Having a sibling on the autism spectrum

Oh they’re really confused because when I describe him they, they think I’m wrong, I’m being cruel speaking of him how I describe him. And I have to explain that whenever they see him or they’re invited into the house, they see him when he’s happy and friendly. They don’t see the stranger sides because it would be cruel to have them around. So they don’t really understand properly where I’m coming from. Occasionally, as I said, I’ve got a very close friend who knows everything. Occasionally he gets a snippet of my brother’s strangeness. Years and years ago it was cold one night and we went to sit one play swings in the village, and I went into my brother’s wardrobe and got my friend a jumper. He wore the jumper and came back, and my brother was furious and shouted at me that having done that very loud. I laughed and said if I had asked he would have no or something like that. And just occasionally they will get a peek at what I’m talking about that makes them realise that this is not quite normal.

My close friends I sometimes talk to it about, but I don’t, like if it, I don’t think I’ve ever turned round gone, “Oh yeah, by the way, I have three relatives that are autistic.” If it just like comes up in a casual way. Like, it’s only with my close friends. I won’t, I don’t talk about it with people I just meet or anything. But I mean they’re just sort of like, they’re on the same standing as me they don’t think it, like they don’t look at me and go, “Oh your family has issues,” or anything. They, I mean like they’ll meet my mum and they’ll meet my brothers and they’ll go, ‘actually yeah they’re pretty cool’. So it’s nice, I mean, because I’d hate to be associated with people that had a lot of prejudice and think it was a bad thing to be on the spectrum in any way, shape or form.

 Yeah, my friends have actually been incredibly supportive around it. I mean when I was younger I didn’t go blabbing it about and stuff. I didn’t like... there was certain people, they wouldn’t make comments deliberately about him, but I didn’t like it when people made jokes about autistic people as such when I was younger. That used to make me quite angry, and had quite a few scuffles as a result of it and things, but no one would be directly like horrible about it, and I was never really embarrassed to talk about it. It’s not like one of those situations where you don’t want anyone to know. And yes, no one really thought anything different of it. My friends they’ve been amazing, the ones who live round here. And they love him. He gets on so well with them, and he still even Facebooks with some of them and exchange computer games with them and stuff, so my friends have, yeah they’ve been great with him and stuff. And I’m still very open about talking about it. It’s nothing I’d shy away from talking about at all. Something I’m quite proud of having a brother and I’m quite happy that I’ve looked after him and things. Very open about it I’d say.

Well as I said when I was younger, I obviously couldn’t have friends around and because I didn’t really have, because obviously I didn’t have my brother to grow up with, my social skills are terrible really [laughs]. You know, really bad when I was younger. And I was bullied a lot like all the way through school. And it still hasn’t really stopped but I just don’t care anymore. And it’s just sort of a knock on effect, that caused that and then this caused… and it just escalated. So yes, for all of my primary school I was bullied because I was, just like I was like that weird kid that no one really, like no one got to hang around with, so no one really got to know. Because I’m, also because like what was going on at home, I was always like slightly more emotional. So I mean, and I was, you know, how you get these kids that just cry over everything. I was one of those anyway so … And at about year two I started getting bullied, like it was just sort of like typical picking on just a random kid and then it just slowly progressed until it peaked in about... Actually no, it didn’t peak, it sort of went up, down a bit, and then up again. But in like year four it got really bad and it didn’t help that I got my hair cut like into, you know, a stupid bowl cut thing and I looked like mushroom [laughed]. Obviously that made, because my hair it was went [explosive sound] and I just got picked on for that, and like everything got like so much worse. And then it sort of went down again and then it picked up again. Then my hair started to frizz as well. It wasn’t just big it was frizzy as well, and I got called Hagrid. I still cannot tolerate that, I mean I still snap at people calling me that, because it had that much of an impact. And some of the stuff that happened to me in my primary school was horrible. Like they put daddy long legs in my lunch box. I don’t even understand that. I don’t even know how they caught them to be honest but, and the school didn’t really care.