Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, Everyone,
I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in January 2017 and I am finding the courage to come out into the open. I am both an artist and writer.
I would describe my condition as mild. I have a Higher National Diploma in Art and Design. During my childhood years, I had extreme difficulties with reading writing and arithmentic and which used to get me into a lot of troubel and result in being hit and made to stand and face the wall for the rest of the lesson and humilated. I remember my mother commenting that I should be reading books that were suited to children younger than me and I should be reading more advanced books. Since I have been diagnosed, it has enabled me to understand my past behavioral patterns. When I explained to my psychotherapist what I had to endure during my earlier school years, she was absolutely shocked.
Hello. Hope you're coming to things and having the time to put everything in perspective. I think a lot of us had less than pleasant experiences at school.
Hi Windscale, I am coming to terms with everything, slowly but surely. Since my diagnosis, I have been able to put things into perspective. My very best wishes.
What sort of art and writing do you like doing? I like certain types of art but I don't really have much skill to create much myself. I've tended to do more technical writing. I wasn't a particular fan of literary criticism at school, since I like to form an overall impression of a work and categorise as either like or not really for me. I didn't much enjoy all the analysis of piece and taking it apart.
The abstract art thing is funny. Some of it I find doesn't really do anything for me, but the curry house we go to in Englefield Green has some abstract pictures and some of those I find really fascinating and could stare at them for hours. The problem for me is that I tend to have a picture in my mind's eye that I'm trying to recreate but I don't have the manual skills to be able to bring the picture into reality, so I find it quite frustrating. I'm fine with diagrams and technical drawings though where there's more proscribed technique and tooling.
I've found in my work that a lot of people really don't like writing things, so I often end up writing all the processes, procedures etc. Mostly to stop people bugging me to do things for them all the time. Once I've written something down I can say "go away and look at X and get back to me if you any specific questions that aren't 'can you not just do this for me?' "!
I agree with you completely about art. It is such a shame that so many people become self conscious about drawing and painting when they grow up. In one of the places where I work I have been running Get Creative groups. Some amazing work has been done by people who thought they were not at all artistic.