It’s almost 5 years since was diagnosed with Asperger’s, aged 41. Since then I’ve been on one hell of a roller-coaster of a ride, and during that time I’ve discovered that all the weird difficult people in my life are in fact normal, and that I’m the weird difficult one. It’s certainly been one hell of a journey, as annoying people would say.

One thing that I’ve discovered about myself is that I really can’t communicate in real time. That’s where the majority of my problems stem from.

What I have learned is that I am OK at expressing myself in writing. That’s great, but you can’t go through your life asking people to wait whilst you write a letter to them, when you’re stood face to face with them.

But that did help me when I was sent to live with my uncle for a year, when my partner of the time, Maria, could no longer cope with me. And again when she moved back to her mum’s for a couple of weeks.

I was able to write down how I felt in letters to her. I’d write, read, and re-write and never gave her most of them. Eventually I’d come up with something that truly reflected what I wanted to say and give the letter to her. From that she was able to understand me, and things were resolved.

But relationships require real-time communication, and eventually ours broke down for the third and final time in 2018.

I wasn’t looking to meet someone following our separation, but someone found me pretty much straight away. But this only lasted for 6 months, and came to an end 6 weeks ago when I had a full on autistic meltdown.

So that’s autism 2 – relationships 0.

So I’ve decided to do what I’ve been meaning to do since getting my diagnosis, and I’ve started a blog.

The primary purpose of the blog is for me to try to understand myself. As I said, I learn a great deal from writing letters when things go wrong, so hopefully this will be just as therapeutic to me, now that I’ve no one to write letters to.

I’ll also post about normal day to day stuff that probably has little or nothing to do with my autism. I’m going to be frank and honest, with no topic off limits, so for that reason some names may be changed to protect the innocent.

Whether or not any of what I post will be of interest to anyone I know not. But over the past few years I’ve been into schools to give talks about autism to parents and teachers, and also to people in the youth organisation that I’m actively involved in, and people are always entertained. So hopefully some of what I write will be of interest.