Today was a bad day.

The last couple of days I have really forced myself to sit down and write. I’m writing a chapter introducing Nat, her boyfriend Ade and his doper crowd and yesterday, for the first time in my life I bought a Writer’s Magazine - as pointless as I had always assumed they would be - and read a couple of articles and interviews while sitting outside in the sun with M____ before she went to work, and then a little more after she had gone. It was pointless as it happens, and I had talked myself into getting the thing because I remembered having some kind of a row with my brother in his car a couple of years back when he was telling me I don’t accept advice from anybody (an O’Gara trait, or so my mum would have it) and telling me what his then flatmate, an aspirant writer, did for her writing, reading magazines and talking about writing groups and the like. I was telling him that I didn’t believe in any of that. That writer’s groups would waste the time I could be spending at the keyboard, the typewriter, the notebook. Anyway, I came upon the phrase Bum Glue. This, according to one writer, is what separates the published from the unpublished writer. And that really set me to my chair. This is familiar, it seems to me. I have heard other writers talking about reading such material and finding that the only sensible, useful things they said were to write every day, and stay at it. Obvious enough. But obvious enough, of course, to bear repetition: I have always know it, always kept it in mind, but of course, when that bum glue becomes that little bit less adhesive, it is high time for a kick up the arse.

I kept telling myself no TV when M____ is out. Nothing but writing, and then I would be in better mood to be around her. To just be around her when she is around.

So today I wrote until 3, and then we went to town to buy a few things. She had come back from work talking of a laundry basket she wanted to buy, and I was out of mineral water (I can’t drink tap water on this exclusion diet) and needed some margarine to make the apple crumble which would use up the cooking apples I inadvertently bought buying the only British apples in Asda the other day - stubborn as I am I couldn’t get through a whole one - so I readily agreed to go.

We were pretty quick. We had to be. It was a Sunday and the shops were open til four. She had got back after three. And then going back to the car I mentioned something about my diet and she asked me something. Essentially what I hope to achieve with it. She asked me something about what would happen when I saw the dietician, whether I would stay on the diet or give it up if I decided it was doing me no good. She asked me if I felt I was concentrating better.

I started explaining as I do. Pretty animatedly. She didn’t understand how it worked. It wasn’t a diet to stay on. I had explained it already numerous times to everybody concerned and they didn’t seem to be taking it in.

S____ and C_____ know people who are on a gluten free diet because of their gut, she said, implying, as far as I was concerned that there could be no connection between [reveries, numerous: breaking things in my parents’ house, slamming doors and going for a run, not coming back for a long while and then straight upstairs to the shower, angry outbursts on being confronted with a variation on my ‘star chamber’-type confrontations, with Mum, Dad, M_____ and bro rubbishing my diet and ideas] gluten and mental functioning. This was too much. Already numerous times she had asked why the care home she works for does not implement a gluten-free diet, simply incredulous that they would fail to do such a thing if credible research suggests that it is helpful, and sceptical of my explanations that they would not because it is expensive and, unfortunately, care for such highly autistic individuals usually comes down to passifying them. She has been similarly sceptical about my belief that GPs would not know about the latest research, and would be reluctant to accept it. I was getting angry. My experience is my experience and it is obvious that nobody has access to it, not least because I am unable to express myself well, not in the written word, and so still less, so much less, verbally. I cannot stand when people deny me my experience. When they diminish the mental sufferings I have had over the years and still have, failing to believe and support me, and, perhaps worse, implicitly making me out to be a hypochondriac and a drama queen.

We got back to the car. Because your mum and dad said there was nothing wrong with you when you were little. She was smiling. Trying not to. She knew what she was implying.

That made me furious.

I started the car and set off, driving angrily.

I didn’t know at that point when she was talking about, when Mum and Dad had been talking about me being normal as a kid. I was picturing that she had been talking to them about that recently - we go to their house often and I say nothing and she talks away to them, yesterday she was taken in and subjected to four hundred odd photos of a wedding of people she didn’t know from Adam, and all to a barely twenty second loop of Fur Elise or some such that I was escaping from up above trying to read a few pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in peace.

A year ago I first went to see some idiot psychiatrist abotu my condition. The letter asked me to bring along my parents or some close relatives who knew me well. I did so. He spoke to me first. They then came in. They sat down and they pulled a fucking bourgoise. I could almost be surprised they didn’t get out the Blue fucking Nun. They sat there and spoke as if everything was rosy and fine. As if it always had been. I won’t look up the school records, he then says to me, completely blowing away all my hopes, and continued to dismiss my problems. They had never noticed anything strange. Never had any worries.

And M_____ smiled. I talked about how it had been for me at university. I talked about that stupid fucking psychiologist. She hadn’t known it was a psychologist. She thought it was a doctor. A GP. That’s what comes from speaking this Nadsat all the while that I’m not improving.

The anger from that day came out. How they had really, really let me down. I need support. You don’t believe me, I said.

It was back home I think that she started talking about how people can sometimes convince themselves of things. Convince themselves that they are ill from reading all about it. This from her, who is a genuine hypochondriac, constantly asking about this and that, worried about every pain or pimple. You never thought about this, she said, before you started working there with kids who have Aspergers and ADD.

I started trying to go into my past, and did so passionately but incoherently. The trouble is that, just as I can go into a shrink’s office and be dismissed for coming over as relatively articulate, intelligent and opinionated, so I can be dismissed by people who haven’t know me for so long, because of the very progress I have made since the years of being almost completely unable to have a conversation.

M_____’s level of English and my level of Czech also held me back. It’s impossible still to discuss intricacies.

I told her about how I was diagnosed as cyclothymic, and explained what that meant, basically manic depression light. And said, though only in outline, how I had read about such things before, and took the job because of my experience of these conditions, and did not interest myself in them because of the job. Of course, I can see how that is hard to understand, because in Prague I didn’t talk of it. For most of my life I didn’t talk of it. And indeed, I didn’t talk of being unable to concentrate, even though I was all the time at planning my lessons, and still every morning in a panic on the metro going to work, trying to think of what I would do. And indeed, when I am being stimulated the more, in an unfamiliar environment, and with unfamiliar people, I can as a whole concentrate better. That must be frustrating, and so, difficult to understand.

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