The Autistic Soul

A Memoir by Claire P. Berrigan

 Before I get into my memoir, I want to mention someone very special in my life who has been around since 2013. My step-dad, Ronan. I am so happy to call him my step-dad. He’s really wonderful and so genuine and also very calm. He’s like the calm that grounds you before the storm of life takes off. I just wish he was here long ago, but he’s here now and its really wonderful. I don’t know what my mam and I would do without him. He arrived at a very tumultuous time in our lives when everything was falling apart. I’m mentioning him now because I don’t want you to mix him up with my mam’s ex, Con (not his real name) who I will talk about later. Ronan is the polar opposite of Con. He is kind, caring and is not remotely violent unlike Con was.

My name is Claire P. Berrigan. The P is short for Patricia, my middle name which was given to me by my parents in memory of my dear uncle Leo’s deceased partner Patrick. Patrick passed away the year of my birth in France where my uncle still lives.

I was born on the 8^th of June 1991. I am autistic. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in November 2014 when I was 23 years old after a tumultuous two years in college. I am an only child, and my condition wasn’t obvious to my mam, dad or my mam’s ex who moved out of my mam’s house in 2006 when I was in my early teens. I imagine my condition wasn’t obvious to any of my family because I didn’t have an older or younger sibling to compare me to as I grew up. I think if you were to look at me as a child in current years you would have been able to tell, especially the major clue: I never learned how to crawl, I used to just “bum-it” and shuffle across the floor then I went to wobbling, standing and walking.

I attended St Brigid’s Girls National School in Dublin when I was 4 years old. This was where the second clue lay. I had a developmental delay which my parents were told was actually a “low intellect” in my brain by a visiting psychologist to the school. The term “developmental delay” wasn’t coined yet or else it was only used to describe autism in boys (because autism wasn’t believed to be a female condition and was thought to just affect males).

At this time, most people with autism were put in insane asylums and kept there as they were seen as subhuman. So, in many ways, I am very lucky that this didn’t happen to me. This developmental delay led me to being held back a year in Junior infants until the following year. This hit me hard because I had made some great friends in the first time around and I became very withdrawn and lost all my confidence as I stopped being able to make connections.

Autism affects your social and communication skills so with my loss in confidence I stopped being able to talk in school. I was very shy. Shyness is actually a sign of autism in girls. Most shy girls are probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, although probably not all. I made a few friends in school, but I was also bullied. This was more than likely because my bullies noticed my disability but just saw me as “different.”

Overall, my time in primary school was a good one. The only thing that made it harder was that my mam and my dad separated when I was two and even though this was before I entered the school system it still had a major effect on me. I was going from home to home every week. One week I was with my mam and the other I was with my dad. I loved being with both of my parents and in many ways, but I was constantly exhausted. As I had a good time in both houses with my mam except when my mam’s ex, Con (not his name), who hit me occasionally. He never liked me speaking up for myself and saw my budding confidence as cheekiness and so hit it out of me. My mam tried to stop him; I don’t know why she waited until I was in my teens to leave.

  I had a connection with a girl in my teens and early twenties who had a similar personality to my mam’s ex, Con (not his real name). I can understand that she saw the good in him and her attraction to him outshone that of common sense, like what happens to everyone when we fall in love. It’s easy to overlook the bad and see only the person’s inner light. Of course the girl I mentioned above never hit me, but she had a very strong personality and I felt safe around her. This safety was later reduced to terror in later years as she got revenge on me because of a couple of misunderstandings that were caused by my innocent manner and many social errors I made from my poor of social skills from my still undiagnosed autism and a mental health condition I was diagnosed with later.

I made lots of friends in secondary school, many of whom I lost contact with as I developed a mental illness when I went into 5^th year and stopped being able to talk because I was so sick with depression, anxiety and a psychotic condition which made networking close to impossible. This was unfortunate because I really came out of my shell in Transition Year, and I actually fell in love with a girl that year but I didn’t understand my emotions. I was convinced that we could be the best of friends. I just loved hugging her. I’d squeeze her so tight, and I just fell madly.

The summer after 4^th year, I got a call in August from one of the most popular girls in school wondering why I wasn’t at my crushes birthday, and I was bewildered because I hadn’t been told and I didn’t know where she and her twin lived. The popular girl said that one of my two best friends was supposed to tell me. I didn’t know what to think but I just figured she had forgotten.

Anyway, due to the anxiety that comes with my autism I lost all my confidence and stopped being able to talk to my crush when we went back to school (I didn’t have Facebook so couldn’t reach out to her). I was so embarrassed. I eventually plucked up the courage to give her a hug in the corridor, but she ducked away from me. I was devastated. I felt so hated and then I made other social errors where I copied many tv shows and films that I saw with my dad that had bad language and I used this language to talk to people. I reverted to not being able to speak properly so copied what I knew because I had no confidence at all.

I left school completely depleted of any energy whatsoever and stopped trying to reach out to my friends because I felt so hated and then my mental illness got worse over time when I went to college. I was a lost soul trying to make sense of everything.  

Around the time I left school I began to start looking at different things ranging from conspiracy theories, philosophy and psychology. I wanted to study psychology in university however that didn’t happen due to unforeseen circumstances in my personal life. I don’t want to divulge this because I want to protect a very close family member who became volatile due to undiagnosed mental illness after going a lifetime of no treatment until relatively recently. They have my sympathy as I also have a mental illness and was also volatile in my teenage years with one of my best friends three times over five years in school. My behaviour was influenced by a combination of anxiety, psychological dissociation and copying what I grew up with. It’s unfortunate that these things happen. A sad affair indeed.

I was bullied very badly between September 2011 and May 2014 by a lot of people. I wasn’t ready for college when I went. My mam was worried about me regressing back into a depression like the one I experienced in school, and I was in a total daze going in. I tried a few courses and eventually settled on the Performing Arts in Colaiste Dhulaigh College of Further Education because my school crush was there, and I thought we could reconnect and be friends again. Alas it wasn’t to be. She bullied me and accused me of being homophobic due to a letter I sent her after seeing her Facebook post saying something along the lines that homophobes are horrible people. My crush is a member of the lgbt (I must be too although I don’t really care for labels that much, we’re just human at the end of the day).

While experiencing a severe bout of Psychosis, I sent her a letter after this or rather a handmade birthday card with a cake being cut into a slice which probably looked threatening. In this card was a letter saying how being a member of the lgbt is okay and that God loves her (which I believe he, she or it does) and then I included two near death experiences of one gay man and one lesbian going to heaven and speaking with Jesus. I really shouldn’t have sent this, but I was very naïve and still am in some ways. I just wanted her to know that she was loved.

I can understand her reaction because I had sent her a stream of messages apologising for apologising. I was apologising for each of my previous apologies, and I felt like they weren’t coming out right. I became frantic and really worried about losing her. I lost her anyway, in fact I already had and many years ago at that. I just pined for something I believed could be re-establisehd, a connection that felt spiritual in a way to me. Like a Twin Flame connection but maybe not that. Or maybe we are twin flames and we are separated for eternity. Who knows!!? But then, twin flames probably don’t exist. Its new age stuff that I got muddled within my psychotic episode back then.

Later that year, my bully forwarded my messages after I confronted her about the homophobic rumour’s. For reasons I don’t really understand, I confronted her in-front of a room full of people. She probably felt embarrassed and retaliated by her lies being found out and so she forwarded my messages and they went everywhere because they went to people I went to school with as well as everyone from college. Many of them turned on me but others called her out and told my bullies to leave me alone.

I went back to college in a daze in September 2013 and the bullying continued by a handful of pathetic people who believed the rumours and chose to make my life hell.

The behaviour of my peers who took part in bullying me didn’t have a major effect on me because I didn’t really know them. They were basically a thorn in my side that I couldn’t wait to be rid of.

The reason I stayed? I was afraid to leave. I was afraid of being hit by one of my close family members who had been hitting me prior to my first year of arts school in 2011 and had been yelling at me to think. This person had also been shoving my face down in the Central Applications Office book with the list of universities and the undergraduate courses in the country. This person had also been rapping me on the head and yelling at me to think. I beg your pardon, but how is anyone supposed to think with that type of physical abuse going on? I’ll tell you who, no one. Not a single living soul could. But anyway, its forgiven and forgiven a thousand times over whenever the post traumatic stress rears its ugly head.

They did the same thing when I was looking at the computer in the middle room when I was having some down time. It hurt so bad that I yelled at them to stop except that Con was in the house on the day and heard me yell. He came in and whacked me on the back of my head and leaned in really close to me and murmured menacingly at me that “children should be seen, not heard.” I went into a complete downward spiral in FETAC Level 5 while the person I’m protecting who abused me prior to the non-relative came in a whacked me kept on going on about how I could be a star. I didn’t want to be a star, I’m very shy still and don’t like the idea of being on stage, I never did even though I went to a dance school with my childhood friend, Sarah who I lost contact with tragically after her mam developed Bipolar Disorder and my mam wouldn’t let me visit them for reasons I still can’t fathom.

All of this stayed with me right up to this moment in the Performing Arts Higher National Diploma Year 2. I had been self-harming in FETAC, trying to feel because the physical abuse made me numb to my emotions, I was like the walking dead and put on a happy face in college. It had started not to bother me anymore because I used the following module as a form of therapy to deal with the loneliness and fear I was feeling.  This module that I chose the year before was playwriting. I wrote a play called A.L.I.A.S which I have recently submitted to Fishamble Theatre, The New Play Company in Dublin. It is about loneliness being a state of mind and an illusion. This concept is not mine, however. It was inspired by the three great philosophers / psychologists Echarte Tolle, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud which I was reading prior to the course. I chose to direct my play in early May 2014 and held auditions for my play. I found it very hard to choose who to take on in my work but chose three of the many promising FETAC (now QQI Level 5) Theatre Studies students: Monica, Soroush and Mark. They were great to work with. I don’t know where they are in the world of theatre, but whatever they are doing, I’m sure they are fantastic actors.

 I had a massive anxiety attack in April 2014 when I was 22 years old that became so severe, it felt like a heart attack when I was in bed. I believe I had an out of body experience because I was suddenly in my hall, and I could see through my arms and hands onto my hall floor. I saw another ghostly figure with long knee length black hair in a white nightdress drift out of my bedroom door and into my mam’s room. I don’t know what it was. Was it a ghost? A specter? Or a jinn / demon that I imagined had been knocking on my attic floor for months since I started looking at videos of conspiracy theories on satanism in Hollywood. Ridiculous things to be looking at because many Hollywood stars are very spiritual people and believe in Jesus Christ. They’ve even mentioned Him in their songs. Next of all I was back in bed with my mam leaning over me shaking me and giving me the breath of life.

I went back to college feeling like I was a speck of dust in this cosmos. Something small in something much bigger than myself. Far vaster than we can ever imagine. I held in my chest a ball of energy filled with hope, and forgiveness and a total collapse in any sense of self. The day after college ended, I can remember sitting on my couch crying my eyes out and calling out to the universe that I don’t know who I am. I had totally detached from myself, and I didn’t like it. I realise now I had begun a very long, arduous journey of “Ego Death” which is defined as a complete loss of subjective self-identity. This was something I had pined for, for about seven years and had experienced a number of times during my time of being bullied. I was meditating the whole time working on dismantling my ego so I could see the bigger picture of all that is. I found myself in college, but I wanted something more surreal, and I got it. When I did, I was terrified and yet totally connected to the soul consciousness that we are all connected to. My psyche had transformed. I no longer felt like a weirdo completely devoid of purpose. I have a purpose and it is to just, simply be. To learn to be content in not belonging anywhere. To be at one with my authentic self. To not worry about what people think of me while respecting the boundaries of my loved ones. To love unconditionally those who have hurt me and see them as 100% human. To enjoy their flaws and still see them as authentic, just like me.

I finally understand that the people who have hurt me did so because they too were hurting. They were wounded. I may not have been the one to inflict all their wounds, however, I have compassion for the vengeful because I know they were wounded at the time and may have been trying to put themselves first in the only way they knew how, including my crush. Like me, they were probably mirroring what they had witnessed, whether it was a vengeful character on movie and tv screens or a vengeful or abusive person they grew up around. It’s like young offenders. Most are just lost and grew up in a location that has a lot of crime. They are not bad people. They just made poor choice’s, and you know what, that’s okay because they can learn from their mistakes. Many of the worlds inspirational people have come from broken backgrounds and feel broken. But over time we all become our true selves. It takes some of us longer. I’m still growing and learning. Often I still experience sorrow disguised as anger towards those people and I understand that I need self-compassion in those moments.

I’m not my true self yet but I’m aware of her. I know she exists. She is my inner child. The little girl I must console when I feel sad or low in myself. But my true self is strong. She is a fighter. My inner child is my true love, and your inner child should be your true love and may well be your last love. He or she or they, depending on your pronoun preference is inside you waiting for you to take the plunge and put them first. Give them the love you give to everyone else. Self-talk is everything. Just like me, you don’t have to be worried about being loved because your inner child loves you more than anyone else except for Source. Whether you believe that is Jesus Christ, Allah, Buddha, Krishna or any other God. It loves you.

I have learned what I needed to learn in this life. I am ready to go home now. I am ready to re-submerge with the cosmos when I die, whenever that may be. If human cloning were available to come back from where I am today, I would decline the offer as I am satisfied with life. I will die happy the day I go and would be very upset if I were to be brought back without my consent. Even back in 2014 I would say no to an offer of being cloned. The only way it could happen is if someone got a hold of my DNA and gave it to a human cloning company without my prior consent. This act, I view as completely immoral and the gravest sin any of my loved ones could ever commit. But it would be forgivable because I know that their missing me would be what would lead to the act, particularly if it were one of my parents who I love very much and wouldn’t want to see sad. But if they love me, they will let me go and be at peace at long last.

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Many thanks

Claire x