Yellow Prestatyn
I love the colour yellow. My favourite is pink, but I think yellow has an invitational quality to it that other colours don't. The colour of single yellow lines on the road; a bunch of beautiful Dutch tulips or English roses; and Emily Dickinson's poem 'Nature Rarer Uses Yellow.'
"Yellow she [nature] affords,
Only scantily and selectly,
Like a lover's words."
The alleged absence of yellow in nature is something that I noticed from a very young age. I always filled my primary school art and geography books with pictures of tall sunflowers and bees, attempting to correct this natural absence with my best human effort. My teachers and parents saw it merely as an attention to detail that sometimes starts to develop in young children. Though like nature, I saw these drawings of yellow fauna and flora as an invitation to look deeper into my worldview (and other infantile writings about rocks and stuff we write in Year One). I couldn't communicate these sorts of thoughts as a 5 or 6 year old, but art, language and performance, dramatic or otherwise, always gave me an opportunity to do my best. But from a young age, I've always struggled to come to terms with the fact that sigular human effort cannot always resolve deeper issues, couched in nature, society or culture.
I think it would be unfair to expect my teacher, from that small idiosyncrasy, to diagnose me as autistic. But that in itself is a microcosm of recognising and defining autism. We often hear that "everybody is on the spectrum," or that "no two autistic people are the same." Yet the internal scruples that reeled through my brain, unfolding like a papyrus scroll, when I saw other children complete fantastic artwork, entertain a whole bunch of friends before becoming popular made me think of myself as a lone fish, swimming just outside the school, trying desperately to place my identity somewhere either within the school or without -- in the bigger, deep blue sea. This roster of scruples has proved a constant throughout my life, from school, to clubbing, to nationality, the three of which I want to flesh out; to help others understand why locating some part of myself, and perhaps yourselves, is always a futile task.
Even though he unfortunately became romanced by Nazism, Martin Hiedegger was an extremely astute philosopher. He talked of a thrownness we experience in formative moments of our lives -- we go into these moments completely unexpectedly, unprepared and, sometimes, unknowingly. I think, though I'm making observations based on experience and no form of quantitative data provided by other autistic people, autistic people feel this thrownness as par-for-the-course. Walking down the street, picking up the phone to an unknown number, ringing the doctors; we get tossed and exhausted being flung from one point of the triangle to another. From unknowing, to unexpectedness, to unpreparedness.
This thrownness became intensified when I made the transition from primary school to high school. New social groups formed with uncodified norms of behaviour that I totally lost myself in trying to adapt to. I want to tell this story through one case study of a friendship that I still luckily have. It highlights the all-too-human trait of wishing we did things differently, though framing it in a way that enjoins the experiences of me, an autistic man, to others in a way where I can't pity myself. For the purposes of anonymity, lets call this friend Ray. He was my first true friend made in primary school, where we conceived of a game called Buzzy Bees. We ran around the playground, weaving in and out of other kids, buzzing like a bee. The joy that brought to my sensory-seeking self still makes me smile with nostalgic wantonness.
We remained good friends in primary school but in the course of the transition to high school, in trying to find that elusive part of myself that sought the popularity and (what I conceived of at the time as) love of everyone, I became aloof and reticent. I neglected his platonic love in pursuit of something I thought of as 'more.' Its shameful, and racks me with guilt. This came to a head when I tried to impress a bully by flooring Ray behind a building of the school. I remember his coat covered in mud. It was yellow, tinged with orange. It moves me to tears to think that even metaphorically, his yellow coat was still an invitation, an appeal to frienship. We both had such strong senses of self, and we were so compatible as friends, yet I continued to repress my sense of self in order to replicate the kind of 'ascension to popular status' that I saw (and unfortunately continue to see) on TV shows.
Luckily, Ray and I dovetailed back into becoming extremely good friends by the age of 12 or 13. Most of the memories we share are fantastic. He wrongly got blamed for a PE teacher faceplanting a locked door. I have hilarious memories of tea bag wars in Graphics, for which we never got in trouble. But I am absolutely consumed by my behaviour in that one-year period of my life, that I feel my own identity is negated. My sense of bookwormish, history-loving, rational, sturdy, foolhardy self will always be diluted by what I did to Ray and I might never be able to shed that. Perhaps this is a window into my autistic irrationality. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is all-too-human. But to see the worst in myself so fundamentally outlines my vision of the world that I struggle to negotiate and reconcile my identity at all levels of my existence.
One example of this was hitting the age of 18. I didn't get with my current girlfriend until the age of 19, but I really liked her and this became a defining feature of me in those years. For my 18th, my friends and her took me to a Manchester club. This may come as some surprise, but it was one of the best experiences of my life. The place played music that felt catered to me and me alone. I danced with a sense of ridiculous abandon that I sometimes try, but always fail, to recreate at home. I danced for hours, until my grey Gaslight Anthem shirt was soaked through with warm sweat. I danced in my own microbial chamber, inviting others in at my whim. We vacated the place following the last song at 4am and I see that night as a formative moment where my friends and my girlfriend inducted me into the worldly delights of adulthood.
But inevitably, we change. I don't think my sense of discomfort going to Manchester now is any different to the first time I went. But we mature, and as we do so we realise that the world owes us very little. Similarly, the diverse and expansive range of Mancunian bars and clubs owed me, a rock-loving, fresh-faced, laser-white-fringed 18/19 year old, absolutely nothing. The pounding of music that I don't even know how to categorise, or apply a genre to; the packed bars where stush women and men with even bitchier airs of hauter congregate and block passage to all open spaces that are otherwise available; the despicably dim lighting that invokes no mood, whatsoever.
My problem is that I often find saying no to my friends too difficult. I often leave messages to the side, untouched and sometimes unread, hoping that in my absence they don't grow closer to one another, leaving no space for me. Perhaps this is a hangover from the way I treated Ray. The occassions where I don't say no, I inevitably end up looking bizarre. I sometimes leave halfway through the night because I can't reconcile the love I hold for my friends with the strange and unsoluble places we frequent. The alcohol I consume often turns my head into a rancourous commotion. I sometimes get migraines. Occular migraines, that is, where my vision is nearly completely lost for 1-2 hours. The constant fretting and anxiety about place, time, 'fitting-in' and my health makes me compete for, and worry about, an identity that I fear I can't live up to. I want these people to reciprocate my love, and see me as 'one of them,' but I ultimately remain unsure that I'm a person that deserves it.
I have a similar fear for my friendship with the man that I go to Man City with. For purposes of anonymity, we'll call him Roy. Like Ray, Roy is an object of my platonic love and has been since a young age. Yet, similarly to the instances above, I sometimes sense that I test him. I sometimes don't drink as much at the games, I sometimes retreat home earlier and I sometimes don't even travel to the stadium with him. This post is written in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, and that has thrown some perspective onto how much time I should spend with my friends in future. But I still rack myself with worry about the relationships they form between one another in my absence. I don't want to be a bridesmaid. I don't want to be the Brian Kidd to their Roberto Mancini. I want to be a bride. I want to be Mancini.
This sense of competing for an identity is blown up even in terms of my nationality. If the United Kingdom didn't exist, and the denonym 'British' didn't exist, I would have to consider myself Anglo-Welsh. As much as he hates to admit it, my dad (and his entire lineage) is Welsh. I was raised, much of the time until the age of 3, in Prestatyn. Many of my formative moments as a young child and man came in Wales. The language in which I learned, and not acquired, my first words were Welsh. I made my first friend in preschool, in Wales. I remember strolling up and down the Prestatyn and Rhyl beachsides with my grandad, in matching Man City kits. He took me to the adventure centre and whilst he went bowling, I played on a bouncy-castle that terrified me. A massive Count Dracula that I thought looked like my dad. Paging Dr. Freud. My first swimming lessons were taken in Colwyn Bay. The first time I looked at a girl, her hair in pigtails, my heart beating a little faster was in Wales. Wales and Prestatyn were so extraordinarily formative that I can't deny that I am, at least extrinsically, Welsh.
But similarly, how can I deny my Englishness? I was born on English soil. I have an English accent, apart from the odd words that are a Prestatyn hangover like "Zulu" and "isn't it." I went to primary school in England and I acquired my Mancunian accent in England. I played football, went snowboarding, properly made friends, and fell in love, all for the first time, in England. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that, in 2016 when England played Wales in their Euros group, I had a vexing decision to make. I chose to wear my Wales strip, whilst situated in the midst of my English friends, in an English pub, which was filled with English strips. The pub reacted quite strongly. It wasn't intended as a two fingers to the population of Stockport. It was an honest and sincere effort to navigate how I felt in that moment. Autistic people famously struggle to find something tangible to latch onto, in reality, in terms of identity, and in society. With hindsight, the turmoil over a simple football kit doesn't appear all too surprising. I just wish I had the diagnosis then to reconcile all these conflicting and, sometimes, burdensome feelings.
Needless to say, England won 2-1 in the final moments of the game and I got a few choice words thrown my way. It was quite funny, but I had hedged my bets and I had, once again, failed to convince myself that I'd made the correct choice by way of identity. But I think I ultimately did. I have such a strong sense of self now that I have a formal diagnosis. I look back on my years in Prestatyn as ones that are hued with yellow. Philip Larkin's famous poem 'Sunny Prestatyn' suggests that the best thing you can see in Prestatyn is a faded billboard, graffitied with a "tuberous cock and balls." I have no doubt that this is objectively true, thinking critically. But I remember the yellow of the daffodils walking in Ffrith, and the yellow paint of the drains of the bungalow opposite on Grosvenor Road.
Something about memory is invitational to everyone. With autism, it flashes like a lighthouse when attempting to find your place in the nexus of society, friendships and identities. You have to construct it yourself. Perhaps everybody is tinged by the memories of things they've done wrong. Perhaps everybody struggles to find their place. My hope in writing this is not for pity, or to be lambasted for how I treated Ray, or for my friends to get in touch and say 'don't worry, you're obviously our friend.' Perhaps its just an exercise in spilling out into a post what I think ought to happen -- people should ruminate on how difficult growing up is, and we all struggle, but maybe we shouldn't worry so much about our place 100% of the time. Even if things go wrong, hopefully we dovetail back together. We shouldn't contend with ourselves, or for each other. In the immortal and final words of Philip Larkin's Whitsun Weddings, "what will survive of us is love."
"Yellow she [nature] affords,
Only scantily and selectly,
Like a lover's words."
The alleged absence of yellow in nature is something that I noticed from a very young age. I always filled my primary school art and geography books with pictures of tall sunflowers and bees, attempting to correct this natural absence with my best human effort. My teachers and parents saw it merely as an attention to detail that sometimes starts to develop in young children. Though like nature, I saw these drawings of yellow fauna and flora as an invitation to look deeper into my worldview (and other infantile writings about rocks and stuff we write in Year One). I couldn't communicate these sorts of thoughts as a 5 or 6 year old, but art, language and performance, dramatic or otherwise, always gave me an opportunity to do my best. But from a young age, I've always struggled to come to terms with the fact that sigular human effort cannot always resolve deeper issues, couched in nature, society or culture.
I think it would be unfair to expect my teacher, from that small idiosyncrasy, to diagnose me as autistic. But that in itself is a microcosm of recognising and defining autism. We often hear that "everybody is on the spectrum," or that "no two autistic people are the same." Yet the internal scruples that reeled through my brain, unfolding like a papyrus scroll, when I saw other children complete fantastic artwork, entertain a whole bunch of friends before becoming popular made me think of myself as a lone fish, swimming just outside the school, trying desperately to place my identity somewhere either within the school or without -- in the bigger, deep blue sea. This roster of scruples has proved a constant throughout my life, from school, to clubbing, to nationality, the three of which I want to flesh out; to help others understand why locating some part of myself, and perhaps yourselves, is always a futile task.
Even though he unfortunately became romanced by Nazism, Martin Hiedegger was an extremely astute philosopher. He talked of a thrownness we experience in formative moments of our lives -- we go into these moments completely unexpectedly, unprepared and, sometimes, unknowingly. I think, though I'm making observations based on experience and no form of quantitative data provided by other autistic people, autistic people feel this thrownness as par-for-the-course. Walking down the street, picking up the phone to an unknown number, ringing the doctors; we get tossed and exhausted being flung from one point of the triangle to another. From unknowing, to unexpectedness, to unpreparedness.
This thrownness became intensified when I made the transition from primary school to high school. New social groups formed with uncodified norms of behaviour that I totally lost myself in trying to adapt to. I want to tell this story through one case study of a friendship that I still luckily have. It highlights the all-too-human trait of wishing we did things differently, though framing it in a way that enjoins the experiences of me, an autistic man, to others in a way where I can't pity myself. For the purposes of anonymity, lets call this friend Ray. He was my first true friend made in primary school, where we conceived of a game called Buzzy Bees. We ran around the playground, weaving in and out of other kids, buzzing like a bee. The joy that brought to my sensory-seeking self still makes me smile with nostalgic wantonness.
We remained good friends in primary school but in the course of the transition to high school, in trying to find that elusive part of myself that sought the popularity and (what I conceived of at the time as) love of everyone, I became aloof and reticent. I neglected his platonic love in pursuit of something I thought of as 'more.' Its shameful, and racks me with guilt. This came to a head when I tried to impress a bully by flooring Ray behind a building of the school. I remember his coat covered in mud. It was yellow, tinged with orange. It moves me to tears to think that even metaphorically, his yellow coat was still an invitation, an appeal to frienship. We both had such strong senses of self, and we were so compatible as friends, yet I continued to repress my sense of self in order to replicate the kind of 'ascension to popular status' that I saw (and unfortunately continue to see) on TV shows.
Luckily, Ray and I dovetailed back into becoming extremely good friends by the age of 12 or 13. Most of the memories we share are fantastic. He wrongly got blamed for a PE teacher faceplanting a locked door. I have hilarious memories of tea bag wars in Graphics, for which we never got in trouble. But I am absolutely consumed by my behaviour in that one-year period of my life, that I feel my own identity is negated. My sense of bookwormish, history-loving, rational, sturdy, foolhardy self will always be diluted by what I did to Ray and I might never be able to shed that. Perhaps this is a window into my autistic irrationality. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is all-too-human. But to see the worst in myself so fundamentally outlines my vision of the world that I struggle to negotiate and reconcile my identity at all levels of my existence.
One example of this was hitting the age of 18. I didn't get with my current girlfriend until the age of 19, but I really liked her and this became a defining feature of me in those years. For my 18th, my friends and her took me to a Manchester club. This may come as some surprise, but it was one of the best experiences of my life. The place played music that felt catered to me and me alone. I danced with a sense of ridiculous abandon that I sometimes try, but always fail, to recreate at home. I danced for hours, until my grey Gaslight Anthem shirt was soaked through with warm sweat. I danced in my own microbial chamber, inviting others in at my whim. We vacated the place following the last song at 4am and I see that night as a formative moment where my friends and my girlfriend inducted me into the worldly delights of adulthood.
But inevitably, we change. I don't think my sense of discomfort going to Manchester now is any different to the first time I went. But we mature, and as we do so we realise that the world owes us very little. Similarly, the diverse and expansive range of Mancunian bars and clubs owed me, a rock-loving, fresh-faced, laser-white-fringed 18/19 year old, absolutely nothing. The pounding of music that I don't even know how to categorise, or apply a genre to; the packed bars where stush women and men with even bitchier airs of hauter congregate and block passage to all open spaces that are otherwise available; the despicably dim lighting that invokes no mood, whatsoever.
My problem is that I often find saying no to my friends too difficult. I often leave messages to the side, untouched and sometimes unread, hoping that in my absence they don't grow closer to one another, leaving no space for me. Perhaps this is a hangover from the way I treated Ray. The occassions where I don't say no, I inevitably end up looking bizarre. I sometimes leave halfway through the night because I can't reconcile the love I hold for my friends with the strange and unsoluble places we frequent. The alcohol I consume often turns my head into a rancourous commotion. I sometimes get migraines. Occular migraines, that is, where my vision is nearly completely lost for 1-2 hours. The constant fretting and anxiety about place, time, 'fitting-in' and my health makes me compete for, and worry about, an identity that I fear I can't live up to. I want these people to reciprocate my love, and see me as 'one of them,' but I ultimately remain unsure that I'm a person that deserves it.
I have a similar fear for my friendship with the man that I go to Man City with. For purposes of anonymity, we'll call him Roy. Like Ray, Roy is an object of my platonic love and has been since a young age. Yet, similarly to the instances above, I sometimes sense that I test him. I sometimes don't drink as much at the games, I sometimes retreat home earlier and I sometimes don't even travel to the stadium with him. This post is written in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, and that has thrown some perspective onto how much time I should spend with my friends in future. But I still rack myself with worry about the relationships they form between one another in my absence. I don't want to be a bridesmaid. I don't want to be the Brian Kidd to their Roberto Mancini. I want to be a bride. I want to be Mancini.
This sense of competing for an identity is blown up even in terms of my nationality. If the United Kingdom didn't exist, and the denonym 'British' didn't exist, I would have to consider myself Anglo-Welsh. As much as he hates to admit it, my dad (and his entire lineage) is Welsh. I was raised, much of the time until the age of 3, in Prestatyn. Many of my formative moments as a young child and man came in Wales. The language in which I learned, and not acquired, my first words were Welsh. I made my first friend in preschool, in Wales. I remember strolling up and down the Prestatyn and Rhyl beachsides with my grandad, in matching Man City kits. He took me to the adventure centre and whilst he went bowling, I played on a bouncy-castle that terrified me. A massive Count Dracula that I thought looked like my dad. Paging Dr. Freud. My first swimming lessons were taken in Colwyn Bay. The first time I looked at a girl, her hair in pigtails, my heart beating a little faster was in Wales. Wales and Prestatyn were so extraordinarily formative that I can't deny that I am, at least extrinsically, Welsh.
But similarly, how can I deny my Englishness? I was born on English soil. I have an English accent, apart from the odd words that are a Prestatyn hangover like "Zulu" and "isn't it." I went to primary school in England and I acquired my Mancunian accent in England. I played football, went snowboarding, properly made friends, and fell in love, all for the first time, in England. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that, in 2016 when England played Wales in their Euros group, I had a vexing decision to make. I chose to wear my Wales strip, whilst situated in the midst of my English friends, in an English pub, which was filled with English strips. The pub reacted quite strongly. It wasn't intended as a two fingers to the population of Stockport. It was an honest and sincere effort to navigate how I felt in that moment. Autistic people famously struggle to find something tangible to latch onto, in reality, in terms of identity, and in society. With hindsight, the turmoil over a simple football kit doesn't appear all too surprising. I just wish I had the diagnosis then to reconcile all these conflicting and, sometimes, burdensome feelings.
Needless to say, England won 2-1 in the final moments of the game and I got a few choice words thrown my way. It was quite funny, but I had hedged my bets and I had, once again, failed to convince myself that I'd made the correct choice by way of identity. But I think I ultimately did. I have such a strong sense of self now that I have a formal diagnosis. I look back on my years in Prestatyn as ones that are hued with yellow. Philip Larkin's famous poem 'Sunny Prestatyn' suggests that the best thing you can see in Prestatyn is a faded billboard, graffitied with a "tuberous cock and balls." I have no doubt that this is objectively true, thinking critically. But I remember the yellow of the daffodils walking in Ffrith, and the yellow paint of the drains of the bungalow opposite on Grosvenor Road.
Something about memory is invitational to everyone. With autism, it flashes like a lighthouse when attempting to find your place in the nexus of society, friendships and identities. You have to construct it yourself. Perhaps everybody is tinged by the memories of things they've done wrong. Perhaps everybody struggles to find their place. My hope in writing this is not for pity, or to be lambasted for how I treated Ray, or for my friends to get in touch and say 'don't worry, you're obviously our friend.' Perhaps its just an exercise in spilling out into a post what I think ought to happen -- people should ruminate on how difficult growing up is, and we all struggle, but maybe we shouldn't worry so much about our place 100% of the time. Even if things go wrong, hopefully we dovetail back together. We shouldn't contend with ourselves, or for each other. In the immortal and final words of Philip Larkin's Whitsun Weddings, "what will survive of us is love."
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