How to Be Autistic by Charlotte Amelia Poe

Author:Charlotte Amelia Poe [Charlotte Amelia Poe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912408337
Publisher: Myriad Editions
Published: 2019-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

Dad doesn’t get it

2005

One of the things my psychiatrist was supposed to set up while I was on study leave was that I wouldn’t have to take my GCSEs due to some loophole he’d found which would allow the government to give me marks based on my predicted grades. This would have meant receiving the A’s I had been predicted back before everything started going quite so pear-shaped. Unfortunately, this was a very old loophole and we didn’t realise it no longer applied until the exams had already started and I’d missed some.

The decision was then whether to sit any exams at all. I chose to take the bare minimum to get into college, and it turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

My mum arranged that I would be put in a separate room for each of my exams, and that I could leave as soon as I was done. She would sit outside the room and read a book. It sounds ridiculously overblown, but there was no other way around it.

My dad drove us to the school, and as I vomited in the back seat on the way there, with my mum comforting me, I wondered if he understood the cost of it.

My dad is older than my mum by a few years and wasn’t around much when I was a child, through no fault of his own, but because he was working two jobs, as a musician and running an antiques shop. It meant he was always busy, and my mum raised us largely by herself. My dad never saw the worst of it, and never believed that there was anything wrong with me. If you’d asked him, he would have scoffed and said I was fine. Maybe it’s a generational thing or maybe he was in denial, I don’t know. Whatever it was, my mum later told me that it was during that car ride to school that it sank in for him that there was something wrong with me.

I knew I would fail the maths and science exams immediately upon opening the papers—not for lack of trying, but because I hadn’t been able to learn. The last two vital years had been ones of survival, and I had clashed terribly with both teachers, falling further and further behind my peers until that crucial moment when I’d seen the first questions and known there was no way I could pass. I’d missed my English literature exam, but I sped through the English, media studies and history exams with ease. Those were the only exams I took.

On results day, I couldn’t face going to the school to find out what I’d got. My mum had to go, and my friend came round afterwards. I was in bed, feeling sick (like, wow, something new and different for me there!). I got an A in English, media studies and history. I got a C in art. The rest I failed abysmally.

I was lucky that the

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