* Donna Williams
I was born in the rock and roll years of the 1960's , in the inner city of urban Australia in the days when 'autism' was unheard of even though the condition had always existed.
I grew up in a family with more challenges than my own and spent most of my first 24 years on fairly continuous antibiotics with undiagnosed food intolerances, food allergies, blood sugar problems, nutrient deficiencies and two primary immune deficiencies. In a nutshell, I was highly erratic, distracted, impulsive, often giggly and smiley, generally in a drugged state and was sick most of my early life. This meant I was unable to answer a direct question, to stay sitting in a seat, to hand in any work or acknowledge what I did or didn't understand.
Assessed as psychotic in infancy, I was later labelled emotionally disturbed and tested for deafness a number of times all the way into late childhood and although the word autism came up in late childhood in the 1970s it wasn't until the 1990's, in my 20s that I was formally diagnosed with autism.
I lived in an emotional and perceptual chaos which taught me surrealism and the relativity of the word 'normal' for there are many different versions of 'normality'. I was nine before I could fluently understand with meaning three sentences in a row, was largely meaning deaf and meaning blind as well as face-blind but learned to map pattern and feel shifts and changes with remarkable ability in spite of pretty much no ability to interpret.
I had no idea why anyone did anything but I knew if someone was 'real', when a fight was coming, whether others were trying to invade 'my world'. My senses and perception were chaotic, fragmented and constantly shifting and fluctuating and the ability to understand things with meaning was so delayed I looked like I wasn't 'on line' but also like someone very behaviourally and emotionally disturbed.
I stored huge strings of sound patterns and sang and chattered to myself most of the time, often in stored lines, jingles and adverts. In other words, my condition helped me develop, instead, a highly refined capacity to sense pattern shifts, a great natural capacity for mimicry, parody and characterisations and a seemingly bottomless memory for stored strings of information even though I have the short term memory of a goldfish and very tumbled receptive information processing.
I loved life and I loved the sensory world but my world was not that of a visual thinker. As someone with fragmented vision and meaning blindness, I learn kinaesthetically; through direct physical experience and hands-on doing. I learn through the repetition of patterns, not mentally, but experientially.
I don't think in pictures. I'm a kinaesthetic thinker, a systems thinker, a musical thinker. Mine is a physical and sensory world of pattern, theme and feel. My mind is like a mosaic, my conscious thoughts intangible until I experience them after they've been expressed- usually through arts.
My reflection was my best friend and family and until adulthood I inhabited my body along with a number of other 'characters', a male persona who embodied logic and detachment and resembled a walking encyclopaedia, called Willie, and a female one who embodied stored characterisations and the exuberance of mania, called Carol, who both helped me survive. I associated Donna with the sensory-oriented, more feral self, the feeling self and very much a ‘cat-person’ interacting and communicating indirectly. Today there is generally ‘one’ relatively cohesive Donna.
I was fascinated by my playground that was the wilderness of the streets in what was a feral childhood with all its fortune and its horror. When I was nine I was put on zinc, vitamin C and multi-vitamins and I realized meaning existed, not just pattern. At fifteen my estranged and equally feral family could no longer cope and I had to fend for myself in a world vulnerable to the wants and prejudices of strangers walking a tightrope of homelessness.
After a return to education in adulthood, I had the fortune that my health finally collapsed completely at the age of 24. It was only then that this rather 'crazy girl' I was finally diagnosed with severe digestive and immune system disorders, the beginning of over a decade of journeying into treatment. It was a year later, after intervention by medically qualified practitioners in nutritional medicine that I began to hold conscious awareness as a relatively cohesive self and could work towards guiding my own life instead of merely surviving moment to moment.
In the chaos and disorientation of that time I wrote my autobiography, Nobody Nowhere in a desperate last attempt to understand where I'd been and ask if there might be some hope beyond what I'd struggled to construct as 'life'. The book, the first of nine books I've had published, got left behind in the UK at the time and accidentally became an international bestseller, read by millions of people the world over, and the first mainstream publication of an autobiography of someone who came to be diagnosed 'autistic'. I have since moved into writing films and completely several screenplays as well as my first fiction novel.
I baby-sit and manage mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders which contribute to my compassion for others, my understanding of condition versus culture and ironically helps me connect with others so much more based on our individuality and personhood. I do most of that connecting through art which is a huge part of who I am. I'm wildly prolific as a writer, artist, sculptor, singer-songwriter and screenwriter. In my spare time, I have, on and off, been a community volunteer, seeking to stay connected to the world around me in spite of a dance I have with social phobia.
I found a diamond of a person and he shone so bright I asked him to marry me. Chris adores me for whatever I am and however I change, when diet gets messed up or medication is taken late and in the stability in between. He is my closest friend and a warm, humble and remarkable human being.
I believe in diet, and that's not easy. It's a choice between a drugged state and being part of the world. I strive to discover life after gluten free, dairy free, sugar free, additive free, low salicylate, rotation diet… and if I can discover in there new elastic definitions and incarnations of 'ice-cream', 'cake', bread', 'custard', 'icing', then there is one more day I don't feel like crying. Besides, it has helped me turn life into a good experience which compensates for a lack of shop bought pizza.
As a tertiary qualified teacher, I became a consultant in the autism field since 1995 and have worked with hundred's of people on the autistic spectrum through schools, welfare and health services as well as directly with families and adults themselves. This taught me there is no one thing called an autism spectrum condition and that for some people it is legitimately a cultural issue but for others there are so many co-morbid health issues at work it would do them a great disservice to proclaim their autism was the sum total of their selfhood or merely the culture they should learn to embrace. In the real world, all the projections and theories only ever fit to a certain degree. The rest is theory and lives in the beliefs of outsiders.
I was an incredibly reluctant public speaker. I have no natural desire to gain attention, no emotional use for applause, no natural desire to be looked at and much prefer solitude and autonomy. I feel I'm a cat-person in what is often a dog-person world. At my first US talk (Connecticut) in the early 1990s I came out and sat and cried for the first five minutes. The audience was silent and patient and I was so moved they didn't try to control me or talk to me, they just let me be, they trusted. I honoured that respect and eventually got to my feet and read the pages I couldn't understand in this state of shutdown until the words began to have meaning. In between I looked up, cried again and continued. They taught me I could dare to be me before others no matter what. They gave me so much more than I could give. Now I just walk out and introduce myself and talk out loud allowing others to hear. I even challenge my audiences to question me and answer them without the middle man of typing and paper.