Becoming Myself, Still
A quiet confession from a long journey
ostrobogulous (adj.)
slightly risqué, indecent, or of questionable propriety.
— Oxford English Dictionary—
There are certain words that arrive in your life not as vocabulary but as recognition, as if they have been circling you for years, waiting for the moment when you are finally ready to hear them. Ostrobogulous was one of those words for me. I first encountered it in an episode of Young Sheldon, spoken almost casually by Professor John Sturgis, who said another academic had used it to describe him. The word was meant to capture his eccentricity, his earnestness, his gentle oddness — the way he lived slightly out of phase with the world around him. And the moment I heard it, something in me settled. Not in the literal sense — I’m neither risqué nor indecent — but in the way the word gestures toward a gentle, uncommon strangeness that finally felt like mine. Not because it was whimsical or obscure, but because it felt like a word that had been quietly orbiting my life, waiting for me to claim it.
The truth is, I never thought of myself as “weird” in the way other people meant it. Even as a child, I sensed that my difference wasn’t a flaw or a failing. It was simply the shape of me. What I lacked wasn’t pride — it was context. I didn’t have the language to explain why I moved through the world the way I did, why certain things overwhelmed me, why social interactions felt like puzzles with missing pieces, why noise and chaos seemed to hit me harder than they hit other children. That strange little word didn’t rescue me from shame; it gave me a framework. It didn’t make me feel better; it made me feel understood. It didn’t change my self‑perception; it clarified it.
And that clarity allowed me to look back at my childhood with a kind of retrospective compassion I didn’t have access to at the time. Even in my first school, long before any diagnosis or terminology entered the picture, I was the odd one out — not because I misbehaved or sought attention, but because I moved differently. My mind processed information in a way that didn’t match the rhythm of the group. I didn’t intuit the unwritten rules that other children seemed to absorb through osmosis. I didn’t blend into the collective social choreography. I lived slightly outside the shared rhythm, and children, with their unfiltered instincts, sensed that difference long before adults did.
There was another part of my childhood that made survival possible, though I didn’t recognise it as survival at the time. Because I was isolated socially — not by choice, but by mismatch, by overwhelm, by the simple fact that I couldn’t find a way into the shifting patterns of other children — I immersed myself in books. They were the first things in my life that didn’t confuse me. I could understand them and trust them; they became my circle. Stories offered rules that stayed still, characters who didn’t turn on me when someone else walked into the room, worlds that didn’t demand eye contact or social fluency. Books were the companions that never betrayed me, the conversations I could enter without fear, the places where my mind could stretch without being punished for its shape. They didn’t just entertain me — they held me.
When I moved schools at six, the difficulty didn’t begin; it simply intensified. I wasn’t placed in the wrong year — I was in the right year, but the other children had already had a full year of schooling that I hadn’t. My old school started at five; this one started at four. On paper, everything matched. In reality, I walked into a classroom where everyone else had already learned the rules, the routines, the social patterns, and the academic foundations. They were a year ahead socially and academically, and I was expected to catch up instantly, to absorb a year’s worth of learning and a year’s worth of social fluency at the same time. It was an impossible demand placed on a child who was already overwhelmed.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, they accelerated me through two years of learning in one, as though my mind were a machine that could simply be sped up without consequence. When I finally buckled under the strain — when the overload became too much — they didn’t ask why. They didn’t consider the mismatch or the pressure, or the sensory burden. They strapped electrodes to my head and monitored my brain activity. It was “off the charts,” they said, and they interpreted that through the only lens they had: hyperactivity, disruption, too much energy, too much intensity. But now, with the benefit of adult understanding, I can see that what they were measuring wasn’t misbehaviour. It was overload. It was a small nervous system trying to process more than it could bear.
And here is the truth that matters: I never grew up with the label Asperger’s. No one tested me. No one named what was happening inside me. I carried the raw experience of difference without any framework to explain it. The adults around me misinterpreted what they saw, and I moved through childhood with the quiet certainty that their explanations didn’t match my reality.
It wasn’t until 1999 — when I began working as an IT Technician in a secondary school — that something in my understanding began to shift. I wasn’t seeking answers about myself. I was simply doing my job — keeping the network alive, fixing computers, supporting staff, and moving through the corridors and classrooms of a school that was its own small universe. But schools are ecosystems, and you can’t work in one without absorbing the lives that move through it.
We had students who were autistic — bright, intense, literal, overwhelmed, perceptive in ways that adults often missed. I watched them navigate the corridors, the noise, the social minefields, the sensory chaos of secondary school. I saw the way they flinched at sudden sounds, the way they struggled with eye contact, the way they tapped or fidgeted to stay regulated, the way they took language at face value, the way they shut down when the world became too much.
And as I watched them, something inside me stirred — not pity, not distance, but recognition. A quiet, unmistakable recognition. I saw in them the same patterns I had carried through my own childhood: the overwhelm, the literalness, the sensory intensity, the social exhaustion, the need for predictability, the way the world felt too loud and too fast unless you found your own internal rhythm to hold on to.
Then there were the colleagues — teachers and support staff who actually understood autism, who could articulate the traits and the sensory realities with a clarity I had never encountered before. As they described the students’ experiences, I found myself listening with a strange, almost disorienting sense of familiarity. They weren’t describing “them.” They were describing me. Not in every detail, but in enough of them that the pieces of my past began to rearrange themselves into a shape that finally made sense.
It wasn’t a diagnosis.
It wasn’t a revelation.
It was a quiet alignment — the moment when the scattered fragments of my childhood finally clicked into place.
Somewhere along the way, the terminology changed. The label Asperger’s — the one that might have been applied to me had anyone looked closely enough — was retired and replaced with Autism Spectrum Disorder. I’ve never liked that term. It carries a clinical heaviness, a suggestion of illness or defect that has never matched my lived experience. My mind isn’t a disorder. It’s a configuration. A pattern. A way of being that has always been mine. I can live with the word neurodivergent. It acknowledges difference without implying damage. It describes me without diminishing me.
And through all of this, eye contact was never simple for me. It wasn’t shyness or avoidance. It was discomfort — sharp, intrusive, overwhelming. Looking into someone’s eyes felt like standing too close to a bright light; too much information poured in at once. It wasn’t connection; it was exposure. And yet, as I grew older, I realised that eye contact was something “normal” people expected, a kind of social currency that signalled sincerity and attention. So I taught myself a version of it. Not comfort, but technique. Not instinct, but skill. Enough to pass. Enough to avoid scrutiny.
The same was true of social interaction itself. I didn’t absorb it naturally; I studied it. I reverse‑engineered it. I learned how to interact with people to an extent — enough to navigate, enough to survive, enough to avoid standing out in ways that invited ridicule or misunderstanding. My social skills were not instinctive. They were constructed. Built. Practised. A second language spoken with an accent I no longer apologise for.
And even now, at fifty‑five, there are parts of me that never learned to harden in the way the world expected. I still struggle in social situations, especially in groups larger than six. The noise, the shifting dynamics, the overlapping conversations, the unspoken rules — it all becomes too much, too fast. My system has never learned to take that in stride. And noisy, busy environments add another layer entirely. The sensory overload hits before the social part even begins. Too much sound, too much movement, too many variables — it all piles up until my system starts to fray at the edges.
There are still moments, even now, when social situations slip out of my grasp in ways that feel both familiar and inevitable. I can hold my own in a structured conversation, or in a group that has a clear centre of gravity, where the rhythm is steady and the expectations are visible. But when a gathering dissolves into smaller clusters — when the room fractures into pockets of conversation and the unspoken instruction becomes “mingle” — something in me falters. The rules change too quickly. The cues multiply. The entry points vanish. And I find myself withdrawing into that quiet, protective silence that has followed me since childhood. It isn’t shyness, and it isn’t disinterest. It’s the simple truth that I cannot find a way in. The conversation becomes a moving target, shifting and reforming before I can locate the moment where my voice might fit. To others it may look like awkwardness, but to me it feels like choosing coherence over chaos, like stepping back from a landscape that has suddenly lost all its pathways. It is not a failure of social desire; it is a refusal to stumble blindly into a space that offers no foothold.
So I regulate myself the way my body has always known how: I tap my foot, move my hand, fidget, shift. These aren’t nervous habits. They’re stabilisers. They’re how I keep myself steady when the world becomes too loud or too fast. My body figured out these strategies long before anyone explained why they worked. This is what people mean when they call me “high‑functioning,” though the term itself is misleading. It doesn’t mean I don’t struggle. It means I’ve built ways to survive the struggle without letting the world see the effort.
And even in adulthood, when I did manage to make friends — slowly, cautiously, with the same deliberate care I bring to everything — the pattern repeated itself in a quieter, more adult form. I was always there for them, steady in the way I have always been steady, the one who listened, the one who showed up, the one who held their crises without flinching. But when the moment finally came when I needed something back — not much, not even the full weight of loyalty I had given, just presence, just reliability — they weren’t there. Not out of malice, not out of cruelty, but out of a kind of inconsistency I have never been able to understand. And that absence taught me something I wish I had learned earlier: that my loyalty is rare, and that not everyone who accepts it knows how to return it. It didn’t make me bitter. It made me selective. It made me cautious. It made me understand that friendship, for me, has always been something deeper than convenience or proximity. It is a commitment — and I have learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that not everyone means the same thing when they use that word.
There are softer parts of me too — parts I kept hidden for most of my life because the world has never known what to do with gentle, playful adults who carry their inner child with them. I make up silly songs and little ditties, often about bodily functions, because humour has always been a pressure valve for me. It’s not childishness. It’s relief. It’s the part of me that never got to be carefree finally having a place to breathe. I talk to ten IKEA Fabler Björn bears and a single finger‑puppet dog as if they’re friends and confidants. They sit with me, listen to me, accompany me. They don’t judge, confuse, or overwhelm. They are steady in a way people rarely are. Until now, only my wife has ever known this part of me. I kept it hidden because I didn’t trust the world to treat it with the tenderness it deserved.
But the truth is simple: these companions aren’t signs of immaturity. They’re signs of survival. They’re the continuity of a childhood that never had safety, now finally allowed to exist without fear. They’re the way I offer comfort to the boy I once was — the boy who was overwhelmed, misread, and alone. They’re the way I stay whole. I didn’t grow out of these things. I grew with them.
And friendship — genuine friendship — has always been rare for me. Even when I did manage to make friends as a child or teenager, I was the one who showed up. I was steady, loyal, and present. But the ones who said they were my friends in private would join in the bullying in public. They’d laugh with me quietly, then laugh at me loudly. They were only my friends when no one else was watching. And that kind of betrayal leaves a mark — not because it continued into adulthood, but because it happened at the exact age when you’re learning what friendship even means.
So it’s no wonder that now Nicola, my wife, is the only friend I have — and the only one I need. She is steady. She is real. She doesn’t disappear when the crowd appears. She doesn’t turn friendship into a performance. I’m not friendless. I’m selective. I’m protective of myself in a way I never could be as a child. And I’m at peace with that.
Now, as a neurodivergent adult, I can finally articulate the truth beneath all of this: I was never the strange one. I was the honest one. My system refused to lie. I couldn’t pretend noise wasn’t noise, or chaos wasn’t chaos, or cruelty wasn’t cruelty. I couldn’t decode unwritten rules because they were, in fact, unwritten. The world punished the child I was and now praises the adult I’ve become — without ever acknowledging the cost. They call me focused, structured, perceptive. They admire the systems I build, the clarity I insist on, the solitude I cultivate. But these aren’t quirks. They are survival strategies that hardened into personality. They are the bones that grew around old wounds.
And somewhere along the way, I learned something simple and quietly liberating: I’m weird, strange, a little ostrobogulous — but I’m also normal, just my kind of normal. A normal built from the inside out, not the outside in. A normal that fits me the way mass‑produced normality never did. A normal that doesn’t apologise for its angles or its intensity or its softness. A normal that finally feels like home.
My difference was never a defect — it was a direction. A trajectory. A way of being that refused to collapse into the shape demanded by the crowd. My adult self isn’t the opposite of my childhood self. He is the continuation of him — the same mind, finally given space to breathe.
I am not the child they misunderstood.
I am the adult who finally understands him.
Until next time.