Sex, Drugs and Asperger's Syndrome (ASD) by Luke Jackson

Author:Luke Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784501396
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2016-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

5

Going Out and Staying In

New places and new faces

Going out into town for the first time was probably one of the headiest experiences of my teenage life. I was going out to socialise and to drink and dance. I felt like a night of respite from the autism spectrum. One of my teachers once told me in school that when it came to his classes, I should ‘leave my autism at the door’. I felt as if this was the closest I was ever going to get. I was out with my older brother and it started well. We went to some awful place, with whatever chart music was sullying the speakers at the time blasting out at plane-engine volume, and semi-sozzled men and women littering the place like human confetti.

I stuck out like the sorest of sore thumbs. One thing I’ve gathered (and become more comfortable with in later life) is that whenever I try to dress normally, I still look somehow obtrusive. I went out in a shirt, tie, trousers and shoes. Looking back, the shirt was purple with velvet lining down the sides. The tie was white, with spider webs drawn on it, because, well, spider webs are cool. My trousers were held up with an ace of spades belt buckle, and the shoes, I can’t even remember but I’m pretty sure they were drawn on too. One of the most beautiful aspects of autism, however, is that often people on the spectrum hyper-focus on whatever it is they are doing. If I am talking to someone or dancing, I have zero attention left to focus on people staring – I simply don’t notice.

The night started, and ended, innocently enough. It was on the way home that things got ‘interesting’. Both my brother and I ended up being attacked, and I spent the night in A&E having some particularly tricky stitches on both the inside and outside of my lip, after receiving a nasty cut on my head and a free lip piercing from some charmer with a sovereign ring on and a penchant for building materials (at least judging by the half-brick that was later introduced to the side of my head at painful velocity). I found out a lot of things that night, not least that lacerations on the lip bleed a lot more than you’d think, and hurt a lot less. (Although, since having my lips pierced professionally, I’ve found out that if the above situation happens when sober, the reverse is actually true.)

My first night out was pretty disastrous – there wasn’t much that could go wrong that didn’t. I didn’t get my drink spiked, but I think that was mainly a side-effect of growing up in a big family – if you put something consumable down then you could bet if you took your eye off it for a second it would be good and consumed. In summary, I went out to an awful club, full of questionable people, and then got attacked on the way home…and I was hooked.

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