Just to let you know: some parts of this account talk about trauma and childhood abuse.

And yes, I am aware that from a global perspective, I have led a very privileged life. Growing up as a white male in a middle-class household in one of the world's most developed countries, I automatically ended up with advantages that are denied to other people. I acknowledge that completely, but I want to point out that I have never been the sort of person who got to live a life on the "easy" setting.

You may have noticed that whenever I refer to Autism on my website, I write the word with a capital letter. This is not common practice, but I do so as a result of reading Dr Devon Price's book Autism Unmasked, which was one of the most helpful books I've read about the condition that is written from the inside, so to speak. In his book, he uses the capital letter to reinforce a sense of identity and belonging, and like many other people who are Autistic, those are important things to me.

I think I've always known I that I'm not even remotely neurotypical. As you'll see, I was a weird kid and I grew up to be a weird adult, too. My ex-wife's friends used to call me Data after the android character on Star Trek: The Next Generation played by Brent Spiner, and although I took it as a compliment at the time, years later I recognised the cruelty behind it. Even today, I struggle to fit in socially and I've lived on my own for most of my adult life.

And yeah, that absolutely sucks.

I have spent decades fighting depression and a permanent state of exhaustion, thinking that this was just how everyone else got through each day; I assumed that they must just have been better at dealing with everything than I was. It wasn't until I reached my sixties before I finally came to the realisation that I might be Autistic. And when I asked my friends and family what they thought, it turned out that I really didn't need the "might" part of that sentence at all.

So yes, this account is based on my own experiences rather than a formal diagnosis (that part of the puzzle has yet to arrive) but quite honestly I have absolutely no doubt that my self-diagnosis is an accurate one. I wrote this account partly to convince anyone doubting me that I'm right (and that's totally the Autistic response to take, isn't it?)

As a small child I loved spinning in place until I made myself so dizzy that I fell over. When we went on holiday, my favourite pastime was rolling down the embankment on the seafront at Lytham over and over again—because being dizzy was fun, wasn't it?

These days, I know that this sort of behaviour is what's known as stimming. I liked jumping up and down, too. I can't remember flapping my hands or any of the other common stimming behaviours, but I soon realised that more overt forms of repetitive movement met with considerable parental disapproval, so I had to find other, less obtrusive stims instead. The one that stuck, which I'm still unable to control, and which gets worse and worse the more stressed I get, is sniffing. I hate it, and I wish I could be rid of it. But I'm afraid that you don't get to choose which stims will possess you, and you can't just decide one day that you're not going to do them any more.

As a small boy, the two stims that worked best for me were playing obsessively with Lego or drawing things, cutting them out, and playing with the drawings as if they were toys. Drawing was the first thing I remember doing so intently that I'd lose track of time. That was still the case when I was well in to my twenties, as you can see on my graphics page. My love of Lego has stayed with me to this day. I'm in my sixties now, and I still build Lego kits (next on the list is their Saturn V rocket, which is still in its box; I'm waiting until I need to put it together. That's how it goes.) When I was married, I would get totally absorbed in playing with the Lego that George and Michael, my two young brothers-in-law, had spread over their dad's living room floor, and I was in my thirties by then. I can remember Heather and her father watching with a mixture of amusement and disbelief as the three of us built a tower of bricks that was taller than I was.

The fascination with Lego was an early sign of something that became a kind of compulsion. I'd get overwhelmingly fixated on certain objects. It's hard to explain, but I regarded them in a sort of totemistic way. My father's light meter was one example which I coveted strongly at the age of three. It was a useful prop to give me when he wanted me to sit still for a photo and that's what I'm holding in my hands here.

Chris in the garden at Beatty Hall, 1963

I ended up rescuing it when my father's house was cleared after his death and it's now kept safely with all the rest of my photographic equipment. Other such objects included a Dinky Toy model of Joe 90's car (which my father eventually stamped into pieces in a rage), a Corgi Toy Commer camera van (which met exactly the same fate) and a weird plastic tiki ring out of a Christmas cracker which I eventually lost. I loved the feel of them as much as I adored how they looked. Action Man (the name which Hasbro gave to its G.I. Joe toy soldiers in the UK), Major Matt Mason (a range of space toys made by Mattel) and Wham-O's Frisbee were other abnormally intense enthusiasms (I was a fully paid-up member of the UK Frisbee Association when I was in my teens). And any television series that Gerry Anderson produced would automatically become an instant favourite.

I loved climbing into enclosed spaces. My reaction to large cardboard boxes was as predictable as any cat; if it fits, I sits. My parents had a sofabed with a hollow back which you could flip over and open up, presumably in order to store bedding in it. I would climb inside, and slide the door shut and feel safe. Being allowed to make a blanket fort with my mother's clothes airer and hide away inside it was a rare treat. I'd often crawl under my bed and fall asleep there. I liked the smell and the dust. Look, I said I was a weird kid, didn't I? When we stayed at my grandmother's house in Lytham St. Annes, there was a dresser built in to the wall to the left of the fireplace in the dining room that had an open shelf which looked like it had just enough room inside for me to fit in. I soon established that it did. And when my parents bought a Volkswagen Beetle, my favourite means of travelling in it was to climb into the parcel compartment behind the rear seats. It was a nicely confined space and as it was right next to the engine, it was lovely and warm; I'd fall asleep in there in seconds and stay there for the entire journey. I liked doing each one of these things for the same reasons: they cut out external stimuli, there was no danger of being overwhelmed, and they made me harder to hit.

I was (and still am) a creature of habit. I needed the stability of a daily routine to reassure me that my existence wasn't being put at risk. When I was young any changes to plans, particularly ones which had been made well in advance, would always trigger a meltdown.

I would become absolutely obsessed with specific topics and would talk at great length about them to anyone who didn't get out of the way fast enough. Particular enthusiasms at four years old included dinosaurs (of course), the Crab Nebula, and the 200-inch reflecting telescope at Mount Palomar in California. If I liked someone, I would usually attempt to show them, and I did that by info-dumping. After all, my father did it all the time so it was obviously completely normal behaviour, right?

I realised as I was writing this page that the web combines two of my most prominent traits: infodumping and computers. Is it any wonder that this website is as sprawling and link-heavy as it is? Nope. Not at all.

I could read by the time I was four years old, but back then nobody had heard of Autism so I was just seen as precocious. Relatives rapidly realised that the best present they could give me for my birthday or at Christmas was an encyclopedia, or a book about science, mechanics, or technology. I still have my original copy of Ward Lock's Junior Pictorial Encyclopedia (1963) and Paul Hamlyn's Every Boy's Encyclopedia (1968) and as a grown-up I managed to track down decent copies of treasures which had fallen apart and been thrown away, including Odhams's How and Why It Works (1948), Ward Lock's The Wonder Book of Do You Know? (1960), which had the aforementioned telescope at Mount Palomar on the cover, and The Dunlop Book of Facts (1966), which was compiled by Ross and Norris McWhirter of The Guinness Book of Records fame. And yes, I still have my copy of the seventeenth edition of The Guinness Book of Records (1971), too. I rapidly memorised large chunks of it and took great delight in enlightening other people I met about the exploits of folk such as Edward Abraham "Bozo" Miller, a competitive eater (hey, it was the seventies, okay?) who once ate 27 two-pound roast chickens in one sitting at Trader Vic's in San Francisco back in 1963...

Books are still an obsession of mine to this day and I read between sixty and eighty books a year.

As a child I was therefore a classic example of what specialists now call the "little professor" Autistic archetype. I could pretty much have been its poster boy. I carried that Ward Lock encyclopedia with me everywhere and as a result, the nurses at the outpatients department at Stafford General Hospital which I attended regularly as a small child would actually call out "Professor Harris" when it was my turn to see the consultant (which must have greatly confused the other patients).

I skipped the second year of primary school and was moved up to the third because I was making no attempt to hide my boredom at how slow it all was. As a six-year-old I naively thought that being clever was actually a desirable thing. Knowing stuff was pretty cool. I didn't understand that in reality, kids really don't like a smartass. As a result I was bullied mercilessly—at least until I learned how to fake being a "normal" kid—but I was never that great at doing that.

I couldn't tolerate unfairness or injustice in any shape or form (and I still can't) and I would often protest loudly when I encountered it, regardless of the personal consequences that inevitably resulted in my speaking up. I can still remember being soundly beaten by my father when I called him out about something he'd done while we were on holiday at my Grandmother's house in Lytham, and I'd only have been six years old or so. He kept hitting me because I wouldn't back down. Wrongdoing remains something I cannot bear so you can imagine how I feel about the current state of the world.

Most of the behaviours which I've described above are now considered to be strong diagnostic indicators that someone is Autistic. The signs were all there. It's just that nobody really knew about such things back then so nobody ever joined the dots. At least, not enough to decide that maybe I ought to see a specialist or get some help.

Up until very recently I assumed that my mental health problems all arose because I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. I've known for several decades that I'm affected by it; it's been a part of my life since I was an infant. I was talking about my childhood with my sister a few years ago, and her comment was brutally honest: "How could you have the childhood you had, and not end up with PTSD?"

When a visit to the dentist at four years old is so painful and terrifying that you run screaming out of the building and set off on your own down the High Street in Stone to go home, surely your parents would figure out that something was terribly wrong?

But when your father beats you instead, with the words "Stop crying or I'll really give you something to cry about," it's not difficult to figure out that you're on to a loser. He had a nasty temper, and he took it out on his kids. My siblings all suffered physical and psychological abuse from him over the years in different ways, but as the oldest I got the worst of the physical stuff. And nothing I ever did would impress him unless he could use it as a means of boasting about himself. For the most part, when I couldn't cope any more and would become overwhelmed and shut down, all this meant to him was that I was lazy and worthless and a hindrance to his grand aspirations. He was a narcissist, and an alcoholic and—well, you get the idea.

I had to share a bedroom with my brother until I was in my mid teens. For me, not having my own personal space where I could go to escape, calm down, and decompress was absolute hell but what made it worse was the way that all of my treasured objects had to be shared as well. I talked above about how fixated I'd get about certain possessions. I think it was because their presence reassured me that I existed too. Things were a source of comfort, particularly as I could associate each of them with specific happy memories (I guess that means that my memory palace was a real place). As you can imagine, losing anything caused me great distress. One afternoon, Andy decided to try out my reflecting telescope (my most-prized possession) and opened the bedroom window to get a better view. The inevitable happened and the telescope ended up, smashed, on the garden path below. Then there was the time my mother decided to gave my baby brother some of my favourite annuals to read, and Dave set about defacing them with a ballpoint and a selection of felt tip pens for the rest of the day. The most traumatic of these events, though, came about after I'd amassed a collection of Golden Age Marvel and DC comics that I would buy with my pocket money during the summer holidays from the corner shop at the end of the street in Lytham where my Grandmother lived. I had dozens of them and today, they would be worth an absolute fortune. But I got home from school one afternoon to be told that they'd been cluttering up the house, so my parents had simply thrown every single one of them away.

I was so upset by each of these events that I felt physically sick. I never got an apology; no attempt was ever made to replace the items or console me in any way whatsoever and even after sixty years, I can still feel a rush of anger as I remember how unfair my parents were. I'd been desperately wronged, but nobody else seemed to be the slightest bit bothered about it. Rather than respond to my anguish, they just ignored it. What made things worse was that I was told off because apparently I was being "petty and childish" by protesting about what they'd done. I was furious; outraged! And yet I was the one in the wrong? As far as I was concerned, that showed me exactly where I was in the family pecking order: somewhere beneath the dog (and quite possibly the goldfish as well). I knew I had no control over any aspect of my life, and I was taught repeatedly that expecting things to be any different was pointless—but this was just rubbing it in.

But the worst source of my childhood trauma came about when I started suffering from abdominal pain that was so excruciating and so intensely overwhelming that it became difficult to think or speak. After multiple visits to the doctor, and then to hospital for x-rays, I was diagnosed with kidney stones. One nurse told me much later that in her experience the pain was much worse than giving birth. Imagine what being repeatedly subjected to that sort of agony is going to do to you when you're three.

Recently I discovered that many Autistic people have a strong phobia about using strange toilets, particularly public ones and I can confirm that I certainly do. As a child, I would desperately hold it in until I got home and I was reluctant to drink fluids in case I had to go; now I wonder if that's why I became so ill? Whatever the reason, by the time I was four years old I needed major surgery. This resulted in a long stay in hospital. When you're that small and you're stuck on your own in a children's ward for several months and the smells and sounds are all overwhelming and your parents don't always have the time each day to visit you, it leaves mental scars just as deep as the physical ones.

And that's before we even get to the experience of the surgery itself. Having a mask placed over my face by the anaesthetist was overwhelming thanks to the texture of the mask, the disgusting smell of the rubber, the loss of all agency at being held down (and believe me, I fought hard; I had to be held down) filled me with terror. The way that the sounds around me started to echo uncontrollably as the gas took hold and I lost consciousness is still a "flashbulb" memory for me now, sixty years later. As is the memory of waking up while I was still on the table and the surgeon having to gently but firmly push my head back down to stop me looking around and put the mask back over my face to knock me out again.

And it was all for nothing; the surgery wasn't successful. By the time I was seven, the pain was so bad that I'd pass out at school and have to be taken home. My mother later told me that on more than one occasion she didn't expect me to survive the night. I'm glad she kept that to herself at the time. But it's difficult to describe the depth of despair you feel when, at the age of ten you're told that you're going to have to go through the whole ordeal again. I can still remember physically collapsing and curling up into a ball at the top of the stairs when my parents informed me I'd be going in to hospital the following week. And did my mother or father make any attempt to console me? No. They just left me there.

Stafford General Hospital had somewhat less of a Victorian workhouse chic vibe going on than the Preston Royal Infirmary did, but it was just as overwhelming. I remember being completely terrified of one of the other patients on the ward: a small baby with what my mother told me was hydrocephalus which had resulted in a grossly enlarged and distorted skull. I know now that the poor thing would have been unlikely to survive and that this response was completely irrational, but back then I spent each day in a state of abject horror. And then, when on the day that I expected to go home, my wound became infected and I found myself stuck in there for another week, it was difficult not to conclude at that point that the Universe just hated me.

At least this time someone—not my parents, mind—had figured out that I needed some form of social support. I remember getting a letter from every single one of my classmates at Burton Manor Primary School while I was still in hospital, delivered in person by one of my teachers who came to see how I was doing. Remarkably, I still have all of them. With hindsight, I don't think my teachers had expected me to survive. Somehow, I did; but when I got home I had been thoroughly traumatised.

In 2025 I learned about a specific type of PTSD which arises when the trauma you're subjected to in childhood is prolonged and there is no prospect of escape; it's called complex PTSD (c-PTSD) and after reading Stephanie Foo's memoir of recovery from it, What My Bones Know I recognised my own experience to such a degree that by the end of the book, I was sobbing uncontrollably.

A sense of powerlessness turns out to be one of the core experiences of cPTSD. I think you should be able to see why that would be the case for me by now. People who suffer from it tend to blame themselves for what has happened to them and I've spent most of my life doing just that. I can still hear my father's voice in my head, complaining that I was worthless, that I was a failure, a disappointment, and that I'd never be good enough to succeed at anything. Take a moment to imagine what it's like living with all that going on in your head. I have never had any belief in my own abilities, and always told myself that my creative work wasn't good enough to make a career of it, even though I have a handwritten letter from Lemmy thanking me for drawing stuff for his band Motörhead which ends with this astonishing compliment:

Once I started reading up about the condition, I was not even slightly surprised to discover that cPTSD is extremely common among Autistic people. It's little wonder then that I've spent decades beating myself up for things which happened to me. Autism, too, often comes with strong and persistent feelings that you've done something truly awful and it's only a matter of time until your punishment arrives. It's only since I read accounts by other cPTSD survivors that I've been able to accept that the most traumatic events of my life not only weren't my fault—they were never going to have turned out any differently than they did.

After sixty-five years, someone had finally shown me the source of so much of my own pain. It's tempting to say "If only I'd known earlier," but these days I know that mourning the life I might otherwise have led is pointless. The fact that it happened to me is unfortunate and unfair, yes, but there's nothing I can do about that, and pretending otherwise is just a waste of energy.

After crashing out of university I ended up working in the City and it wasn't long before I found myself in a work environment involving computers. Information technology was like catnip to me. I had to compile databases of call charge information for telephone exchanges as hexadecimal look-up tables and after I'd been doing the work for a couple of weeks, I realised that I could simply do all of the encoding in my head and type the results directly into the computer. My supervisor soon stopped checking my work, deciding that it was a waste of time. Nothing strange about that, right?

My life was full of contradictions. I hated noisy environments, but I absolutely adored loud rock music. Certain fabric textures would repel me, but when my first serious girlfriend discovered that I was hypersensitive, it suddenly became tremendous fun. Going out for curries with her and her family also led me to discover that I loved spicy food and that is another common Autistic trait, believe it or not.

Even though I was pulling in a salary, I was still living at home; to say I was a late developer is putting it mildly. Looking back on my late teens and my twenties, it feels like my parents weren't confident enough that I could survive on my own. There were several occasions when I announced that I was going to move out and get a flat with some of my friends, and they made very sure that this didn't happen through all sorts of passive-aggressive manipulation.

Ironically, when I finally managed to escape in my mid-twenties by getting promoted at work and I moved in to my own place in Milton Keynes, one of the first observations my parents made was how much less stressed I seemed to be. Duh.

Back then, I didn't realise anything was out of the ordinary. Having a place of my own, where I could control my immediate environment, manage distractions, and avoid interacting with anyone else unless I wanted to meant that I was able to begin a form of healing, but what's really sad is that back then I didn't know that this was why I felt better.

And I didn't realise that I'd simply exchanged one set of challenges for another. The thing that made life most difficult for me is a condition that I didn't know existed until recently. It's called alexithymia or emotional blindness. People who suffer from it have difficulty experiencing, identifying, understanding, and expressing their emotions and I can't begin to describe the shock of recognition when I discovered that it was a thing. That's me in a nutshell. Without me realising, it crippled every relationship that I've ever had. And it's only now that I realise just how badly it has laid me open to exploitation and emotional manipulation throughout my life. I was an easy mark, and people took advantage; I might as well have painted a target on my back.

But I never thought about asking for help; why would I? I had absolutely no idea how ill I was. Without a formal diagnosis or access to any form of treatment or therapy, by the time I'd reached my thirties I was struggling to cope. Although I didn't know it, I had already started to suffer from depression. I just thought that everyone else had somehow learned to be a lot better than I was at dealing with all the problems that I was going through. It never occurred to me—not even once—that their life experiences might be so radically different to mine that for them, those problems simply didn't exist.

I was camouflaging who I was (which should have been a red flag, as I'll explain below) and although I was good enough at it to get by most of the time, it took a huge toll. My marriage didn't survive, and I'm sure the state I was in was a contributing factor. I didn't realise it at the time, but I could no longer function properly and I spent more and more time in what I now know was a dissociative state. Poor Heather didn't understand what was going on, and neither did I. After she walked out, things got much worse, and I became suicidal. The only way I survived was by quitting my job, selling my house, and moving to the other side of the country. But the feelings of grief and guilt and shame from that period of my life have never left me.

I said earlier that I've always known my mind doesn't work like most people's. I have a vivid memory of trying to explain that to my boss when I worked in London. But I still thought that I was more or less normal.

As I got older and a little wiser, that began to change. As my father's physical and mental health declined in the 1990s, I read somewhere about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and suddenly it became obvious that this was driving his behaviour and the way he had always treated the rest of his family suddenly came into focus. My father used to shout at us for not cleaning up after we'd had a bath, insisting angrily that we'd left a ring of soap scum in the tub. But I eventually discovered that the ring in the tub wasn't extra material deposited by our soapy activities; instead, my father had used scouring powder so aggressively as he cleared up after us that he'd ended up wearing the cast iron bath's enamel away completely. After I pointed this out to the rest of the family during dinner one evening, the house soon gained an entirely new bathroom suite and my father never mentioned soap scum again.

He would also unload the dishwasher if anyone else had loaded it because we would always have put things in it the wrong way and this would not do. Soon afterwards I realised that he undoubtedly had what at the time was called Asperger's—the classifications were changed in 2013 and these days I he'd be described as ASD-1, someone able to cope with adult life with no support needs.

Discovering that traits like this were genetic and heritable, I started reading up about the Autistic spectrum in an attempt to figure out if I was on it, too. After all, the worse things got when I was little, the more introverted and shut down I would become and the deeper I would disappear into my books or my drawing. That sort of behaviour began to sound like it could be explained if I was on the Autistic spectrum just as easily as it could by PTSD. But at the time I thought that most of the behaviour that I called "Aspergery" was stuff that I was unconsciously modelling after I'd learned it from my father. I'd spent my twenties actively trying to be as unlike him as I possibly could be. Now I realise that that's when I started masking in earnest but back then, I quickly hit upon what I thought at the time was the deciding factor which I was confident would completely demolish any possibility that I was Autistic.

Back in the 90s, the only image of an Autistic person that the public were likely to have encountered was of the robotic, emotionless character portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988). Apart from exceptional people like Temple Grandin and Stephen Wiltshire, every case I'd read about in books by Uta Frith, Tony Attwood, or Simon Baron-Cohen described people who were almost or entirely nonverbal (you may have noticed I'm really not like that) and I didn't believe for one minute that I suffered at all from what's known as "mindblindness" because I was always painfully aware of what other people thought of me. To me, Autism meant having no feelings about anything at all; I was struggling because mine were turned up to eleven almost all the time and they were always so intensely out of control that any situation which was even slightly challenging threatened to overwhelm me completely. I had all the feels. How could I possibly be Autistic?

We now know that a lot of research back then suffered from the Double Empathy Problem; it wasn't that Autistic people can't empathise with other people; the problem was that the researchers studying them were failing to empathise with them because of a breakdown in reciprocity and mutual understanding and had failed to notice that this was happening.

All the same, at the time I decided to ask a few of my friends if they thought I might be Autistic.

Autistic? Me?

Nope, absolutely not, I was told. I couldn't possibly be.

Oh. Okay, then. I sort of shrugged it all off and told myself that I must just be terrible at being an adult. And so I found myself trying harder and harder to appear normal (which I now know, is a classic Autistic behaviour known as masking—more on that in a moment) which leaves the person having to do it in a permanent state of exhaustion. Not surprisingly, I spiralled into chronic depression. A bit of "flattening of affect" would actually have helped matters considerably.

For the next thirty years, I found myself living in what felt like a permanent state of crisis. I had occasional phases where I felt like I was beginning to get on top of things, but they never lasted more than a few years (and neither did my relationships). I felt overwhelmed all of the time. At home, I would burst into tears for no reason. I would suffer from gastric upsets on a regular basis (which turn out to be yet another trait that Autistic people have). I was always so tired that I couldn't think straight. And yet I couldn't get a good night's sleep to save my life.

It became more and more difficult for me just to go out into the world, at least if I had to remain sober. Alcohol was how I self-medicated, and my lack of any self-worth meant I really didn't care about the long-term consequences of my heavy drinking (by this point, my father's condition showed exactly where that path would take me, but I'd decided that the likelihood of me surviving to his age was slim to non-existent; I wanted to obliterate myself). I ended up an eight-pints-a-night guy, right up until the day that I heard that one of my former drinking buddies from Milton Keynes, who was a decade younger than I was, had dropped dead.

Knowing what I know now, I have no doubt whatsoever that although I was finally diagnosed with chronic depression in 2009 this only acknowledged a very minor part of what was actually going on; the Autistic burnout that I was actually suffering from was driving it, but my doctor didn't put two and two together and neither did I.

And things just kept getting worse. By the time I reached my mid-forties I was, quite simply, done.

At the time, I was in a job I utterly loathed. I could no longer sustain the effort required to mask who I really was each and every day, or deal with the sensory overload of a highly stressful commute (I hate driving) when I could quite easily have worked far more productively and happily from home. My Autistic self loved remote working and I became increasingly frustrated by the management team's inability to see how much it improved the quality of my work (to say nothing of my quality of life; at least I was politically savvy enough to restrain myself from pointing out just how much better it was for me than having to share a loud and excessively air-conditioned office with them all). But worst of all, I was slowly being driven mad by the cognitive dissonance that's inherent in being told what to do each day by bosses who were all textbook cases of the Dunning-Kruger Effect: none too bright, utterly clueless when it came to managing professionals who were their intellectual superiors in every respect, but nonetheless sublimely confident in their own (completely non-existent) talents. For them, being a manager relied exclusively on being able to shout angrily and loudly at people—and to give them their due, I must say they were extremely good at that. Perhaps inevitably, I ended up being prescribed a hefty dose of antidepressants because it turned out that I quite literally needed to be on drugs in order to continue working there; that's how bad it was.

Watching things go off the rails at that job was just one of many times when I knew that nothing I could do would have any chance of changing the course of events. That, of course, reinforced the long standing sense of powerlessness which cPTSD amplifies so readily. So I gave up trying to cope. It seems so obvious now, but at the time I couldn't see any way out and once again I became suicidal.

I was very glad when the company was taken over, as the entire training team was shut down after being declared surplus to requirements and I could take advantage of another hefty redundancy package. I spent most of the following year trying to recover. For the first six months or so I was incapable of doing much of anything each day other than sit at home and play electric guitar (which meant that my abilities on the instrument saw a tremendous improvement) but hearing the news from my former colleagues that the department's entire management team had also subsequently found themselves out of a job delivered a delightful dose of schadenfreude which made me feel a little bit better...

I started my own business in my fifties. Never thought I'd end up doing that, but it kept the wolf from the door and gave me a much-needed sense of purpose. My symptoms noticeably declined during that time, but unfortunately so did my bank balance, even though I never made a loss. After a few years of that I eventually had to find myself another full-time job working for someone else.

It paid well, and the work was very much my sort of thing. But I was back in an office environment and spending far too much time travelling (which I hated). Worse, I soon discovered that I had joined a company that regularly went through boom and bust cycles because despite all their outward self-assurance and posturing, it turned out that its directors hadn't got the faintest clue about running a business. When the next bust inevitably happened, I was out—and the sense of relief I felt was immense, because I'd seen the writing on the wall soon enough to start putting money aside for just that eventuality. When I was laid off I realised that actually, if I managed what I'd saved properly for a couple of years, I wouldn't ever need to work for a living again.

And that proved to be the case. Instead, I shut myself away at home, put together the home studio that I'd always dreamed about having, and set about recording album after album of music for no other purpose than my own amusement and satisfaction. It became one of the most fulfilling things that I've ever done, and it still is to this day.

So, crisis avoided? Well, not so much.

After I retired I still had regular wobbles, but for the most part they were nothing like the ones I'd had while I was working. I could manage the overwhelm by simply never leaving the house, so that's pretty much what I did. I felt settled enough that I could convince myself that I was okay. When COVID arrived and lockdown happened, I barely noticed because I'd already been shut away on my own for a year at that point.

On my fifty-ninth birthday I became seriously ill. I vaguely recognised the pain I was experiencing, but it was only after a round of trips to the oncology departments of several local hospitals, a load of x-rays, and even an MRI scan that the consultant informed my that the kidney stones had returned. And this time they'd brought some gall stones with them for company. Oh, joy.

I made some hasty changes to my lifestyle. Over the next year I passed several of the offending items and since then I've been able to manage okay. But I recognised that while I was stuck at home I was spending far too much of my time thinking about what I wanted out of life in a way that was risking my mental health. I'd reached the conclusion that I was a complete failure as a human being (and even today I can hear my father's voice at the back of my mind, telling me exactly that). I knew I needed to get back out in the world or I'd turn into a Howard-Hawks style recluse (although without the long fingernails, because guitars).

In an attempt to break out of the destructive patterns of thought I'd fallen into, I committed to a collaborative music project at a nearby recording studio. Dear reader, it did not go well. The person I ended up working with decided that the piece we should work on was one that he had already written, and I was presented with a fait accompli that didn't require any creative input from me at all. I wasn't just insulted, I felt worthless. I'd been unfairly marginalised and what talents I thought I had weren't just unappreciated, they were completely ignored. As a result, I went through something that in the old days would have been called a nervous breakdown. With hindsight, I realise that my cPTSD had been massively triggered. I wasn't just at a low ebb; for the next few months all I did was lie in bed all day, wishing I was dead. The despair was overwhelming, and I couldn't see a way through it.

But thanks to a wonderful book written by my friend Robin Ince, I had an epiphany. In it, Robin had described his recent diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and when I read it, I was astounded by how familiar it all sounded. In one chapter, Robin sets out the diagnostic criteria which were involved in his assessment, and I found myself saying, "Well, I do that" to all of them. Not a few; all of them. When I talked to my sister about my suspicions, she agreed that I did indeed have ADHD, but then she gently but firmly told me that I also needed to accept that I was Autistic. I was shocked. But as she's spent the last twenty years or so teaching SEND kids, I knew I couldn't argue with her assessment. And so I finally accepted that "being on the spectrum" was the simplest explanation for my experiences. Mind you, this didn't stop me seeking a second opinion from my friends. Of course, as soon as I asked them what they thought about the idea, I got a very different response compared with the last time I'd asked. I can only explain this in terms of people being much more familiar these days with how someone who is Autistic actually behaves. I'm pleased to say that society has moved on from Rain Man.

When I messaged Helen (whom I've known since I was a teenager) about it on Whatsapp, her immediate reply was just a crying laughing emoji. That was quickly followed up with "Really? I've always known!"

Oh.

Helen's daughter is autistic, so she provided me with a reading list and I've included a selection from it at the bottom of this page, together with some other books on the subject I which helped me, because it was a great comfort to read the accounts of other people on the spectrum and recognise so many things that I had in common with them. Knowing that I was not alone in going through this has been a tremendous help. Devon Price's book in particular was a revelation and when I learned about "masking" I realised why I'd spent my entire adult life in a permanent state of exhaustion.

Masking is an incredibly effortful behaviour which Autistic people perform (often completely unconsciously, without ever realising that they're doing it; that was certainly the case with me) in order to appear non-Autistic and fit in to society. It's sometimes called "passing" because you're trying to pass as a normal person. It involves pretending that everything is absolutely fine when the work you're being asked to do seems pointless and stupid, the tie that you're required to wear feels like it's choking you, the lights are too bright, the room is too cold, the people are too loud, and all the noise around you hurts and all your nervous system wants you to do is curl up into a little ball.

I'm still learning what it means to be Autistic. Writing this account has been one of the ways I've chosen to try and come to terms with the implications, as well as proving to myself that my experience is a valid one, even without a formal diagnosis. Apparently, doubting that you are not "properly Autistic" and feeling like a fraud is itself a relatively common Autistic trait. And so is PTSD.

When the penny finally dropped, Helen said to me "Your life is not the car crash you thought it was" and when I realised that she was right, it felt as if someone had lifted a huge weight from my shoulders.

Finally learning that it's not my fault that I have struggled to fit in, or that I was not responsible for the awful things which have happened to me over the years; recognising that the reason some people treated me badly was because they weren't very nice people, not because that was just how I deserved to be treated has been profoundly liberating but it's also been an intensely emotional experience.

For the first six weeks after my realisation my "depression" disappeared completely. Instead I was bewildered, shocked, embarrassed, and even amused by the discovery that I didn't even remotely resemble the person I'd spent the whole of my adult life thinking I was. It felt like I'd been given a clean slate and the opportunity to start again. That euphoria eventually wore off and I found that my depression hadn't gone away completely after all. I still have as many bad days as I do good ones, and I still spend too much time looking back on my life and wondering how it might have turned out if I'd known what was wrong with me. It turns out that this is a very common reaction; for me, post-diagnosis grief has been very difficult to deal with. Fortunately I was able to access a programme of talking therapy through the NHS and this has helped me a lot.

Today I have no doubt whatsoever that I am Autistic and that I also have ADHD. Read the rest of this website and you'll probably conclude that it's pretty bloody obvious. You'll get no argument from me there; but getting to the point where I could accept that has been a long and arduous journey. It's not been a comfortable one. Nevertheless, it's one that has let me join the dots about many aspects of my life which up until this point had left me feeling frustrated, confused, and deeply hurt. Of course, now I can see that the signs were there all along...

Now I understand why, when I began working in London at the beginning of the 1980s and had to spend several hours a day stuck in an overcrowded train on my commute, I would get crippling anxiety attacks. My doctor at the time basically told me to just suck it up and deal with it, which didn't really do much for my opinion of the medical profession.

Now I understand why, when the office I worked at in London acquired its first IBM PC, I was the one who ended up looking after it, because I'd read all the instruction manuals for it and already knew the rudiments of programming. Now I understand that "normal" people often struggle with technology that to me seems simple to use and that while the solution to a technical problem might be blindingly obvious to me, that isn't necessarily the case for anyone else.

More significantly, now I understand that I preferred working with computers because I could figure out why they were doing what they did without any effort while I failed dismally at understanding people's motivations and behaviour.

There are things that I desperately wish I could go back and change. If only I'd known what I know now forty years ago, my life would have been transformed. But you can't change the past, and there's no point in grieving over things that never happened.

And after sixty-five years, a lot of angst, several courses of therapy, and with the help of some very good friends I have finally started to find out who the authentic me really is. I don't know what the future has in store for me. I just know that for the first time in my entire life, I feel like I've got an instruction manual for it that actually makes sense.

When I first started to suspect I was on the spectrum in the early 90s, I read a lot of books by such luminaries of the field as Uta Frith, Tony Attwood, and Simon Baron-Cohen. But I found nothing in those works that I could relate to, and I now think they hindered my understanding rather than enabled it. So instead, I'm only going to list the books which have helped me. I hope they'll help you understand the condition, too.

The Autistic Spectrum and ADHD

Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal by Robin Ince
Autism Unmasked: The Power of Embracing Our Hidden Neurodiversity by Dr Devon Price
An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

Autistic Autobiography

Thinking In Pictures by Temple Grandin
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things? A Comedian's Guide To Autism by Pierre Novellie
Fingers In The Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham

Books for Autistic Kids and Young Adults

Growing Up Autistic And Happy by Dr Camilla Pang
A Different Sort Of Normal by Abigail Balfe
Invisible Differences: A story of Autism, adulting, and living life in full color by Mademoiselle Caroline and Julie Dachez

Fiction with Autistic protagonists:

A Kind Of Spark by Elle McNicoll
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon

Complex PTSD

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
The Complex PTSD Workbook by Dr Arielle Schwartz