Monday 16th January 2023: Happy New London!

Hi everyone!

Ok, I’m NOT going to apologise. I know it’s been ages, but it has been Christmas, which I celebrated with my beautiful partner and his wonderful family. Shout out to the Ukranians who came to live with his parents last year (despite the best efforts of the Boris Johnson government) and made an already great Christmas unforgettable. (I will never do a blog series called Autistic in Times of War. Unless. Y’know. The world forces it upon me.)

This past week, I’ve been back on the horse, as it were, after a week of being very much on every single horse imaginable, in London. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of the place. My feelings for London, as a city, are summed up by this video:

Yeah.

I used to live in London. For two and a bit years, I lived in East London, while I was (supposed to be) studying at UCL. I was doing my MA in Comparative Literature, whilst trying not to die and taking so much medication that I was practically asleep 24/7. Oh, I was also trying to write and perform comedy badly. It didn’t work. From February 2014, my studies were interrupted while I tried to figure out how to survive. In the end, I more than survived, but it took me two years.

I first lived in Hackney, in a small room in a flat up near the river Lea. It was quiet enough, apart from the fact that the family I lived with had a 1-year old baby. This baby was quite loud and, because its parents did not believe in vaccinating their child (autism had something to do with it), I caught every single bug in that household. And there were many.

When the family left to go on a several months-long holiday, I was still there, not well in the slightest. That’s where I met Tiger, you remember him. Anyway.

Hackney was relatively quiet. It was weird being in London on benzos. I had been to London many times when I lived in Brighton, in 2010-11. I went up to do comedy and see friends I’d made at Sussex. I would always be overwhelmed by the city – sometimes in good ways, sometimes bad. The noise and the sheer number of people knocked me out. I was always in someone else’s personal space, always feeling too much. I thought it would knock the awkwardness right out of me. It never did, obviously. After I moved back, the intensity of being in a different country remained, so did the sensory overload. But I was slower and I couldn’t get any part of my life to function. Of course not, I was completely disabled by the medications I was taken. Any executive function went out the window with the amount of drugs I was on.

I started accepting that I was autistic in 2013, when my brain started fraying again and I thought that I just needed to get more medication in my system. I told my GP, in Hackney, that I was actually diagnosed autistic, which is when I was registered autistic in the UK as well. Not that it helped. I still had to go on the interruption. Nothing I could meaningfully do would help me get back to functioning again in the way that I wanted. My brain was functioning at half-speed. I sometimes get hit by odd, unconnected memories from that time. I can hardly recognise them, if they’re even real. Much of those three years are gone to me.

I moved to Plaistow, East London, in mid-2014. I needed an extra year of recovery time. It was frustrating. There was no view on getting any means of recovery, since the high place on the waiting list for specialist psychiatric support I’d had in Hackney, I lost when moving to Tower Hamlets. Because of course I did. I spent a calendar year trying to write, read and prepare to go back to university. I couldn’t really do any of those things. My medication wouldn’t let me. I was exhausted and hungry all the time.

The city was painted in a different colour when I lived in Plaistow. I remember small parts of the Spring of 2014. There was a lot of green space in Hackney. There was very little of that in Plaistow. I loved the area, but it wasn’t good for the people who lived there. I lived in a house share with people from across the world, working menial jobs in London. Life was lonely, especially since I gave up comedy too, in mid-2014. Stand-up was killing me, though not the job itself, more the sensation of never being able to do it like I could, when I was at my best, when I lived in Brighton. I felt I had comprehensively failed. After booking a gig with The Comedian’s Bookshelf at the Barbican just when dinner would be served. I could not continue. I lived under a cloud, trying to write but never managing. My life was empty now. I mostly ate and waited for the weekends I could go to Leeds and be with Harry. I spent a year slowly withdrawing from clonazepam with the help of a private therapist.

I hadn’t actually stayed over in London since 1st October 2015, when I moved out to Watford to live with Harry, where they started their first out-of-uni job. By that time, I’d been off benzos for a few weeks and started doing comedy again. I was coming out of my shell a little. I’d also become more immediately sensitive to the sensory world around me. Plaistow was loud. There were sirens every couple of minutes, even in the middle of the night. It was a poor area, so obviously overpoliced. Harry, the few times they stayed over, could never manage more than a few hours sleep. The smells from Queen’s Market were wonderful. The people were too. Far kinder and more considerate than in the pricier parts of London where I would do tutoring work. Still, there were often hundreds of people crowding around Upton Park tube station in the mornings. I’m not surprised it was there where someone deliberately infected an elderly woman with Covid in early 2021. So many people are squished together in one of the few places to live on a minimum income within the M25.

Since coming to terms with having asthma again (for a different blog, called Confessions of a Moron), I do have to be honest about being sensitive to air quality. It was not good there. It’s downriver from the city centre, not far from the docklands. On hot days, it was practically unbreathable. The low amount of tree cover only made things worse. On cold days, the ice would be brownish grey with pollution. Or maybe that was just my meds-addled brain making connections that weren’t there.

When I moved to Watford (still within the M25 but quieter) I could start to get a grip on my sleep without benzos or constant noise pollution. We moved to Oxford in June 2016.

The only other time I’ve been in London overnight was after Pride 2019. I’d forgotten my meds so I didn’t sleep a single second and walked out of the person’s flat where we’d been staying, forgetting my glasses, bag and dignity. Suffice it to say, dear reader, without one’s beauty sleep, one gets was quite insane.

2023!

So on Monday the 2nd, I left for London after only having been home with my partner for 2 days. I was nervous, clearly. The night before I’d been biting my nails all night so all my cuticles looked ravaged. Didn’t sleep great either. I got to my hotel, called Snoozebox (not Sweatbox, as I mistakenly called it numerous times. That’s another kind of place entirely). Each room is actually a haulage container, raised like flats, mostly to facilitate visitors to Abba Voyage, where you can pay £75 to watch holograms of Abba perform. I had dinner with Harry, who lives in London now, and I got in around 23:00.

I didn’t sleep great at all. Maybe about 3 hours? I mostly played Persona 5 the rest of the night. So much for writing my books during the stay. OH WELL.

By now I was developing a bad cold, with raspy unpleasant coughs. I made my way to Bow Road in the morning. It was pretty freezing and I felt quite spaced out. I hadn’t been to that part of London since early 2014, when I was gigging at the Bow Bells.

Phoenix College

I was at Phoenix College for two days, first on the Tuesday for an introductory staff training, then I was there from 8 to 5 on Wednesday, to observe the staff and students interacting.

The first day I was running on pure adrenaline. I was nervous, way too early and, when I was allowed to talk to the staff, absolutely brilliant. It’s Doctor Theatre; even if I’m sick as a dog, I’m still able to do excellent work when I have to. The staff was lovely. It took them a while to feel at ease, but when they did, it was so much fun. All I had energy for was to grab food at Tesco and head back to the hotel. I crashed hard afterwards.

I didn’t quite sleep, but was curled up in bed for a few hours, at that well-known middle point between sleep, wakefulness and evaporating into a cloud of sweat. I realised after an hour that I was actually too hot and needed to not wear pyjamas. That helped a lot.

Afterwards, me and my cold-raddled brain went to Stratford Westfield. What a strange place to go if you need toothpaste and flu-medicine. It was packed to the rafters, it smelled weird and it was very noisy. Luckily I’ve started using ear defenders over wireless earbuds so I can listen to podcasts and still be kept safe from noise. I had some dinner and crashed like a brick. With interruptions, I probably slept a good 9 hours, even though I woke up at about 6.

The second day was even better. I was super early again, but for a purpose: I was able to see the process of the students coming in and how the staff interacted with them. I will leave all my notes for the 5-6 A4s I need to hand in soon (also because LITERALLY GDPR and safeguarding) but let it be said that I massively enjoyed my time there and I will hopefully be back soon.

The day after was a day off, with another reasonable night’s sleep. All I needed to do was get all my stuff to the Novotel Hammersmith where I’d be staying Thursday to Friday. Naturally, I had too much stuff with me, including many books I knew I wouldn’t even be opening.

After dropping off my stuff at the hotel (awkwardly managing to leave my luggage at the luggage desk and not knowing how to behave), I had breakfast at Whetherspoons and got the tube into town. Of course, knowing I didn’t have the spoons to read, I got books from my favourite bookshop in the world Gay’s The Word who actually posted Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us to me a few days afterwards. Why? Because they’re GREAT.

I had lunch at the Bloomsbury Café, where I spent many awkward afternoons 2013-2016, often just as something to do. This time I had a phone call with one of my mentees, which was an excellent use of my time.

I went into Soho, then reapplied to the British Library. I still had my old photo-membership card from 2014. I looked like death, because I was dying. My new card looks way swankier, because I’m actually well. My intention had been to read there for a while before meeting friends for dinner at Holborn, but due to the train strikes (also the reason I couldn’t have gone back to Bath in between the two jobs. I’m no strike breaker, either) they closed early.

LAMDA

Another terrible night’s sleep. Neither my partner and I could sleep, missing each other. We spoke over the phone at 1 AM. Neither of got to sleep before 2. Not long now, though.

I spoke to my mentee over the phone while I made my way from the hotel to LAMDA. It was weird having been in a proper hotel on business, for the first time. It’s a liminal space, created to be passed through, never as a destination in itself. I don’t think I took the time to enjoy it, though. I’ll do my best next time.

I got in to LAMDA. What happened there is meant for them. But I did even better than I could have imagined, especially after another bad night’s sleep. I was funnier than I expected. I was able to freely discuss many things I’ve written about on here, including the Autistic Coding on Stage series. It was a black-box theatre and it felt wonderful to finally feel powerful in a space like that. I will be in London again later this month, I’ve been invited to speak for the Society for Theatre Research, here:

Theatre on the Spectrum: performance training and the neurodiverse – Society for Theatre Research (str.org.uk)

Yes, I’ve let them know about the title.

Home was via the National Express, then another bus from Bristol to Bath. I ran to my partner. He’d missed the heck out of me, same here of course. Getting home was wonderful, too. I immediately slept 12 hours.

Links!

They’re about ABA today!

Here’s a link to a petition on ending ABA, specifically in the Republic of Ireland, but I’ve signed. I have autistic Irish friends. In the UK, PBS is more the issue (nothing’s more British than doing conversion therapy but making it really about guilt and shame and repression), but they are made for the same purpose, by the same dude, to get the same result. We know this. Please sign the petition, especially since this year’s ABA conference will be held in Ireland.

Abolish conversion Practices on Neurodivergent People | Uplift

This video by Nathan Selove describes ABA. In America, where ABA is still the norm, the situation is so serious that autistic people may not be allowed to come out at all.

Lastly, if you are on social media, please let me know if you’ve also been advertised to with this particular advert? I’d love to know from multiple people. The algorithm knows that we’re autistic. That’s why we’re being advertised to.

It’s been nearly a year since I first notified this company about these advertisements. Their product is not created by or for autistic people, let alone for our benefit. It is marketed to us. The “free” part is only valid if the course (on PBS) is completed. Please send me evidence that you have also encountered these ads. UK only I’m afraid, for obvious reasons.