I haven't seen anyone suggesting Mike Oldfield as a possible Aspie.
Check out these quotes from his autobiography "Changeling" (ISBN 978-0-7535-1307-1)
"When was it that I knew I was different? From when I was very young, I was always watching, observing, taking it all in; but it was more than that, I knew there was more to life than I could grasp."
p. 10
"Unfortunately, I was no that good at getting on with kids of my age.
I did have a younger friend for a while but I didn't like him very much.
p. 13
"I remember how my mother would send me to parties or organise a party for me, for my birthday. I would be dressed up in a pair of shorts an an itchy shirt, then all these strangge children, boys and girls, would walk through the door. They were complete strangers to me, I didn't know who on earth they were. They would give me a present - I quite liked that part - but then I had to play with the strangers. I didn't know what to do whith them. It ended up that they played on their own, while I I sat twiddling my thumbs and shuffling my feet."
"I was quite happy in my own company, anyway."
"I didn't have a concept of fear."
p.14
"...I've had a whole lifetime of DIY phobia. I can put a model helicopter together, or insert a piece of circuitery into a Macintosh computer, with the tiniest screws and pieces; however, if it's anything to do with building work, I'm useless at it."
p. 16
"My first school was a Catholic convent school..."
"I vividly remember my first day: my God, what a shock that was...."
"That morning, my parents dressed me up in my school uniform, which felt horribly itchy..."
"All around me looked completely alien..."
p. 17
"I felt lost, like a fish out of water."
"It was from that moment, I started to realise I wasn't the same as everybody else.
I could see other children all joining in, quite happily playing games in little groups. The other children didn't approach me and ask me to play; I didn't want to approach them either, so I just skulked around, watching...
"I knew I was being left out but had no idea why. In one way I longed to be able to play, to run around with the other children, but I didn't know how to change the way things were. I just had this feeling there was something wrong with me...I didn't know what put them off. I was on my own, I didn't really understand anything about it, and I hated it."
p. 18
"I can remember learning how to read, having trouble with the word 'all'. I couldn't work out how you could have to 'l's, and you didn't say, 'al-l'."
p. 19
"There were some kids I got on with, but that was more on my terms. They were older kids, about eight or nine, and I suppose they didn't fit in, like me."
p. 20
"For some reason things weren't so bad with the older kids. They accepted me..."
"I was always an inquisitive child."
p. 21
"Unfortunately, I don't think I was really academic."
p. 30
"I put everything, every single resource in my brain, to understanding that guitar and achieving what I could with it. I must have looked completely obsessive, but for me it was a way of escape."
"...I certainly don't know what else I would have done if music had not come along."
p. 34
"A great, very happy, by-product of playing guitar was that suddenly I became popular. From being a lonely child who nobody wanted to talk to, as soon as I got out my guitar and started playing it people were, 'Wow, hello', and interested in me."
p. 35
"I wasn't really socialising, I didn't really talk that much: the people I was with were older and, an by this time I was using my guitar as a mean of communication anway. I was so immersed in my music, it really becoming an escape from the horrors of dayly life..."
p. 45
"I've always been a lonely, outcast, outsider kind of person, I'm not very sociable."
p. 120
"I think I was born as a sort of mutation, without the social gene that makes people or animals flock together."
p. 204
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Regards
Infaj
10 Oct 2009, 9:13 am
