Strong female character, p.11
Strong Female Character, page 11
We wiped away tears as we took turns reading it out, stopping to laugh at every other sentence. It was a relief to have at least one friend who had an accurate understanding of me. Outside of that, I had no idea who I was.
In my parents’ house I was told I was evil and clever. In school I was strange and quiet.
To people trying to have sex with me I was mysterious and sexy.
None of these things fitted, but Lauren had seemed to perceive immediately that I had no clue what was going on in social situations and accepted it without question.
Dad eventually let me go back to the house. During another argument I told my parents that I’d told the school they’d kicked me out and that the headmaster might make a referral to social services. My dad spluttered, genuinely incredulous, his voice going up in pitch.
‘You – you cunt!’
I’d never heard him say the word before. I was so stunned that I didn’t register his hand swooping through the air and hitting me until I landed on the ground. I picked myself up, headed to my room and numbly gathered my things, packing Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton yet again, the same stupid ritual. I went to my magazine rack, pulling out tightly packed copies of Cosmo and the NME and digging for the money I was sure I’d hidden between the pages. There was none left. I realized I had nothing and no credit on my phone. I left and walked fast down the hill, crying. I went to the phone box and used my last pound in the world to call Lauren.
‘Can you come get me from the bottom of the hill?’
‘Oh my god, are you okay?’
‘Quick, I’m on a payphone. Just come meet me.’
She whizzed to our town in her car and sat listening to me wailing. Her car, the fact she was a year older than me and her sense of calm concern made her feel almost maternal.
‘You can’t come stay at mine but here’s money for a train to Edinburgh.’
I took the train, my thoughts racing, trying to work out what I was supposed to do from there. No one had prepared me for this. My parents’ overprotectiveness seemed like a joke given they’d now turfed me out with zero coping skills. I got to Edinburgh and walked through the Meadows trying to find Fat Scott’s flat in pitch-darkness. I have no sense of direction and smartphones hadn’t been invented yet so I’d memorized his directions in my head, saying them over and over to myself as I walked.
It was nightmarish and I got lost repeatedly. I thought back to the stories I’d heard of girls getting raped there in the dark and the whole pitch-black expanse seemed to spin around me. I started walking this way and that and through my panic realized that I was walking in useless circles. Eventually Fat Scott rang my mobile, surprised at the state I was in, and directed me to his flat.
He wore a synthetic football top in bed. The feel and sound of it rustling over his lardy belly made me want to puke. He tried to hug me and I stiffened as my skin screamed at the shiny fabric scratching against it.
‘Please take that off, it’s disgusting.’
He laughed and smiled, taking it off. Naw, on second thoughts, mate – put it back on. I tried to hide a grimace. His subservience to me was repellent. I resigned myself to having to live with this man for the summer until I got into university accommodation in September. On balance it wasn’t the worst – he always had drugs, gave me money to play the quiz machine in the pub and when he was out at work in the day I could read books in peace with no one bothering me; but my intense dislike of his face, body and smell meant I was fairly cold to him on a regular basis.
One night we went to Calum’s flat to have drinks. All through school I was pretty sure that all I needed to not feel left out was to be around real adults. After all, no one at school had the same interests as me, probably ’cause I was so grown-up that I needed to be around adults. Except, when I hung around Karen and Shaun or Mo or my older boyfriend and his friends it was just a new kind of loneliness, but one where I thought hopefully, Maybe when I’m their age I’ll fit in.
When we arrived there were probably four of us there, the others smoking weed and drinking, talking about their adult jobs and me occasionally trying and failing to think of a cool thing to say about books. Things were pleasant enough until Calum’s new girlfriend showed up. She’d been drinking on a work’s night out before coming back and it was evident from the off that she was jealous or insecure of the fact that I’d fucked Calum before she did. She walked into the living room, saying hi to all the guys in turn before regarding me coldly. She plonked herself down on an armchair opposite me and started a relentless stream of passive-aggressive comments in the guise of normal conversation. She made terse small talk with my boyfriend, smiling tightly. ‘Good job? How’s the new flat?’ She thought she knew his flatmate.
Then she added: ‘You’d be a nice guy if you weren’t going out with a wee lassie.’
He laughed nervously. People around him attempted to change the topic, move onto something else, but her dozy, pished eyes were fixed on me.
‘Stupid wee lassie,’ she muttered as she stood up and put Mercury Rev on the CD player. She started to croon along tunelessly.
‘And now the dark is rising! And a brand-new moon is born!’
She shook her head, inhaling her fag and muttering to herself before singing again.
‘I dinnae get it, though. What you doing with her, man? Stupid wee lassie like that.’
I started to feel my breath quicken. A terrible adrenaline rush lit up my nervous system again and I felt dizzy as my heart pounded through my chest. Curled up in an armchair, Sian was still burbling away, her eyes closed as she sang.
‘I never dreamed I’d lose you! In my dreams I’m always strong . . .’
In an instant, I stood up and walked over to the table and picked up a bottle of vodka, my back to her. My plan was to tip it over her. I turned around and walked over.
‘I’m not a wee lassie. I’m actually about to start uni,’ I said, trying to seem assertive; but my voice was shaking and I sounded terrified. How many more women would get to just say stuff about me while I meekly sat there and took it? There were the women in Tesco, Lorraine in the mental unit, the girls at school, the teachers, Mum.
Why did I never do anything about it? It was pathetic, embarrassing. I felt repulsed at how weak I was.
I reached where she was sitting and silently tipped the full litre of vodka over her head. She squealed and as I watched it soak her as if in slow motion, something in me snapped. I flipped the full ashtray in her lap over her and before I knew it, I was hitting her over the head with the bottle. The song was a big sweeping orchestral number and the violins swelled as she screamed. It was a preposterous song to bottle someone to.
As I made contact with her skull everyone in the room leaped from their chairs in a collective ‘Woah-woah-woah!’ moment. In the commotion that followed, someone pulled me off her and before I knew it I was being dragged out the house. Someone – possibly me – was telling Scott to drive. Calum ran out the house screaming abuse at me and ripping his shirt open, which I felt was unnecessarily dramatic. He pounded the windows as Scott frantically tried to start the car, going, ‘Oh fuck, oh god, oh fuck . . .’ When we drove off, Scott asked over and over, ‘Why did you do that? Why did you do that?’ while I stared straight ahead in disbelief.
Later I found out that Sian had needed some butterfly stitches. I was amazed slash horrified I’d caused an injury. Meek little me. Stupid wee lassie. The bottle had felt like nothing in my hand. Making contact had felt like nothing. I hadn’t seen what other choice I had. The way I saw it at the time, if I hadn’t have done that she would have attacked me first.
Having said that, Sian wasn’t wrong: it was odd that a man was dating a teenager eight years younger than him. The way she made her point wasn’t great but the adult me thinks it’s a fair one. I understand now that a lot of people use alcohol to say what they’re too scared to say normally and that as one of the only sober people in the room I was actually in a position of power. Had I known that, I could have either sat calmly while she needled me then taken her down verbally or said nothing and found a way to leave the party. I’ve been in similar situations dozens of times since and been unfazed and it makes me realize how utterly terrified I was at 18. Terrified of everyone and constantly hypervigilant.
Through years of practise, I can think a little more laterally now and am able to separate my autistic instincts from my actual behaviour by forcing myself to look at a situation from several angles. Initially, this wasn’t easy but I now have an ability to think objectively that I didn’t have before. I understand that my body overreacts due to my amygdala being too large and so I must mentally talk down a disproportionate fight-or-flight response that perceives any loud noises, shouting, confusing facial expressions or tones of voice as immediate threats.
Research has shown that the amygdala is either enlarged or too small in autistic people, which explains why we perceive aggression and certain emotions so differently from others. In autistic girls with depression and anxiety it tends towards the large side.* We cannot ignore the fact that nurture interacts with nature in these kinds of responses. As social animals, human beings have good reasons to feel physically unsafe when we are ostracized socially,† plus autistic people often bank up a lot of the trauma that we experience through life‡ and that inevitably affects how we perceive or act on certain emotions.
I now use data to reassure myself that if someone starts making bitchy comments at a party, no matter how frightening or uncomfortable it feels, it’s statistically extremely unlikely that any violence will occur because the vast majority of people have a strong desire to avoid negative social consequences and avoid losing stuff like their freedom, money or status. I’ve learned all this from reading and studying humans like a Martian. None of it is intuitive.
I had absolutely no insight into this incident for a decade and nor did I have any understanding of why it happened. Instead, I learned from careful observation of others that I absolutely should not tell people that she made me hit her and I had no option but to do it.
I used to shrug when people asked about it. I’d say, ‘It was a difficult time. I was homeless and she would have hit me first.’ Yet my inability to see shades of grey meant I had very little capacity to comprehend that there were other options.
It was only on my first day working in a halfway house for ex-offenders, almost a decade later, that it all clicked into place. My manager, an ex-offender himself, said simply: ‘Here are everyone’s case files. Sit down and read. Then let us know if you can do the job.’
Hunched over my desk reading one messy life story after another, I realized that almost everyone who kills someone isn’t deranged or a maniac – they put those people in a different place, in the secure units, and their release is tightly managed by specialists. The offenders I worked with were more often than not intensely vulnerable, impulsive people with chaotic lifestyles who had made a terrible split-second error of judgement that permanently changed the course of their lives. The same sort of case came up again and again: people who had had a drunken argument and hit their partner or relative over the head – often with a bottle – and the person died later of a subdural haematoma. No one meant to do it.
My stomach lurched reading their case studies as I realized if I’d hit Sian an inch to the right or left, if I’d hit her harder or if I’d hit her twice, I’d be in prison for manslaughter. I may even have been diagnosed in there. Many autistic people don’t get diagnosed until they’re in prison. In addition to her diagnostic work, my therapist works within the criminal-justice sector and says one of the biggest problems for autistic clients when they go to appeal their sentences is their unabashed honesty. Most people will understand the unspoken implication that to win an appeal they have to parrot out a convincing apology and display remorse. I don’t operate that way, at least not intuitively. I’d never say I regretted something unless I actually did.
Around the time of working in the halfway house I wrote a newspaper article about this incident, giving my insight into and understanding of why on earth I hit a relative stranger when I had no previous criminal history. I was still so lacking in self-awareness I can barely recall it now without cringing. I tried to explain the experience as ‘going through a phase of behaving like Begbie in Trainspotting ’. This is absolute nonsense. The character of Begbie has a thirst for violence and is well versed in it, dealing in it like a currency. Perhaps I thought it made me sound cool and hard and scary and streetwise; plus it played into well-established British media tropes around Scottish people and aggression. I couldn’t exactly say in a national newspaper that I felt small and scared for my life.
Again, though, I was continually over-identifying with fiction to try and find a template for myself and my story – and there was no fiction available to describe being a girl who thinks the world is out to get her and after years of taunts finally lashes out.
________________
* Attwood, T (2015) ‘Autism in Females’: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfOHnt4PMFo&t=417s would be a boy who loves trains or Star Trek, but it can be anything. I feel uncomfortable every time I use the term, though, as it feels patronizing and pathologizes a harmless trait purely because allistics don’t understand it. Such focuses are more likely to be described by autistic people as ‘preoccupations’ or ‘passions’, which are terms I prefer.
† The term ‘special interest’ refers to the autistic tendency to have intense focused interests that bring us a lot of joy. We tend to bring them up at every opportunity. The stereotypical idea of an autistic special interest
* Interoception is the ability to notice and address internal bodily sensations. Poor interoception affects me even when I’m excited about stuff. (This is the case for lots of autistics.) I’ll forget to drink or eat anything for hours or even move from the same spot as I become so absorbed in what I’m doing. When stressed or uncertain I reduce my foods down to two or three things and when very distressed my diet will become so unhealthy I end up with infections.
* Later, I did material on this experience in a stand-up routine but couldn’t say, ‘I was a schoolkid,’ as it wouldn’t have been relatable or funny then. It’s barely relatable as it is. The material then got made into a light-hearted sketch for some stupid TV show and seeing the whole thing reduced down to cartoonish silliness gave me a feeling I couldn’t explain.
* Schenkman, L (2020) ‘Enlarged amygdala linked to severe behavioral problems in autistic girls’. Spectrum News. www.spectrumnews.org/news/enlarged-amygdala-linked-to-severe-behavioral-problems-in-autistic-girls/
† Some research into the long-lasting pain of ostracism can be found here: www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2011/110510WilliamsOstracism.html
‡ One example of research that is being done to explore the links between autism and trauma and how this may manifest itself in PTSD can be found here: www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/intersection-autism-trauma/
Chapter Six
‘you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye’
—Margaret Atwood, ‘You Fit Into Me’
Mum was already stationed in the car outside and wailing as Dad left the student accommodation in Edinburgh’s Old Town. This felt more than a little ridiculous given the fact I hadn’t been living with them and had only gone back that morning from Fat Scott’s place to pick up the last of my stuff. I watched them leave from the window, feeling nothing. Scrap that – as the car disappeared round the corner I felt euphoric. My own room! I didn’t have to live with my loud family or some chunker in an acrylic tracksuit. I promised myself that from this point onwards, I would do whatever it took to never go back to Bathgate. To go back was unthinkable.
Two girls from Shetland that I met in halls took me out drinking in freshers’ week. As we stood in the queue to an eighties-themed roller disco at the student union, the Shetland girls talked in hoarse voices with endless rolling rrrrrrs. One of them was insisting it was definitely legal for women to piss outside.
From behind us a posh English voice said loud enough for us to hear: ‘Ugh! What’s that smell?’
On cue, another voice replied: ‘Smells like commoners!’
Pahahahaha.
Peals of horsey laughter ensued. I turned round to look. Two girls with artfully messy blonde hair wearing pearl necklaces were smirking back at me. That was the moment I realized that university wasn’t going to be some idyll where everyone who was a geek at school bonded over books and the life of the mind.
Inside the student union, some 6-foot blond guy approached me. I’d not seen many men this height, proper big, unfeasibly healthy-looking adult men. Everyone at home was wizened and tiny from generational poverty. He said nothing to me but grabbed me, lifted me up and started kissing me, slamming me up against a wall. This is the life! I thought. This was how I’d seen freshers’ week depicted on telly and in books and I was here for it.
At some point I peeled myself off him to go to the toilet. As I dried my hands and checked how far my mascara had run down my face, I noticed some girl scowling at me in the mirror before she pointedly told the Shetland girls how disgusting I was. I still don’t understand this mad way of fighting – where women can only ever start a fight by using other women to communicate their message, like ghosts through a medium. I turned to address the little jury of girls in earnest, trying to appeal to their better judgement.
‘But have you seen him? He’s fit!’
I felt like the evidence I’d presented to the court in response to the question, ‘Why are you getting off with that guy?’ was clearly compelling; it was more than adequate from my point of view. Unfortunately, ‘Because he’s fit’ and ‘Because I wanted to’ did not fly in 2004. They glared at me again as I walked out, muttering under their breath about how strange I was.
