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Foreword

Autism is a fruit salad and every journey with it is different. There are questions of where does condition end and self begin or are the two so intertwined as to be interchangeable. There are questions of culture verses cure or treatment. Where is that ethical, spiritually healthy, socially humane? There are questions of whether there is autism or autisms, whether autism makes one alien amidst general social or, like looking through a microscope at humanness itself, does it illuminate experiences we all have, uncover things people hide about their own world and the secrets of self just under the surface or buried deeply.

I was assessed as psychotic at the age of two in a three day inpatient hospital assessment in 1965. By late childhood I was still echolalic, had a language of my own, was labelled disturbed and still being tested for deafness. My meaning deafness was discovered when I was nine and interventions led to me gradually acquiring and becoming fluent in 'functional speech' but it would be decades more before I could use that to deeply express and gain answers about my own ‘fruit salad’ or the passions, fears, perspectives I had about others, life and myself.

Living with meaning deafness, meaning blindness, disconnectedness with my body, mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders and gut, immune, metabolic disorders as part of my own fruit salad, my dance with autism has been a lively one, a dynamic one. As one of the most well known people diagnosed with autism in the world, it has been a controversial journey. I’ve captured that journey across nine books in which Everyday Heaven is book four in my four stand-alone autobiographical works.

The first one, Nobody Nowhere became an international best seller in 1992 and is now set to become a Hollywood film. Against one of the challenging social backdrops, I wrote of my simultaneous battle to join the world and to keep the world out and the adaptations and magic in between those battles. The book became a touchstone in the autism world but, more importantly, illuminated the human condition itself.

Somebody Somewhere followed a few years later, again becoming an international best seller. In it, I became a qualified teacher meeting children and adults with autism and began teaching others about the my world, how to ‘Simply Be’ and the exploration of self versus condition.

By the mid nineties my autobiographies had a worldwide following. I followed the first two with a third book, Like Colour To The Blind. Here I explored the inability to tell compulsion from want, to read one’s own emotions and body messages, discovered what a visually fragmented face, a body, a world can look like through tinted glasses and journeyed into the world of Augmented and Facilitated Communication.

Everyday Heaven is perhaps the most laugh-out-loud of the four autobiographical works, which is strange for it’s a story of beginnings and endings, of transition and emergence, of life and of death. It is a story of spirituality and development and what happens when your life has become a stagnant pond and you transform it into a flowing brook.

On some levels it is one of the first published autobiographies about autistic marriage and soon enough about divorce but also a book about an autistic perspective on death and loss.

Laced with humor throughout, Everyday Heaven navigates the reader from a veneer or contentment into the turmoil of death, separation and divorce. But as endings close one door, others open and the book soon springs into a coming-of-age story about the sudden clumsy, funny but beautiful emergence and exploration of sexuality and orientation. It is also story about health and facing the stark realities of being someone with primary immune deficiencies facing my own death in my mid thirties. And it is a book of hope and how treatment turned that around and simultaneously set me free from Exposure Anxiety’s labyrinth of involuntary avoidance, diversion and retaliation responses.

Along the way, I became not only an author and a teacher but an international public speaker, an autism consultant who has worked with hundreds of people with autism. I became a partner, a friend, a fool, a pioneer, a candle to others and a controversy. As I moved from autism to artism, I became an accomplished painter, a sculptor, a singer-songwriter and screenwriter. Most recently I became a band manager of Donna and The Aspinauts and wrote, produced, directed and performed in rock musicals.

I can’t say I managed all of these things through the defeat of my autism because in so many ways it was my autism itself which gave birth to all of these things. The once meaning deaf girl became the singer and musician. The once meaning blind girl learned to see through her hands, became proficient in gestural signing and a sculptor. The person once crippled by Exposure Anxiety learned that typing could set her free and became a writer. The person who had danced with mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders since the age of two learned to seize life where she could, never waste it. The person who had battled to feel her body, own it, love it and fight for it, became a performer who would touch the lives of others though using it. The warrior who had battled life, selfhood and autism until she learned that loving achieves more than fighting, took that lesson forth as a lecturer, teacher and consultant. I hope you enjoy Everyday Heaven as a stand-alone adventure in my autobiographical series.