Differently Wired

James Christie

Description

Differently Wired is an illustrated collection of around sixty articles and blogs written by James Christie for the Huffington Post UK, the Glasgow West End Guide, Autism Eye magazine - and even the Sherlock Holmes Journal. They cover subjects as diverse as Einstein's brain, Scottish independence, American civil rights, libraries, adults with autism, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all with told with Christie's characteristic fluency and barbed wit and all offering the unique perspective of an autistic writer.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 08 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911105367
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

DIFFERENTLY WIRED
Articles by an autistic blogger
James Christie





First published in 2018 by
Chaplin Books
5 Carlton Way
Gosport PO12 1LN
www.chaplinbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2018 James Christie
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.
Cover photograph of the author by William Millar Kay. All other photographs were taken by the author, are in the public domain, or are by kind permission of Juliet Landau.




For my mother



Foreword
Allah does, indeed, weave the threads of men’s destinies into many strange tapestries. If such a destiny had been woven for me and I at first missed it, in retrospect it now looks like someone up there not only liked me but also took decisive action to ensure I was reunited with it.
In 1989, I was an itinerant fruit-picker living in a tent outside the town of Bowen, North Queensland, Australia. Still an undiagnosed Asperger and therefore not understanding the reasons I found settling into employment so difficult, I’d taken a working holiday to Oz, intending to write my way across the ‘Lucky Country’ and use the resulting articles to stumble into some sort of media-related career.
And after nearly ten months of strenuous labour, soul-searching and focused writing, my first feature articles (as I called them) were standing proud in serried rank shortly before being posted home.
I began to feel like I was meant to be an article writer of some sort.
But after I took the road back, including my first Greyhound trek across America, a Scottish magazine publisher ground my dreams to dust via a misapplied journalists’ training course that first raised my hopes, then shattered my ego and flung me back onto the street.
I faced the fact of my humiliation and set myself the seemingly impossible task of redemption: to be published on merit by a real publisher.
It took twenty-two years to achieve that redemption, but here’s the thing...
When I set out on that road across America in 2010 to meet Juliet Landau in Hollywood, there was no intent to write a book, no intent to write more than a few blogs about travel, autism and Buffy the Vampire Slayer .
But it was as if I’d been placed firmly back on a road, and as long as I followed that road without deviation , it seems I was set fair to become the person I always should have been: a published author ( Dear Miss Landau , Chaplin Books, 2012) and blogger (courtesy of my publisher’s introduction to the Huffington Post UK ).
Around sixty of those blogs for the Huffington Post and other internet news sites are reproduced here, and they cover subjects as diverse as Einstein’s brain, Scottish independence, American civil rights and adults with autism. They make up a rainbow’s glide of multifaceted hue and seem, to my biased eye, to sum up what happened after I alighted from my personal starship Enterprise back at Glasgow airport in April 2010.
But I also know that none of it would have been possible without my ‘dear Miss Landau’, and while it may seem like something of a geek’s metaphor to say that I did indeed steal the Enterprise for my Helen of Troy; she truly was the Spock to my Kirk and I could not have become what I am without her.
And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
(30 March 2018)



Huffington Post UK
Selected blogs 2012-2016
Drunk? Demonic? Deranged? Be a Writer!
A BBC news article has confirmed what so many might suspect: writers are nuts, or to put it more politely:
“creativity is part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible... Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found. They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.”
(Michelle Roberts, health editor, BBC News online)
Great.
I have published my first book. So apparently all I can look forward to is going crazy, having my mood go up and down like a yo-yo, becoming delusional, snorting cocaine and dying young’ish.
The older I get the more it seems that those who excel in certain areas seem to make up for it by throwing themselves straight down the plughole in certain others. Jimmy Savile’s once-fine legacy of fundraising for Stoke Mandeville and making children’s dreams come true now seems like a smokescreen erected by a dirty old man, behind which he preyed on the young and the vulnerable. Lance Armstrong, who fought back from cancer to win the Tour de France seven times, should have been an icon of inspiration to others, but has instead been exposed as a serial cheat and a bully. He has been charged by the United States Anti-Doping Agency with doping and trafficking of drugs, and is likely to be stripped of his Tour titles.
Nor are the feet of our revered leaders free from clay.
Back in 1996, Lisa Marshall of Glasgow Caledonian University proved that psychopaths and politicians had many similar character traits, and her report was received with no great surprise by Parliament. Lewis Moonie, then Labour MP for Kirkcaldy, wryly commented that, “nothing I have seen in the Commons contradicts these findings.”
So it seems fundraisers are fiends, sportsmen are stoned on success and steroids, our current frontbenchful of MPs could be swapped for the inmates of Carstairs State Hospital without there being any discernable difference in the way Britain is run and writers are bouncing around gaily with bipolar disorders.
But wait a minute, amidst all these torrents of eccentricity and madness lies the fact that I wrote a story, found my muse, virtually got a vampire for a flatmate (long story!), got that mythic connection with a character writers dream of (that was the vampire) and made friends with a film star into the bargain.
Why am I not in Carstairs State Hospital, tied to a bed and gibbering away happily? Why, even in the midst of a torrent of creativity flowing like a river in spate, was I completely free of anxiety, schizophrenia, depression or the desire for death? Why was my vampire flatmate more like a good companion than a demon bent on sin?
I’ve never written while drunk in my life, I’ve never taken drugs and I’m reasonably certain I’ve never killed myself. On the other hand, I once heard that after writing In Cold Blood , the writer Truman Capote became a recluse, turned up drunk at talk shows and died in a pool of his own vomit.
There is a fine line between creativity and obsession, between fantasy and delusion, but I seem to be able to walk the line and turn out the work without any ill effect.
Could this be because of the atypical wiring of my autistic brain?
I have a theory that autistic brains may be better able than those of neuro-typicals (the majority of the population) to handle the ups and downs of the creative impulse. One of autism’s few universal symptoms is a tendency to be artistic and creative. It is possible that the design of the autistic brain’s wiring makes it more able than the mind of a neuro-typical (NT) to accommodate that vital spark which drives the artist to perform.
I’ve no easy answer with which to finish this article. I sit down to write and stuff happens. Afterwards I put my feet up and enjoy the sunset. Around me, in the streets of the city, I hear the sound of breaking glass as tormented neuro-typical writers hurl themselves to their doom.
I cannot understand them and they cannot understand me.
(8 November 2012)
The Black Man, the Asperger, the NHS and its Bigots...
In case you think the atrocious treatment of learning-disabled patients at Winterbourne View care home was a one-off blip, or if you think that organisations today would never cover up Jimmy Savile’s alleged activities the way they did thirty or forty years ago...
In 2008, the ‘Race Equality Services Review’, an analysis by the Health Service Journal of a report about the experiences of black and ethnic minorities (BME) in the National Health Service (South East Coast region) concluded there was institutionalised racism within the NHS as a whole.
In 2009, after the deaths of six learning-disabled patients, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s report ‘Six lives: the provision of public services to people with learning disabilities’ said (among other things) that “fundamental principles were not being upheld... an underlying culture which values human rights was not in place.” Regarding complaint handling, the Ombudsman stated that the families “gave repeated examples of failures to understand their complaints... defensive explanations; a failure to address the heart of the complaint; and a reluctance to offer apologies. Our investigations generally confirmed this picture.” The Ombudsman finished by saying, “we are still left with an underlying concern that similar failures to those identified in the investigations will occur again.”
In a Facebook debate in July 2010, David Forster, a director of the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, wrote that they had employed “too many who are lazy, unproductive, obstinate, militant, aggres