hi guys
I was diagnosed with autism twice in 2024 once privately and then about a year and a half later I got a reminded that I’m on an NHS waiting list for an assessment and that missed appointments cost the NHS £300 so I had another assessment and you guessed it - was diagnosed again. I also have ADHD (6A05.Z)1 (314.01)2, subtype Inattentive, Impulsive/hyperactive, and Developmental Coordination Disorder (Dyspraxia) was told that I’m almost certain to be dyslexic and knowing how good (bad) I am at maths, an assesment for the fairly new dyscalculia is also on my radar …
having this diagnoses explains a lot .. nope who am I kidding IT EXPLAINS IT ALL. But most importantly it was a sense of relief, a sense of relief because I finally realised that I’m not bad, lazy, pretentious or even stupid, I’m simply wired differently, I have severe deficits which make basic everyday functioning significantly harder than it would be for a neurotypical person, and although this doesn’t fix or make anything easier, it teached me that I can’t really fail in life as I was never destined to be on the roller coaster in the first place, if you know what I mean.
However I’m not here to talk about that, not at all, I am here because I’ve finally found courage and decided to speak out about the horrendous amount of abuse, neglect, and god knows what else the monster I had to call mother and her side of the family put me through just because I appeared to be different from what their vile and low as a cut summer grass standards expected me to be.
But before we delve in to it, let me give you some background.
I was born and spend the first 11 years of my life in the suburbs of the capital city of Europe’s poorest, most racist country and arguably one of the countries with the utmost disrespect for law and order - Bulgaria.
Our neighbourhood was officially called “Hope 4” but was unofficially known as the “skinheads zone” because it was situated in the middle between villages and a gypsy ghetto, and local ultra white gangs used it as a hub from where they can control all three areas. Now just because I say this don’t think that people were terrorised or anything, in fact the only reason I’m even mentioning them it’s because my own mother would often pay these people to bother and threaten me, but I’m going to get in to this later on, for now let’s continue.
in the middle of my first year of school, a teacher would call my mother and tell her that my behaviour is not what would necessarily be what’s expected of someone in first grade and they called me over to the psychologist’s office and I remember this like it was yesterday, she made me draw my entire family in the form of an animals but also gave me a list with empty, white square boxes and asked me to do whatever comes naturally and I remember I just filled them in with paint.
Next thing I know is that my mother would have a short discussion with the psychologist and we’ll go home. She wouldn’t talk to me for an entire week afterwards and I wouldn’t know why and when I’d ask my dad he’d laugh and say “don't know, you know how she is” my dad was and still is a very social and easy going person whom liked his drinking.
A few days later my dad would be drinking at home and making phone calls to friends when my mother would come home angry I don’t know where from but I do know it wasn’t from work as she wasn’t working at the time. Because she wasn’t home that night my dad had served me and my sister food in the sitting room rather then the kitchen and what he liked doing was throw food on the table (a clean table of course) rather then put it in to plates which got my mother really angry as she had explicitly told him not to do that multiple times in the past as it is really hard to clean food from glass once stains dry or something like this.
By this point my sister had gone to bed so my mother broke her non talking to me spree and grabbed my arm and chucked me out of the flat on to the stairs and said “go away” she would then shut the door so hard that she didn’t realise it made it bounce and left it wide open which unfortunately made me hear all that there was to follow. She went in to the kitchen and by that time my dad had finished his calls so she stormed in and shouted “what are you doing” to which my dad replied “what does it look like I’m doing, I’m enjoying myself” after which she started loudly arguing about many things, about the food table, about mutual friends, about money, about happiness, when she finally uttered the words “oh yeah and your stupid son” to which my dad replied “what about my son” to which she started explaining things that I’d apparently done (most of which were not even true tbh) when she eventually said “and did you know that out of all the things he can be, he has chosen to be different!!!” To which my dad responded “what are you on about he’s 5 years old?” When she said “that’s what that dumb skank said” (she was referring to the school psychologist,) “HE IS AN AUTIST!!!!!!” Now, autist technically means autistic but in some cultures the word autist has a hidden meaning, it still means that you’re different but it’s a different, different if that makes sense (to try to explain it let me put it this way, it means that you’re purposely choosing to do what the crowd and by the crowd I mean other people whom are meant to be on your level have been told explicitly not to do and are not doing) and in some cultures appearing to do things that seem out of the norm are not classed as a disability like they are in the UK, but can be the difference between life and death, and from that night on my mother started the most horrendous campaign of abuse against me which included but not limited to psychological, emotional, core identity abuse, locking in a rat infested basement, under feeding , and purposely neglecting me, constantly creating stories about me, constantly undermining me and showing me other boys my age as an example of how to be a man. But on one occasion I think she realised how out of the norm all of this was and pulled me aside and said “you need to fix yourself, look what are you making me do” she was talking to me almost as if I was a damaged toy from a shop that had the ability to self fix or alternatively would be thrown for scrap.
Later on that very year my parents would divorce as my dad had lost his anyway poor paying job coupled with the other issues they’ve had in a decision which was heavily influenced by my mother’s sister whom for long years had lived in Sweden.
The properly we resided in was the property of my grandmother whom had passed away and so it now was half my mother’s and half her sister’s, the reason the sister was so pushy for the divorce was because she didn’t want my dad to eventually persuade my mother to sell it so we could also move to a more developed country as if this was the case the money that the sister would get would be miserable due to the exchange rate which back then would of had her have about 2-3 months worth of whatever the national minimum wage was in Sweden at the time.
From that point on things would only take a turn for the worse as my mother’s attitude toward me would even further unprovoked-ly deteoriate but this would be far from unassisted.
i would be the first to tell you that I never, ever liked nor the sister nor her husband as the man was very strange and scary Iraqi man and the sister was down right evil.
Like most post communistic homes, we used to have two landlines at home, one in the kitchen and one in the sitting room.
After the divorce the two sisters would talk on the phone almost daily and quite often one of the subjects of the conversation would be I. One of my mother’s biggest fears was that as I grow my autistic identity would become a very clearly visible difference, and she was also worried of how she can control me or like she once said in the phone “control it” like she was referring to a homeless animal she had sheltered and not her own son.
The reason my mother listened to her sister so much was because like most people in her position she automatically believed that because her sister lived in Northern Europe she knew more and that she was a higher entity if you may. Despite the fact that the sister sometimes talked pure and utter nonsense that even a 6 year old me knew, my mother always listened to her blindly because like many ordinary people she felt safe following the instructions of someone whom she felt was superior.
The sister would once say on the phone that my mother should avoid feeding me regularly as feeding me would literally feed my autistic identity which is absolutely shocking thing to say about your own nephew but also coming from someone whom lives in Sweden of all places as I recently discovered that Sweden is the most autistic friendly country in the world, so rather then sending us some useful and helpful tips for managing the condition she did the exact opposite in the pettiest of ways and this woman is a pharmacist btw (at least that’s what my mother claimed. Now, I know that a pharmacist is not a doctor, but still it is a profession in the medical industry and also you’re talking about your goddamn nephew for god’s sake! And for what ? I was already disadvantaged health wise, and economically, it wasn’t really a competition with her children at the time and I think she knew it but I think her fear was that perhaps one day this would change.
But enough about the sister and let’s talk about the husband for a bit now, one day the sister would advise my mother that her husband had said that If I misbehave an effective method to control me would be to put me in a close proximity of a large screen and make me watch bright lights and listen to loud noises which back then I thought “how is this a punishment!” but only recently I added 2 and 2 as I started educating myself about neurodiversity and found out that what she was referring to was sensory overload which is one of the worst things for an autistic brain.
It baffles me how they knew those things all the way back in 2006 and does that mean that countries like Sweden and Norway had more education and development about neurodiversity then the UK at the time?
(if there’s lots of interest I’ll tell part 2)