…Ema and ondrej came soon after, and as is usually the case with me I made a great effort at first, going out and taking them to the local, coming back fairly drunk on the few I had already had before decampling with them to the summer house at the top of my parents’ garden with a couple of snails we raced on the glass table, drinking Becherovka, a Czech spirit.

Soon though I tired of it all. I couldn’t take Ondrej and his constant chat, his incessent questions about English pronunciation, and, just being around people.

I had enjoyed so much being on my own and writing, and I found it so very difficult to be around people.

I started to ignore them in my parents’ house. My parents took the brunt, taking them for walks and gong out of their way to ensure the periods of solitude they knew I need.

Ondrej had forgotten his running shoes and one day my dad offered to take him to Macro, a warehouse, where he would be able to buy some cheap running shoes.

I like to consider myself a runner, a sportsman, but the exercise I know I need often gets crowded out by my desultory attempts at writing, and by the general disorder of my mind and the things it throws me into.

I went with them and w came back and went out for a run. I couldn’t go further than a few hundred metres before turning back, letting him go off on his own happily. He turned up a few hours later having known nothing of the area, and only remembering, probably not very accurately, the name of our obscure cul de sac.

He went to shower naked in the garden with the garden hose.

I knew this was difficult for my parents, who were coping well with these intruders on their home.

One day I holed myself up in the dining room where my parents keep the computer and logged on to an Aspeger’s support group chat room on the internet. It was the first time I had done so. I had been back a good while by then and had not told my friends. I had wanted to be alone. Now that Ondrej and Ema had come over I had none of the peace I neded, and my pkans of spending the summer writing were going to ruin. This depressed me very much. I was realising too that I could no longer hide the fact that people’s company oppressed me. For years I had hidden from myself the fact that I had very strong traits of Asperger’s. Indeed, I fulfilled all of the diagnostic criteria. I had looked over this a few times when researching bipolar disorder and ADHD, but these two diagnoses were enough for me to take on board at any one time. Indeed, I had only really acknowledged the truth of the former to myself.

I started having a converation with a lad in Portugal. I was going over my development, talking about how I was new to the whole internet chat room thing, that I had had a real aspergic geeky phase as a kid, never away from the computer, but that, having had a mental breakdown at the age of seventeen, I had come over all arty, getting into literature.

Perhaps as I wrote of that I was as ambivalent about it as I have been since, as to whether it was a good thing. Perhaps being a geek was a much simpler, easier way to get on with your life.

We chatted on the internet for a long while. He told me his own english language teacher, a native speaker, also seemed to have mental problems. I wondered if my own were as evident to others - I hate being seen through in this way.

I don’t remember well how emotional I was having this chat. I remember other times I had looked into Asperger’s on the internet, acknowledging something to myself for a tearful period before pushing it down inside myself again, but this day is not now clear to me.

He started asking for my ICQ. I didn’t have one. And then my MSN account. Again, I didn’t have one.

I sounded like a good guy, he said, and he would like to get in touch sometimes. Be friends.

I backed off. Perhaps simply broke off communication. I don’t know if I properly signed off. I think I went into the kitchen. But I realised too how many demands I make opf people before they can be fit to be a friend. Yes, this was just some callow kid on the internte, but I always do this. I have to get so much from a friendship. It has to be somebody I can learn from, not simply spend time with.

* * *

In truth I now have lost the pain of the above memory, as it came on when I was looking back to my past the time I began writing the first entry. I will move on.

At the weekend I went to a writing course for work. I had seen a poster in the computer room of the college I work at for students with learning disabilities, ADHD, Aspeger’s.

It’s a hippie college, and I have a very exclusively logical take on things. It’s a take that comes from several experiences in my life, as well as, inevitably, my (self) diagnosis of aspergers syndrome.

I was brought up in a catholic family, with catholic schooling. I lost faith fairly quickly. I always questioned everything. I had too many thoughts in my head to subdue and can remember in my first house when I was very oung, having insomniac nights similar to thouse I had for years as an adult (before I changed my diet at least), in which I wondered about the origins of the universe, going over and over the same questions, with no answers.

Later, I began to have episodes of hyper religiosity interspersed with despressive doubt, of belief in nothing. I came to see that these extremes were based in biology. Consequently, subsequently I could not access faith at all. I had lost it completely and could in no way reach even tentatively in that direction.

At univeristy I also subscribed to an internet group which was for those with bipolar disorder who wanted to look into critical thinking, logic essentially. I had always been a deep thinker, and had began studying English with Philosophy, but this entrenched my habit of introspection and logical analysis, extending it into all aspects of life.

This conflicts with the College’s view of things, which is based on the writings of Rudolf Steiner, among oher things.

I find it very hard to understand the Steiner adepts, and often passionately hate them and their lifestyle and hypocrisies, such as a lack of empathy for others who do not subscribe to their worldview. Consequently I found it challenging to walk into a room with all indications being that I was surrounded by the cult: home-made clothes, Croc shoes etc etc…

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