Читать книгу M is for Autism - The Students of Limpsfield Grange School - Страница 11

This is when I became M. I wasn’t named M. I chose it and this is how it happened. One Monday afternoon. I was in Year 5 and we were working on number sequencing in the morning and it was spelling tests in the afternoon. I hadn’t slept all weekend because my anxiety was so high. In fact, I know I’ve just started my story but I think we should stop here – for the time being.

You see I use the word anxiety and this is the biggest word, thing, emotion, part of my life. Maybe you are one of the people who says,

“Oh dear, poor thing, you’ll be fine. It’s just a bit of stress.” Or maybe you’re the type of person who looks at me seething and thinks I should pull myself together and stop making a fuss because I am ruining everything for everyone else. Selfish!

I’m used to hearing and sensing both these responses and neither of them make the situation any better because my anxiety is so massive, so consuming and controlling. I looked up anxiety in the dictionary and this is what it says:

Anxiety [noun]

1. A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome: “She felt a surge of anxiety.”

But this is what I say:

Anxiety [noun]

1. An uncontrollable, wild, savage beast that prowls beside me taking me hostage at it’s will. Can make frenzied attacks which strangle the life out of me. Stops me walking, talking or seeing or hearing. It shakes my brain, my inner core and rattles my nerves. Inflicts terror, causes chaos and prevents a normal existence.

So, I hope you can see it’s not possible for me to just pull myself together, as I haven’t worked out how to control this force, this frenzied, cruel beast. Sorry to interrupt you with anxiety but it interrupts me all day long… So, back to the spelling test. The words had been jangling round my head all weekend.

Angry, alarm, angel, absent, ANXIOUS, able, anaconda, area.

I couldn’t sit still. Fidgeting. I was PaNiCKing.

Miss Haynes said, “Focus! FOCUS!”

At lunch a teacher said I was naughty. NAUGHTY because I couldn’t eat.

“Has the cat got your tongue?” asked the bus driver this morning.

I was crying because no one sat next to me on the “Friendship Bench” in the playground. Someone is always meant to sit next to you when you sit on the “Friendship Bench.”

The TA called me sca-t-tY.

One girl was whispering about me to the other girls.

“Stop flapping your hands sweetheart,” said the dinner lady.

I sat at my table trying to focus on my spellings. Miss Haynes said,

“Antennae. Spell antennae.”

I could sense anxiety circling around the classroom. Its eyes locked on me, getting nearer and nearer and the bright sunlight kept hitting me in my eyes making everything look fuzzy.

Antennae.

I knew this. I had practised this all weekend but I was on overload now. All these words and letters crammed in my head but I couldn’t get them out. They were all trapped, locked in my skull! I squeezed my silver pen in between my fingers and thumb but I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t get the letters out! And the boy beside me kept repeating the word over and over again to me. He said he was trying to HELP ME.

I just want to be like everyone else and do the test! I just want to be normal.

Fidgeting. Panicking. Focus. FOCUS! Naughty. SCAtty. Whispering, Laughing. The cat? Sweetheart. Fuzzy. Flapping. Help me. Antennae. Again and again.

Why can’t I be normal? I looked up…

All the letters in the alphabet were stuck around the classroom wall, you know,

A for Apple, D for Dancing, and then I noticed M in the middle of the alphabet.

M with all the other letters either side of it, crushing, jostling and pressing against it.

M trapped. How could the letter M ever hope to escape with those other letters shoving, shouldering and squeezing it into the middle? Pushing against it and keeping M in the middle. Stuck in the middle. And that’s how I felt. Getting crushed and hurt and stuck and trapped.

M stuck in the Middle M. In a Muddle. Me in the middle.

I wanted to bolt! Run away from that room in my pretty, patent shoes. But I knew I would be told off again and anyway anxiety was trapping me as it slid its strong arm around my little neck and squeezed. I could hardly breathe. The classroom was quiet as everyone wrote down words in their little spelling books. I dropped my pen, it chimed as it landed on the wooden floor and loudly it rolled across the room towards Miss Haynes. She picked the pen up and shouted,

“You’re being so naughty!”

Anxiety squeezed harder. So I stopped and I removed myself from this situation, from the terror. I just couldn’t function. I had been rendered defunct. Not fit for purpose. I so wanted to do the spelling test but it was impossible. I didn’t move my chair or anything. I don’t need to...

I went off to my own little world, MOLW. (More about that later.) But for now, let me tell you, it’s a place I fit in. It’s a safe place.

And after that day, I stopped answering to the name my mum and dad gave me. Some people asked questions but I never explained and after a while everyone called me M. Even teachers when they call out the register.

After the day of the spelling test Mrs Clarke, the headmistress at my primary school, suggested I,

“Talk to someone.”

But I don’t talk very much, so I wasn’t sure this was going to be a good idea and I wasn’t sure why I had to talk someone. Like I was the problem.