I was weird and didn't fit with other kids from as early as I can remember. I also have an IQ of 172 and an eidetic memory which sort of makes me stand out from others. My school life was torturous and I quit that as soon as I was legally old enough that my father couldn't refuse. He certainly objected but he had no legal right to compel me. He was a lawyer by the way.
Once I left school I learnt a trade and I was very successful in that. The people that trained me also taught me social skills that I never learnt as a kid and I became very successful socially as well. But I was always different, I'm someone that actually prefers being alone, I don't get lonely, I get the opposite, I get all peopled out and need a break from them from time to time.
I didn't find out anything about autism until I was in my late 40s but I learnt about my own needs well enough that I limited my social activities to those that I wanted and avoided all others. I even used to tell people during job interviews "I'm here to work, not to party. I'm not interested in any social club, Christmas party or Melbourne Cup Day barbecue. I'm not very social and prefer to be left alone to work.".
By the time I was 30 I was earning seriously good money and taking on management roles as well, and my social life took off big time. I wish I knew about autism back then. All the friends I had grown up with had settled down to have families but I was a party boy, out and about 7 nights a week and spending all the money I earned quite freely. I was having a lot of fun, the world was my oyster.
Then in my late 30s I started burning out. I knew nothing about burnout and kept pushing myself to keep performing as well as I used to, but that just makes the burnout worse. I moved back up to Darwin hoping a slower pace of life would help and to some extent it did but I still kept burning out. In the end I was so disenchanted with the world I lived in that I came to the decision "I can't live like this any more.".
I've never had fixations of self harm though, I just needed something different but didn't know what. We all have idle daydreams from time to time about escaping to a remote tropical paradise. I was already living in such a paradise, all I had to do was walk out the front door and that's literally what I did. I told my neighbours to help themselves to everything I owned before the landlady claimed it and left the front door open for them. I kept my favourite SLR camera and lenses and a spare pair of jeans and that was pretty much it.
I wandered off in to the rain forests to live like a feral, was homeless for 12 years. I ended up living on various people's properties in a remote community where I was accepted because I have a helpful nature and I'm not shy of physical work, and I'm a bit of a computer geek which was also handy.
I had been out there for nearly a decade before I heard a program on the radio discussing autism and for the first time in my life I had a way of understanding what had happened to me and why I am this way.
A few years later after falling out with another property owner and having to find somewhere else to live I decided that I was getting a bit too old for that life and I knew how the welfare system worked in the state that I grew up in, South Australia. So I jumped on a plane down to Adelaide, put my name down for a diagnosis and put myself through the homeless system to get social housing.
It only took 3 months to get cheap permanent housing, it took a year on a waiting list to get my diagnosis, by then I was 55 years old. I've been comfortably housed and financially stable ever since.
