey flats in the grimmest of areas while they walk past streets that are empty all week and then they have the cheek to ask for discounts… Tacky!
It comes to something when even the new renter’s union consists of many of these small scale colonists, homeowners and those linked to landlords to-boot; as far as I’m concerned that is all about as sane and wise as creating the Myra Hindley children’s playgroup and creche. How can anyone fix a problem that they are instrumental in creating? It hardly makes them able to clearly evaluate the cause of escalating rents and massive shortages when they have helped caused them. Sadly, no one listens to me though… Ho Hum.
As is painfully obvious to all but the most unhinged of people, life is not like the movies. People like myself who stand up for what is right against overwhelming odds tend to get squashed like bugs rather than rewarded with a freeze frame and a fade to black. Sadly, I’m too daft and or stubborn to act any other way.
Some people are utterly amazing, I spent six months or so liaising with a team of palliative carers a few years back. They’d come in twice a day to give personal care to a friend I was keeping an eye on. Their work was backbreaking at times but they did everything with such good humour; the humour was vital. I’d make them a drink if they had time to knock it back before the next client, they knew I made good coffee and deeply respected what they did. There is an invisible army in Britain of underpaid, mostly, women that live out of cars and go from person to person caring for the sick and vulnerable. I was offered a job with them, funnily enough, but my life took a massive downslide and the opportunity passed. I’ve always known that humanity is as much bodily fluids as poetry and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise (but many do).
There is a lot of skill that comes with caring for the sick and dying, they knew more than the doctors in most cases as they saw it every day, the lady in charge was an SRN (state registered nurse) but it was only because I am very observant that I spotted that she was the boss, they were a unit and functioned so. They were part cleaner, part medic, part counsellor and part comedian and all of this with utter grace.
And so undervalued.
I’ve met so many others who treat such people like dirt, they give themselves airs and graces and waft through life as if they own the world; that it and the people in it are their playthings, little person shaped pieces on a board that they can pick up and move around for their own ends and amusement.
Other people would like you to think they are amazing, they give themselves big titles or act like they speak for everybody. I was doing some maths in my head this morning I’d counted about 15 people that I know of that, for no good reason I can see, have appointed themselves as pillars of the community. They weren’t born with extra brains (far from it in mostly) they have no visible gifts but for some unfathomable reason they act like they are in charge and their opinions matter more than everybody else’s.
For the sake of argument (and easy maths), let’s say there are a hundred people like that in this town who are (as they would describe it) bringing the community together. so one hundred out of 92,000 is… Roughly 0. 1% have appointed themselves as leaders, champions, heads of the community. Questions spring to mind; Who by? Why? What qualifications? What are the other 99.9% of people doing?
I have regretfully had a window into this world and watched these characters scurrying from cafe to cafe, getting this person to do this while that person does that and not actually doing anything themselves in-between, there might be loads of people involved in whatever but as they are the spokesperson, it’s them in the press, it’s them in the media and years later when you put their name in google, they are often the only one linked to the project. It’s a clever trick to say ‘community’ when what is really meant is ‘me! me! me!”
I think of those beautiful people up top and it angers me that while they are wiping bums, changing incontinence pants, emptying catheter bags and applying cream to bed sores there is a ridiculously visible minority that lift nothing heavier than a full cup of coffee and deal with nothing messier that a rare leaking ball point pen that will get paid twice as much and rewarded with attention.
I was wise to their game from the get go. Often, those that set up a ‘community’ project become the most important thing about it. You will find their name attached to some focal point or a statement that could have come from a whole team. All those little minions that they shined their light upon so briefly are left behind in obscurity as they inevitability move on to the next thing when the funding money runs out. They are like animals moving through the savanna , going from water hole to water hole, draining it back to dry mud and heading on, leaving a barren wasteland behind them.
I hate the insincerity of such people, they are all smiles and eye contact and they overuse your name because they did a course once where they learned how to manipulate people into getting what they want. They are the equivalent of the sets in an old western, painted fronts and bare boards and props for the parts that you aren’t supposed to see. That charm is linked to a switch, not a dial, and it flicks on when needed and off as quickly.
I have tried to remain anonymous for most of my life and I’ve met these types when they haven’t been aware of my skill set and they have looked right through me and every kind word is met with stoney silence and a glare; and then I’ve been introduced to them later, maybe a week, maybe a months, maybe a year as Chris Hoggins, “whatever” and you see the light bulb moment of what use I could be to their goal for attention and suddenly they are all charm and loveliness… but I never forget a name… or when someone blanks me.
Whether it’s turning your birthday party into a charity fund-raising event, using your victimhood as a moneymaking exercise, humiliating the homeless for your childhood ambition that you should have grown out of when you learnt the difference between right and wrong, claiming to be something you are not so that you can become the focus of a cause or running groups for the vulnerable while you and your immediate family are making their lives worse, a few people in my town or in any other town will always have an obscene need to be loved, admired and / or worshiped.
One thing that particularly fascinates me is how willing they are to scupper anyone else’s good works, often much better than their’s, for no other reason than it wasn’t their idea. They do not stand for the public good, just their own.
It’s safe to say that such people have some serious psychological issues that need to be addressed but like most of a narcissistic bent, they can never see that the problem that needs fixing most of all is them.
You know you are off to a bad start when you end up quoting Neitchze, but here goes!
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
A friend for mine laughs when she tells me of things about me that remind her of my mother. My dad died long before she could have met him and I wish they’d had a chance to meet, so she could share the same insights about him; he was much nicer and much kinder. Kids would gravitate towards him and he’d end up dragging a whole bunch of children up and down the shore in an inflatable dingy while autistic Chris sat far away and made sandcastles on his own, away from the noise. Kids like me too, and animals and old dears, basically anyone who isn’t doing a bunch of nasty stuff I can’t ignore. My dad had a bit of that too, He was a big man, and if he saw a parent mistreating a child he would often tell them he was an off duty copper and he was watching them. He was a heating engineer actually but a rare poor one as he would often fit an expensive part in an old lady’s boiler and charge her for a tap washer.
My mother was spiteful and had the most evil and quick tongue on her and she had chronic and crippling anxiety and was a valium addict for many years. She was a mess really and she was utterly vile to me growing up and much of that was down to extreme, unchecked, honesty. (and probably autism too)
Because my Hastings friends only knew my mother and only in a very brief period of her later years, they recognised two similarities; the filthy looks and the tongue. These are both fare points but as they, sadly didn’t get to meet my dad, and they can’t see the full picture.
While trying to be as objective as I possibly can when observing myself (i.e not very) I would like to think that I’ve got my mother’s harshness with words with my father’s kindness and sense of justice. Perhaps I am totally wrong but it seems to make sense. Particularly with what I do and the way I go about it. I have my mother’s anger too but it’s finely channeled into the injustices I see as opposed to my mum’s scattergun cruelty. She was critical of everything and had very narrow-minded views although she mellowed with age and was very fond of a few on my gay friends and would visit them for tea without me. I can imagine my mother’s face if she saw me buying a pink Moomins T- shirt but I was as stubborn as she was so she wouldn’t have dared let that tongue loose on me, but a. Moomins! and b. I liked the phrase printed on the edge.
I had a friend once that absolutely despised their father, by their accounts he was a bit of a wide boy who was all charm and generosity in public but behind closed doors he was a two faced, cruel bully to whom you would have to lie and placate to prevent the toxicity turning into violence. There is a reason why we are no longer friends and while the violence is thankfully missing, the rest is there threefold.
We make choices in life and we often set out to fight for good and end up doing even more bad. Just look at Keir Starmer for example; he bought his mum a donkey field and went about the world trying to stop the death penalty… and now his stance on Gazza…. shudder! Was he ever really a socialist? Doubtful! but I’m always willing to give someone that likes donkeys the benefit of the doubt.
I have a woollen blanket from a weaver in Japan, it cost more than I could afford but the design sings to me. It’s a little house in the middle of the woods, far away from people; and that is where I want to be. With knowing about the autism, I have realised that the further I am from most people, the happier I am. I do not like to engage with humanity unless I really have to. Sadly, I feel what I am doing right now is important enough to take off my shoes and socks and roll up my trouser legs and dip my toes in; and the waters around here are both actually and metaphorically full of shit.
Engaging with others changes me, not in the autistic, losing too many spoons way (look up spoon theory is you don’t know what I mean) but in that I end up knowing more than I should. There is a lot of pointless, virtue seeking nonsense around here and its sole point is to impress the other few people who do exactly the same; precisely no one else cares. I do get angry seeing and reading about it though as I, sadly, know every sordid detail. It’s a question of just how much I have to engage and the level of psychic damage it causes me. I can’t change any of these people or their nonsense, so I just have to step over them and get on with my life journey.
It’s very draining though, this people malarkey, and I just hope to be away from it all in my own little world as soon as possible. When it comes to the intentionally visible people around here, ignorance definitely is bliss.
There is a myth that Autistic people don’t feel empathy or indeed much at all. It’s actually the exact opposite, we feel far too much and then blow a fuse.
In my case, I can’t be around certain people because they make my skin crawl; I can feel their awfulness and it makes my insides feel polluted.
Here’s a little empathy test for you… I hope you will play along.
Imagine feeling terrified for a day, a whole day with no respite, you are feeling the worst threat that you have ever felt in your whole life. Have You got that? Good!
Now times that by three hundred and sixty five. You wake up terrified, you go through every second of the day under threat. You develop all sorts of illnesses and your body falls apart on you. Can you imagine that? Have you got it yet? keep trying….
Now imagine another six months of that. Go on! you’ve done so much already…
Now your mother dies!
Oh! and one your closest friends on the exact same day.
Can you imagine that? Go on! Try really really hard!
Now cope with that grief while on the same day a complete stranger is ripping your floor up and a spoilt, rich, man-child, landlord is looking at you like shit on his shoes.
Now spend six more months in noise and terror and filth and dirt… You are still with me aren’t you? You haven’t sneaked off yet? Because I can’t; there is no escape for me from this, I have to live this.
And then after all that fear, and grief, and uncertainty and degradations and pollution you finally get out.
…
…
…
Oh! No! It’s not over yet, silly!
Now imagine a spoilt millionaire is breathing down your neck for a fortune to you and pocket change to him back that they had lent you to (part) move.
And imagine that you cannot get any of the last few years’ horrors from your mind and you relive them every day and you are just waiting to lose your home again because it doesn’t feel real or safe.
Now imagine your mother had left your inheritance in the care of your sister with learning disabilities (except mum refused to believe it and never told her) and that she has frittered away tens of thousands of your money because she is so utterly clueless and that (now ex) friend is still pestering you.
Now imagine that the only way you can make sense of all this and to give it some validation is to write and illustrate about what you experienced, why it happened and what can be done to improve matters; and imagine that that action make you feel slightly less hopeless.
Now imagine that is what you did, you spend the best part of the years writing and illustrating your nightmares and eventually got something together that was your testament to the pain and grief and misery you ploughed through, so you may at least have a tangible human account of the horrors our political climate can do to us. Are you still there? Are you coping ok? because by then I was leaking like a rusty bucket.
Now imagine that someone who could never be in that position because of wealth, privilege and sheer dumb luck tried to steal all that from you for nothing more than their own silly vanity. Can you imagine the level of hurt that I must feel because they dared try and rob me of the one good thing to come from years of pain and horror?
Now imagine what could possibly be going through their head to allow them to think that is an okay thing to do? Imagine how you could square that so that you could sleep at night or ever look anyone decent in the eye ever again. Can you do that? Good! That’s really good!
Christopher Hoggins Artist 
You must be logged in to post a comment.