Me?
I think.

Hi, I'm Nic. Some people know me as Callum. I'm fifteen, autistic, dyspraxic, very literal, and probably a lot harder to explain than I first appear.

I can tell you what someone said six months ago, spot an inconsistency in a conversation, build something on a computer, or argue about a subject I've spent far too long reading about. Ask me what I'm feeling and there's a decent chance I'll just say, "I don't know."

But that's the issue. I can explain what I do. I can explain what happened. I can explain what I think somebody meant. I struggle to explain who I actually am, especially when I'm not doing anything.

So I've decided to write this because most of what people know about me comes from scraps: school records, diagnoses, what somebody else has said, things I've made, incidents they've heard about, or their own assumptions. And because I've started realising that I do the same thing to myself. I take what I know, work out a possible answer, and call it a conclusion. Sometimes it turns out to be wrong.

This isn't my success story. It isn't an attempt to prove that everyone who's ever dealt with me was evil and I was perfect. My life isn't that tidy. I'm not that tidy. Some things I remember sharply. Other things are half memories, things I've been told, or questions I still don't have answers to.

So, let's start.

I had hearing and speech difficulties when I was younger. I had glue ear, grommets, and years where hearing and speaking didn't happen on the timetable other people seemed to expect. I didn't properly start speaking until much later than most children. I can talk plenty now, obviously, but speaking isn't always as effortless as people might assume. Only recently did I start properly noticing a stutter that someone else had picked up on before I did.

In primary school I had different kinds of support. Speech work, special equipment to help with writing, being taken out of lessons, and time away from everyone else. I remember the separating as much as I remember the support. I'm not claiming none of it helped. I don't know that, and some of it probably did. What I do know is that as a child I didn't always understand why I was the one leaving the classroom.

I didn't want to be hidden away. I wanted to be in the lesson with everybody else. That's a theme that keeps turning up in my life, even when everyone involved thinks they're helping.

I have hypermobility as well as dyspraxia. Handwriting can be painful, and after more than a little writing it can turn into something even I struggle to read. That's a genuine reason to use a computer. But people sometimes seem to struggle with the fact that somebody can need help with one thing and be completely capable, or more than capable, at another.

I don't need every aspect of my life explained to me through a disability label. I also don't want people pretending the difficulties don't exist. Apparently there isn't a universally convenient setting for that.

This is the timeline my parents have explained to me. The Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) process was meant to start while I was still at primary school, but the SENCO there never started it.

That was passed on to Oldershaw. My understanding is that Oldershaw said they didn't know enough about me to complete the process.

My parents then brought in a professional, and that was how the EHCP finally got through. According to my parents, the professional said words to the effect of: “This lad has needed an EHCP since primary school.”

I'm describing the sequence as my parents have explained it to me, including their recollection of what the professional said. I haven't personally checked every record, so I'm not presenting that sentence as a verbatim quote or claiming to know every conversation between the schools.

By the time my parents got the EHCP through, I'd already been assaulted more times than anyone should have to be. I eventually received support much later than I'd have liked.

Would an earlier plan have changed where I went to school, or prevented what happened? I don't know. What bothers me is how long it took to get the support in place.

At some point I want to go through those records properly, not to invent a villain, but to understand my own history.

My time at Oldershaw involved repeated assaults, police involvement, periods of not feeling safe, and situations I still find difficult to make sense of.

One of the strangest incidents started with a PE lesson. I didn't want to do it. I asked a teacher if I could skip it because I genuinely couldn't be bothered, and I had a feeling something bad was going to happen. They let me sit out and do work while the others played dodgeball.

I got bored doing the work. There were older students nearby talking about things I didn't want to listen to. The game seemed calm enough. So I joined in.

I got attacked.

I can't explain the feeling I had beforehand. It doesn't make me psychic. It doesn't prove I knew what was going to happen. I remember asking to sit out, changing my mind, and then having something happen that had a huge effect on my education.

What I remember most about the immediate situation is confusion. We were playing dodgeball. Someone got angry about something, and suddenly it had escalated far beyond a school game. I apologised to the person who attacked me. I still can't tell you what I believed I was apologising for.

That confused adults around me too. Later, I said something violently angry about him. At another point I hit and headbutted wood and hurt myself more doing that than I'd been hurt in the attack. None of that was sensible or safe, and I'm not proud of it. I'm including it because leaving out the ugly reactions would make this a story designed to flatter me rather than explain me.

My reactions don't always arrive neatly or at the time someone expects. I can be confused first, say something completely different later, and still struggle to label what was happening inside my head. It doesn't excuse anything I do, but it's relevant to understanding it.

The assault led to a live police investigation. The school wasn't sure how things would develop and allowed me to remain away for a period, which became months. They gave me work to complete at home. Within days, I'd finished an entire maths book for that school year because I found it easy.

I also played basketball in the front yard. That might sound like an odd detail to remember, but it's an important one to me. I hated feeling excluded from normality. I didn't want being attacked to mean I had to disappear from school life and everything ordinary that went with it.

While I was off, I heard how upset my parents were that things had got this far. It was also around that time that I began learning more about why the EHCP had not been started in primary school.

I've never naturally described all of this as a struggle. When people ask me about difficulties, I often treat them as things that just happened. Life. It doesn't mean I was unaffected. It means I don't always have another way of describing it.

There's another incident at Oldershaw that I remember in a very particular way.

I remember being extremely angry about something. I can't clearly remember what the original reason was. I'm not going to manufacture a reason just to make the account more satisfying.

I remember pacing inside the cafeteria. Pacing is something I do anyway. I remember medical staff in the room near the toilets speaking to me. I remember roughly eight members of staff moving around me and others stationed at the doors, forming a human barrier inside and outside so nobody could enter or leave. I remember that I was kept there until my parents arrived to collect me.

I remember the people, their positions, and the space more clearly than I remember my own thoughts.

There may have been serious concerns about what I might do at the time. I can't tell you everything the staff knew or intended, because I wasn't inside their heads and I don't have a complete record of the incident. I know that being physically contained like that was real from my perspective, and I know I hated it.

I've been told that some of the breaks or separations at my previous school were connected to concerns that I could be an issue or a threat. Again, I'm describing information I've received, not claiming to know the private reasoning of every staff member.

Imagine already being confused or angry and finding yourself surrounded by adults who are deciding where you can move. Whether the intention is safety or something else, it doesn't feel like the gentle sort of "break" people often talk about.

I still have difficulty with being interrupted, especially when I haven't finished processing something. I can become more wound up rather than less. I'm not saying that makes every intervention wrong, or that other people should ignore genuine risks. I'm saying that the method matters, and so does the person it's being used on.

I don't hate SEN students. I don't hate people who need movement breaks, quiet rooms, sensory equipment, one-to-one work, or a different kind of classroom. If something helps them, good.

What I can't stand is the assumption that because something is common in SEN settings, it must be right for me.

A lot of people at my current school appreciate breaks. I generally don't. I want to be in lessons. I want to learn things that actually challenge me. I don't want to be removed for something that, in my own experience, has sometimes felt much closer to exclusion than support.

It's not as simple as saying I reject help. I want to use a laptop when handwriting is painful and illegible. I want information communicated clearly. I want people to respect that I don't like being touched without warning. I want teaching pitched at a level where I'm actually learning.

But if the answer to every difficulty is "go somewhere separate", don't be surprised when I question it.

My current school has people who have treated me much better than some of my previous experiences. It also has things I dislike, lessons I don't see the point of, and expectations that don't always suit me. Both can be true. I'm not interested in pretending one school is perfect and another was nothing but bad. I am interested in being treated as an individual rather than a category.

When I started at my current school, I wasn't walking in with a plan to become everyone's mate.

For the first couple of lessons I mostly interacted with teachers and a small number of people who knew me from my old school. Some of what they said about me drew attention I hadn't asked for. Then I sat next to someone very talkative in science. He started talking to me, someone who already knew me joined in, more people became curious, and before long I was answering questions from people I hadn't actually gone out of my way to meet.

It's not that I thought those people deserved to be ignored. Quite the opposite. If somebody talks to me, I'm not going to blank them just because I hadn't planned on socialising. So I answer.

And then I answer the next question. And the next.

Before I know it, people think we're friends, include me in groups, mention me when talking about their close friends, and generally act like I've been a willing member of the whole social operation from the beginning.

Sometimes I do care about them. Sometimes I'm glad they're there. That doesn't mean the socialising itself is easy, or that I sought it out.

There was also a death very early in my time there. Someone I'd only recently become close to died. He was known around the school, and I was among the relatively few pupils who attended his funeral. That became part of how people knew who I was, alongside the people I was spending time with.

I don't want to turn someone else's death into a convenient explanation for my popularity or my personality. He was a person, not a plot device in my life. But it is part of how those first weeks unfolded, and leaving it out would make the story dishonest.

The friendships that followed haven't always made much sense to me. Sometimes other people seem more certain that I'm part of their circle than I am. They'll describe trust and closeness as if it's obvious. I'm left trying to work out the evidence for it, because that's how my brain tends to handle things.

The main consequence is that I get absolutely knackered. I can talk, joke, participate and appear sociable at school, then come home completely finished. I don't necessarily socialise because I want to. Sometimes I do it because I'm there, somebody is talking, and I think refusing to respond would be rude.

I want to be included in ordinary life. I just don't want to be forced into constant interaction to earn that inclusion.

I'm literal. Not in the sense that I never understand a joke, but in the sense that I tend to take words seriously and reason from what has actually been said.

If I believe something, I'll say it. That doesn't mean it's definitely true. It means I mean it. I don't always remember that other people soften things, imply things, exaggerate things, or say something they don't quite mean because the situation calls for it.

I'm often very observant of other people. I can notice patterns in who trusts whom, how someone speaks, how they respond to certain people, or how a situation is changing. But noticing a pattern isn't the same as understanding its meaning. Sometimes I build an explanation out of incomplete facts and only later discover I've misunderstood it.

I've started realising that I do a version of that to myself.

I can tell you that my heartbeat is raised, or that my chest and neck feel tense, without being confident whether I'm stressed, upset, frightened, in pain, or experiencing something else entirely. I can explain a situation in absurd detail and still not be able to name the emotion that went with it. Sometimes even physical sensations are difficult for me to interpret unless they're obvious.

That creates a problem when somebody asks a question like, "Are you anxious?" or "Did that upset you?" They may expect an answer based on a recognisable internal feeling. I might have to guess from events and behaviour. So a sincere answer from me isn't always a complete answer about what's happening internally.

This is one reason I worry that understanding and assessing my needs can become harder as I get older. I'm articulate in some areas, and people may assume that means I understand and can report every part of myself just as clearly. I can't.

I've wondered about things like emotional awareness and recognising signals from my body. Those are things worth exploring properly, not diagnoses I'm awarding myself on a blog.

I can be blunt. I swear. I argue when I think somebody is wrong, especially when they insist on being wrong with a lot of confidence.

I can also apologise when I have no clear reason to be apologising. Apparently those two things can exist in the same person.

I don't like being touched unexpectedly. I don't like people making decisions about me without including me. I don't like having my words turned into something I never said. When someone crosses a line, I can make that very clear.

But when somebody just wants a conversation, even if I'm exhausted, I find it much harder to walk away. I don't want to be unnecessarily cruel to somebody who has done nothing to deserve it.

This doesn't make me a saint. I've said things in anger that were too far. I've been wrong about people. I've assumed motives I couldn't actually prove. Sometimes I keep arguing long after an argument has stopped being useful.

I'm still trying to understand why I can be so strict about some boundaries and so poor at recognising when I'm allowed to simply say, "I don't feel like talking."

I've built software, worked on real projects, started a company and taken on responsibilities that people sometimes find surprising for my age.

Those things are part of my life, and I put effort into them. But I don't want this to become a list of achievements, because that misses the point.

When I achieve something, my reaction is often: "Okay, what do I get from that? More work? More money? More attention? More people who hate me?"

It's not that I don't recognise what I've done. I just don't really stop and feel proud of it. There's always another thing, another problem, another idea, another job. I sometimes joke about having a god complex because it's easier to perform ridiculous confidence than to explain the absence of that feeling of satisfaction.

I'm not claiming all my ambition is some secret psychological defence. I genuinely like understanding and making things. I also know that being able to do a lot doesn't mean I know what I want from life beyond the next thing I can do.

One of the more uncomfortable things I've admitted recently is that I don't think I've felt genuinely safe or secure for years. I'm often on edge even around people who have never hurt me. Relaxing isn't something I can easily describe from experience.

I don't have a neat explanation. Some of that might be connected to what happened at school. Some of it might relate to the way I've always processed the world. It could be several things together.

I've also had mental health difficulties, including periods when being alive itself has been something I've questioned. I don't want to turn those experiences into entertainment or use them to make myself seem profound. They're part of my history, and they have affected my life. Sometimes I've needed real help. That's worth saying plainly.

What I find difficult is that I've rarely looked at my own experiences and thought, "That's a struggle." I've tended to call it life, keep moving, do the next thing, make a joke, or find something useful to occupy myself with.

I've been starting to ask whether that means I'm coping, avoiding something, genuinely experiencing things differently, or some combination. I don't know yet. I also know that a person can keep achieving things while not being okay. One doesn't cancel out the other.

I don't really know. That's not me being mysterious.

I know I'm literal and stubborn. I know I can be observant and still miss something important. I know I care about some people while finding social interaction exhausting. I know I can defend myself fiercely in an argument and then apologise to somebody who has hurt me. I know I want to be treated normally without having my actual needs dismissed. I know I don't always recognise stress, pain or emotion the way people expect.

I know I want independence, but I don't want isolation. I want support when it helps, not support that feels like being taken away from everyone else. I want to know what actually happened in my childhood, not settle for a story assembled from assumptions. I want people to take my words seriously without deciding that every word I say must be correct.

I've made mistakes. Adults around me have made mistakes. Some people have genuinely helped, and some situations have caused harm. Sometimes those categories overlap. None of this is clean enough to fit into a lovely beginning, middle and end.

Maybe this file will change as I remember more, find old records, or realise that an explanation I've relied on doesn't hold up. I'd rather correct it than pretend I knew everything all along.

For now, this is me: not the whole person, not an official account of every event, and definitely not the final version.

Just the part I can put into words today.

Hi. It's me again.

If you've read the first part, you'll know some of the things that have happened in my life. This isn't another attempt to recount them all. There would be no point in listing every incident again and attaching a tidy lesson to each one. Life hasn't worked that neatly, and I don't intend to pretend it has for the sake of making this easier to read.

This part is about a different problem: I can remember a remarkable amount about my life, but I can't always explain what any of it meant to me.

I like talking about myself. That's probably an odd thing to admit in a piece about struggling to understand myself. But talking lets me recall. Someone asks a question, a memory comes up, and suddenly I can give them the context, the setting, what somebody said, what I did next, and whatever happened after that.

Then comes the question that tends to ruin the whole system: “How did that make you feel?”

I don't know.

Not in the theatrical sense. Not because I'm holding back a profound answer. Often I genuinely don't have one. And it's frustrating to be able to explain the circumstances of something in detail while not being able to identify what was going on inside my own head.

So this is me trying. Not to diagnose myself or present a definitive character profile. Just to put my observations down before I replace them with yet another thing to do.

I can recall conversations, the way people behave, and little details that other people might not have considered important. I notice who talks to whom, how people react, and when something seems different from how it usually is.

But recalling an event isn't the same as understanding it.

I might know exactly what I said in a conversation and still not know why I said it. I can describe a tense situation and not be able to tell you whether I was afraid, angry, embarrassed, or something I haven't got a word for. Sometimes I only work out later that other people considered something serious.

That has created a strange gap between what I can tell people and what I can tell myself.

People hear a detailed account and assume I must understand what happened. I understand the sequence. I don't necessarily understand the experience.

I also don't want every gap in my memory or understanding filled in for me. People can be very confident about what an event must have meant. They can say that I was frightened, that I felt rejected, or that I was trying to gain control. Perhaps they're right sometimes. But unless I know, it's still an interpretation.

I'm learning that saying “I don't know” is more accurate than accepting the first explanation that sounds convincing.

I've described myself as literal for a reason.

If someone tells me something, my instinct is to take the words seriously. If I think what they've said is wrong, I'll challenge it. If there's a problem, I'll try to find a fix. If the fix is impossible, I'll look for a workaround. If the workaround fails, I'll find a different route.

That isn't only how I approach technology. It's how I tend to approach life.

There's something comforting about a problem that has a definable cause. A broken feature gives you something to test. A bad decision can be examined. A plan that doesn't work can be rewritten. Even if the answer is complicated, there is something to investigate.

People are harder.

They don't always say what they mean. Sometimes they exaggerate because they're upset. Sometimes they say something out of politeness. Sometimes they contradict themselves and don't see any contradiction. Sometimes they don't even understand their own reasons.

I can be very good at analysing what somebody said and still completely miss what they were trying to communicate.

And I need to admit something uncomfortable: being literal doesn't automatically make me objective. I can build a logical argument on top of an assumption that was wrong to begin with. I can mistake what I inferred for what I actually know. I can be confidently wrong while believing I'm simply being precise.

I'm trying to get better at separating those things.

What somebody said. What I observed. What I concluded. What I still don't know.

They're not interchangeable, however much I might want them to be.

I don't need to be offended to argue back.

Someone can insult me and I might not be particularly bothered by the insult itself. But if I can challenge what they've said, I probably will. Sometimes I do it because their point is wrong. Sometimes I do it because I dislike the assumption behind it. And sometimes, if I'm being fair, I do it simply because I can.

That last one isn't exactly noble.

I can make an argument longer than it needs to be. I can keep correcting details long after the conversation has stopped being useful. I can be more interested in proving that I have an answer than asking whether an answer is needed.

There is a difference between defending a boundary and defending my ability to win a disagreement. I don't always recognise which one I'm doing in the moment.

Another issue is that people sometimes interpret my tone as an emotion. If I swear, they assume I'm furious. If I sound blunt, they assume I hate somebody. If I challenge someone older, they assume I'm trying to be disrespectful.

Sometimes I really am annoyed. Sometimes I am being unnecessarily harsh. But sometimes I'm just talking.

I don't expect other people to read my mind. I do wish they'd stop acting as though their first interpretation of me must be correct.

And I have to offer them the same courtesy. If I want my intentions to be checked rather than assumed, I need to check theirs too.

I don't particularly seek out constant social interaction. That doesn't mean I'm going to blank somebody who has done nothing wrong.

If someone talks to me, I tend to respond. That seems like the decent thing to do. Then they continue talking, and I continue responding. Eventually a conversation becomes a routine, and a routine becomes something other people expect.

From the outside, that can look like I actively wanted the interaction in the first place.

Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn't mind it. Sometimes I was only being polite. Those situations can look nearly identical.

I can care about a person without wanting to talk to them all day. I can regard somebody as a friend without wanting the constant activity that some people associate with friendship. I can be glad somebody trusts me and still feel completely knackered after being around people.

That's an awkward combination because people understandably judge relationships partly by how often you choose to interact.

I don't always make those choices in the same way.

There's an uncomfortable question here: how often do I say yes to an interaction because I want it, and how often because I don't want someone else to feel rejected?

I don't know the answer. But I think it matters.

And I need to remember that declining a conversation isn't the same as being cruel. I can be respectful without making myself available all the time. That sounds obvious written down. It's less obvious in practice.

I hate being misrepresented.

If somebody says something inaccurate about my intentions, abilities or behaviour, I'm likely to correct them. Not always calmly. I can spend far too long trying to prove what I actually meant.

But I also make myself hard to interpret.

I joke when the topic is serious. I can sound confident when I feel no particular pride. I sometimes laugh at things other people would react to very differently. I describe significant experiences casually. I don't always name an emotion because I don't always know it.

Then I get frustrated when people misunderstand me.

There's a contradiction there, and I can't just blame everyone else for it.

Other people don't have access to whatever reasoning I've done in my head. If I skip the context and deliver the conclusion, they may hear something completely different from what I intended.

I still think people should ask rather than assume. But I also have to acknowledge that being understood sometimes requires explaining more than I naturally would.

That's partly why I like writing. I can go back, add context, correct an assumption, and say something more accurately than I might manage in a conversation.

Even then, the writing is only my version of events. It isn't an all-knowing account.

I'm beginning to notice that I don't always recognise what is happening inside me.

I can notice my heartbeat becoming more obvious or my muscles becoming tense without knowing what to call the sensation. I don't always distinguish stress from discomfort, or discomfort from pain, unless it's unmistakable.

That doesn't mean I don't have those experiences. It means identifying them can be difficult.

The same seems to apply to emotions. Somebody can ask whether I'm anxious and I might genuinely have no idea. I can describe the circumstances, but not confidently label my internal state.

I've read about alexithymia and interoception. Parts of those descriptions sound familiar, but recognising myself in an explanation isn't the same as being assessed or diagnosed. I don't want to give myself a label and then bend every experience to fit it.

This matters for more than curiosity.

When somebody asks a question about my wellbeing, my answer might reflect what I can recognise rather than everything I'm experiencing. Saying “I'm okay” can sometimes mean “I haven't identified anything specific to report.” Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

It also means I shouldn't assume a physical symptom is harmless just because I can't confidently identify it.

I'd like people working with me to understand that I may need questions based on concrete examples and observable changes, not only words like anxious, overwhelmed or distressed. I can often answer what happened more reliably than what I felt.

I can trust somebody enough to speak openly with them and still not want them to touch me.

Unexpected touch has always been complicated for me. There are sensory reasons, personal boundaries, and experiences that may have made physical contact feel even less predictable.

I don't need to believe someone is a bad person to dislike being touched by them. Someone can have perfectly good intentions and still cross a boundary.

I've described myself as paranoid. What I know for certain is that I spend a lot of time on edge, even around people who've never harmed me. I watch what's happening. I notice where people are and what they're doing. Relaxing doesn't feel like an automatic state I can just enter because someone tells me everything's fine.

I don't know exactly how much of that comes from autism, experience, habit or other factors. I won't pretend I can separate them neatly.

But I do think there's a difference between someone being safe and me feeling safe.

That's an important distinction, because another person's good intentions don't switch off my physical reaction.

It also doesn't mean every person is dangerous. I don't want to spend the rest of my life treating every possibility as a certainty.

I know I have additional needs. I also know that what helps one person with the same diagnosis might be useless or upsetting to me.

Sometimes people hear “autistic” or “dyspraxic” and arrive with an entire package of assumptions about what I must need, how I must behave, and what I must find difficult.

I don't want my needs ignored. I also don't want them decided without me.

Handwriting is a straightforward example. I can understand the work and still struggle to put it onto paper. My handwriting can deteriorate and become painful. Giving me a laptop isn't pretending the problem doesn't exist; it means allowing me to demonstrate what I know without the physical task getting in the way.

Other arrangements are less straightforward. A break, a separate room, or somebody stepping in might genuinely help another student. For me, the same arrangement can carry a very different meaning because of earlier experiences.

That doesn't mean every intervention is an insult or that every adult involved is acting unfairly. It means the effect on the person receiving the support matters just as much as the intention behind it.

I want to be listened to as an individual, not treated like a generic example of a diagnosis.

And I don't think that's an unreasonable request.

If something is broken, I want to fix it. If I can't fix it, I want a side solution. If there's a barrier, I'll look for a way around it.

That approach has helped me get things done that might otherwise have stayed unfinished.

It also has a downside.

Not everything is a problem I can solve. People have their own choices. Sometimes a conversation needs to stop. Sometimes the best response is to accept uncertainty rather than investigate it until everyone involved is exhausted.

I don't always find that easy.

There are moments when I keep pushing because I haven't got the result I wanted, not because continuing is sensible. I can focus on the immediate objective without properly considering the cost of reaching it.

That isn't something I want to glorify as determination.

When my reactions get intense, that can matter a lot. Understanding why I'm reacting is useful, but it's not a substitute for making sure I don't hurt myself or someone else.

I don't have a neat explanation for every reaction I've had. I do know that being confused about a feeling doesn't remove my responsibility for what I do with it.

I can identify a milestone. I can explain why an achievement matters on paper. I can tell you what took time, what was difficult, and what I did to get there.

Then I reach it and think: okay, what now?

More work? More responsibility? Money? Attention? Another problem that needs sorting?

There's usually another step, so I take it.

Sometimes I joke about having a god complex. It's easier to make an exaggerated claim about myself than to answer sincerely whether I'm proud of anything.

Because I don't really know what that feeling is supposed to be for me.

I can respect the work involved in something without feeling satisfied. I can know I've done something unusual without treating it as the end of anything. I can receive praise and immediately start evaluating whether the praise is accurate.

And there is a problem with that.

If every achievement is measured by the next one, there is no point at which I actually arrive.

I haven't decided that the answer is to force myself to celebrate everything. That would feel fake. But I am beginning to ask whether my standards leave any room for recognising what I've already done.

One thing that bothers me about telling personal stories is how quickly people look for a moral.

Something bad happened, so I must have become stronger. Something was difficult, so I must have learned resilience. I achieved something, so it must have made everything worthwhile.

That's not how I experience it.

Some things happened and I dealt with them. Some things are still unresolved. Some people helped me. Others made things harder. I've done things I'm glad I did and things I can't explain particularly well.

I've also made mistakes. I can be arrogant, rude, impatient and unfair. I can assume I'm right because my reasoning sounds convincing to me. I can judge somebody's behaviour without knowing what was going on in their life.

If I'm going to write about myself seriously, I have to include those parts too.

What happened to me doesn't excuse every reaction I've had. But my reactions don't erase what happened to me either.

I don't need to be a hero or a villain to tell the truth about my life.

I would rather be an unfinished person on the page than a polished character who doesn't exist.

This is probably the question I'm least comfortable with.

When there's a problem, I can work on it. When something needs making, I can make it. When somebody needs an answer, I can try to find one.

But what about the moments when none of that is required?

What do I actually enjoy? What do I want from an ordinary day? What would I choose if I wasn't reacting to a problem, proving I could do something, or meeting an expectation?

I don't have a confident answer.

I know what I dislike. I know some of my boundaries. I know what I'm capable of doing and what I'd like to achieve in the future. But those things don't fully answer what it's like to be me when I'm not occupied.

That uncertainty matters. I've spent a long time being capable of doing the next thing. I've spent less time asking whether doing the next thing is actually what I want.

I don't want to manufacture an answer for this article.

Maybe my preferences will become clearer over time. Maybe some things are harder for me to recognise than for other people. Maybe there's more than one reason.

For now, it's an open question.

There's a strange risk in writing something like this.

I want people to understand me better. But once you publish a description of yourself, people may start treating it as the definitive version of you.

It isn't.

A statement I make at fifteen might not be how I describe myself at twenty. Something I currently believe about my own behaviour might turn out to be incomplete. I might find a better explanation, remember something differently, or decide a detail is more private than I first thought.

I want the freedom to do that.

I also want people to distinguish between what I've experienced, what I've been told, and what I suspect. Those aren't all equally certain. I don't want a theory I once mentioned in conversation repeated as an established fact about me.

That includes explanations about diagnoses, personality, past decisions and why other people acted as they did.

I can talk about what I remember. I can explain what I believe. I cannot always know what was going on inside everybody else's head, including my own.

The irony of writing about myself is that I may never be able to give a complete account of who I am.

But perhaps completeness isn't the point.

I'm somebody who talks about himself more easily than he explains himself.

Somebody who values accuracy but can be wrong.

Somebody who dislikes being unnecessarily rude but can be brutally blunt.

Somebody who can care about people and still want silence.

Somebody who notices changes around him while missing signals from inside his own body.

Somebody who wants support without surrendering his independence.

Somebody who can achieve things without knowing how to feel about them.

And somebody who's spent a lot of time asking “what next?” without always asking “what happened to me?”

None of that is a diagnosis. None of it is a complete personality. And none of it means I've solved the question I started with.

I don't know that I ever will.

But this time I'm not trying to fix myself like a broken piece of software. I'm trying to find words for experiences I've mostly just lived through.

I can recall my life.

I'm learning to examine it.

Whether I understand myself yet is another matter.

Me? I think.

ME? I THINK

A NOTE BEFORE PART III

First, thank you to everyone who has read Me? I Think and reached out with suggestions about possible diagnoses.

I appreciate that people are trying to understand what I've written and, in some cases, help me understand myself.

But here's a fun fact: I'm human, not a diagnosis box.

Not everything I do needs a medical explanation. Not every unusual characteristic needs a name, and not every paragraph is an invitation to investigate another condition.

Part III is going to be different from the previous parts.

This part covers some of the darkest and most medically active periods of my life. It also explores my deeper thoughts, my understanding of myself, and moments I've never publicly shared before.

Some of these experiences are things I've struggled to explain even to people who know me personally.

I'm choosing to write about them because I want my experiences to be understood, not because I want to be treated differently.

There may be things in this part that are difficult to read. Some involve mental health crises, hospital experiences and thoughts that I still find difficult to explain.

I won't necessarily explain the meaning behind everything I write. Sometimes the words themselves are enough, and sometimes I'd rather leave the rest for the reader to understand.

Please don't mistake my willingness to write about something for an invitation to question me about it in person unless it's a calm question.

You can understand someone's experiences without turning them into the subject of every conversation.

And perhaps most importantly, what I describe here is part of my life. It isn't the entirety of who I am.

I'm a person before I'm a patient, a diagnosis or a story.

With that said, welcome to Part III.

The Darkest Time.

I don't particularly know when things became as bad as they did.

I can remember events. I can remember conversations, places, people's reactions and sometimes details that probably shouldn't matter as much as they do.

What I struggle with is identifying the exact moment everything changed.

For years, I'd been dealing with things that other people might have considered unusual. Medical appointments, assessments, difficulties at school, problems communicating, and situations where I never quite understood why people behaved the way they did.

Eventually, unusual became normal.

And then normal became something considerably worse.

There was a point where my life stopped being primarily about school, friendships or figuring out what I wanted to do in the future.

Instead, it became about whether I was safe, what professionals thought was happening to me, and what would happen next.

I don't think people always understand what that's like.

It's strange being the person everyone is discussing while not necessarily understanding what's happening inside your own head.

People can ask how you're feeling, and you can genuinely have no useful answer.

You can explain exactly what happened yesterday, yet struggle to explain what it meant to you.

You can even find something funny in a situation that everybody else considers serious.

That doesn't mean you don't understand the seriousness.

It means your reaction doesn't always look the way someone expects.

And unfortunately, the darkest periods of my life involved quite a lot of that.

This isn't going to be a straightforward story about getting better.

Nor is it going to be a collection of dramatic moments written to make somebody feel sorry for me.

It's an account of what happened, what I remember, and what I still don't entirely understand.

Some things will be difficult to explain. Others might be uncomfortable to read.

But I think they deserve to be written about.

Because the person I am now didn't appear out of nowhere.

And some of the things that shaped me happened when I wasn't particularly sure I'd have a future to shape.

THE PART THAT HASN'T QUITE ENDED

I'd love to say everything I'm about to describe is firmly in the past.

Unfortunately, life hasn't been quite that considerate.

I still struggle with some of these things today. No one's perfect, especially me. Although, at this point, my medical record has enough material to qualify for its own autobiography.

And there are certain teachers who are very aware of that.

They know about some of my thoughts, how difficult things have become, and just how bad my mental health got THIS YEAR.

Yes, this year. Not some distant childhood experience that I've conveniently recovered from.

I wish I could tell you everything improved in a nice, straightforward way. Unfortunately, my brain appears to have missed the meeting where that was agreed.

Some days I can function perfectly normally, talk to people, make jokes and get on with whatever I'm doing.

Other days, things aren't nearly as straightforward.

And sometimes the people around me notice before I do.

I don't particularly enjoy admitting that, but pretending otherwise wouldn't make this an accurate account of my life.

The difficult experiences I'll describe aren't the entirety of who I am. They're also not something I can honestly claim has completely disappeared.

I'm still here, still thinking, still questioning things, and occasionally wondering what the actual fuck is going on.

Which, considering the title of this book, seems rather appropriate.

2026.

What a fucking year.

I don't particularly know how else to introduce it.

I'd love to say this was the year everything finally became normal. That I could go to school, talk to people, work on things I enjoyed and generally get on with life without something extraordinary happening.

Unfortunately, life apparently had other plans.

And to explain why 2026 became so difficult, I actually need to start in 2025.

Because some of the things that affected me this year began long before January.

SEVEN DAYS

On Wednesday, 9 July 2025, I met someone called Robert.

On Wednesday, 16 July 2025, he died.

Seven days.

That's how long I personally remember knowing him.

My family, however, had known Robert for considerably longer.

And I think that's an important distinction.

For them, his death meant losing someone who had been part of their lives for quite some time.

For me, it meant losing someone I'd barely had the opportunity to know.

But I don't think that made it meaningless.

I remember finding the whole situation difficult to understand.

Not necessarily because I didn't know what death meant. I understood that perfectly well.

What I struggled with was understanding where I belonged in everything that followed.

People who had known Robert for years were grieving.

My family knew him far better than I did.

And I was somebody who'd only known him for a week.

Part of me wondered whether I had any right to feel involved.

Which sounds rather ridiculous now.

Apparently, I'd managed to convince myself there was some kind of minimum friendship requirement before somebody's death was allowed to affect you.

As though grief came with terms and conditions.

Sorry, you haven't known this person long enough. Please try again later.

But that's genuinely how I approached it.

I started comparing my relationship with Robert to everybody else's.

And because mine had been so short, I questioned whether I belonged in the situation at all.

I don't think I recognised immediately how much those seven days mattered to me.

But I do know they mattered.

And once he was gone, there wasn't going to be an eighth.

A FUNERAL I NEARLY DIDN'T ATTEND

Robert's funeral took place on 22 August 2025.

Originally, I didn't plan to attend.

It wasn't because I didn't care about him.

It wasn't because I thought funerals were pointless.

I just felt out of place.

My family had known him longer. His other friends had known him longer. Other people had histories and memories that extended far beyond the week I'd spent knowing him.

And something about attending felt wrong.

As though I'd be placing myself into an occasion where I didn't really belong.

A few friends eventually made me reconsider.

They helped me understand that attending someone's funeral isn't a competition about who knew them best.

It isn't about proving that your relationship was important enough to qualify.

It's about remembering someone and acknowledging that they mattered.

So I went.

And I'm glad I did.

That doesn't mean I suddenly understood everything I was feeling.

I didn't.

I've always had difficulties understanding my own emotional reactions, particularly when something serious happens.

I can remember events clearly.

I can remember conversations, locations and little details that other people might have forgotten.

But ask me exactly what I felt during those moments, and the answer becomes considerably more complicated.

Sometimes I genuinely don't know.

And funerals aren't exactly the easiest environments in which to work that out.

People cry. People comfort each other. People talk about memories.

Meanwhile, I can understand the significance of what's happening without necessarily reacting in the way people expect.

But I was there.

And I think that was important.

THEN CAME JANUARY

By the time 2026 arrived, Robert's death was already part of my history.

So were the experiences I'd had at school.

The assaults.

The bullying.

The isolation.

The periods where I felt like I didn't particularly belong anywhere.

And the years of trying to understand why certain things happened to me.

I wasn't entering the year with a completely clean slate.

But I certainly wasn't expecting things to get considerably worse.

At the beginning of 2026, I lost family members.

More people gone.

More situations where I understood what had happened but struggled to understand my own response.

And I think something about experiencing several losses within a relatively short period made everything feel increasingly unpredictable.

I'd already spent years dealing with things that most people probably wouldn't consider normal childhood experiences.

Then I lost Robert.

Then family members.

And eventually, I reached a point where my own life became part of the concern.

I don't particularly want to compare those losses.

Some people had been part of my life for years. Robert had been part of it for seven days.

They weren't identical relationships, and I don't think there's much value in pretending they were.

But they all happened.

And their effects didn't disappear simply because I was expected to carry on with my life.

Unfortunately, January doesn't arrive with a button labelled Reset Previous Problems.

Although I would've appreciated one.

MARCH AND APRIL: WHEN THINGS BECAME SERIOUS

Sometime between March and April 2026, my mental health reached one of its lowest points.

I attempted to end my life.

Twice.

Within the same week.

That's not an easy thing to write.

And I imagine it isn't particularly comfortable to read.

But I don't want to pretend it didn't happen.

There are parts of my life I've written about with humour, sarcasm and an almost ridiculous amount of detail.

This is one of the experiences where I think the facts themselves say enough.

I'm not going to describe the methods or every moment surrounding those attempts.

I don't believe those details are necessary for somebody to understand the seriousness of what happened.

What matters is that I reached that point.

Twice.

And looking back at it now is strange.

Because I'm sitting here, writing about a time when I wasn't sure I wanted to continue living.

I remember things about that period.

I remember conversations.

I remember people's reactions.

And I remember certain moments much more clearly than I can explain the emotions behind them.

I think people sometimes imagine that somebody experiencing a suicidal crisis must be visibly falling apart.

Constantly crying.

Unable to speak normally.

Obviously distressed.

But that's not always what happens.

Someone can laugh.

Someone can hold a conversation.

Someone can attend school.

Someone can talk about completely ordinary things.

And still be struggling with thoughts that are extraordinarily serious.

I was not an exception to that possibility.

And I think that's something people need to understand.

Just because somebody doesn't look distressed doesn't mean they're okay.

HOSPITALS AND THE STRANGE THINGS I REMEMBER

Following those events, medical professionals became involved.

I spent hours in hospital.

And there were conversations about my safety, my mental health and what needed to happen next.

I'd already experienced plenty of medical appointments throughout my childhood.

I was familiar with assessments.

With professionals asking questions.

With adults discussing difficulties I sometimes didn't entirely understand myself.

But this was different.

This wasn't a discussion about my handwriting, my coordination or how I processed information.

This was about whether I was safe.

And there's something deeply uncomfortable about being the person everyone is concerned about while struggling to explain what's happening inside your own head.

One moment from hospital has stayed with me.

I was told I wasn't allowed to leave.

My response?

I laughed.

Yes.

I laughed.

Apparently, when somebody tells me that I'm being kept in hospital because of concerns about my safety, my brain decides that's a suitable moment for comedy.

I don't think the professionals involved found it nearly as amusing.

But I understood why I was there.

I knew what had happened.

I wasn't laughing because I believed the situation was harmless.

It was simply the reaction I had.

And this is something I've struggled with for a long time.

I don't necessarily respond to serious events in the way people expect.

Sometimes I become quiet.

Sometimes I make a joke.

Sometimes I can explain something logically without being able to explain how it makes me feel.

And sometimes I can't explain the emotion at all.

That doesn't mean the emotion doesn't exist.

Nor does it mean the situation isn't serious.

It means my outward reactions aren't always reliable indicators of what's happening internally.

THE CRISIS TEAM

For approximately six weeks, I was involved with crisis services.

That's not a sentence I ever particularly expected to include in an autobiography written at fifteen.

But here we are.

The focus was different from most medical involvement I'd experienced previously.

It wasn't primarily about education or developmental difficulties.

It was about my safety and mental health.

I won't pretend I enjoyed that period.

I didn't particularly want to be in the position of needing those services.

But I understand why they became involved.

Two suicide attempts within a week are not something that can reasonably be ignored.

And whilst I sometimes find medical discussions difficult or frustrating, I recognise that professional involvement can be necessary.

I remember that by the end of the crisis-team involvement, there was a clear plan for what needed to happen if my mental health deteriorated seriously again.

It wasn't a particularly pleasant thing to have to consider.

But it was important.

One thing I'd like people to understand is that being discharged from a service doesn't necessarily mean every difficulty has vanished.

Mental health doesn't operate like a software deployment.

You can't simply mark the incident as resolved, restart the system and assume everything will work perfectly forever.

And speaking as somebody who spends a ridiculous amount of time working with software, I can confidently say that even the technology doesn't behave that conveniently.

Sometimes things improve.

Sometimes difficulties return.

Sometimes you recognise them earlier.

And sometimes you need help.

That doesn't automatically erase the progress you've made.

SOMEHOW, LIFE CONTINUED

Here's where the story becomes somewhat strange.

Because despite everything I've described, 2026 wasn't exclusively terrible.

There were genuinely good moments.

I continued attending school.

I developed friendships.

I had conversations that made me laugh.

I got to know people I hadn't necessarily expected to become close to.

And I found myself involved in social situations that I never particularly went looking for.

I've mentioned before that I'm not somebody who actively tries to become part of friendship groups.

Usually, I just happen to know people.

Then they start speaking to me.

Then I speak back, because I'm not going to deliberately ignore someone for absolutely no reason.

And before I know it, apparently we're friends.

Nobody sends an official confirmation.

Nobody asks me to sign anything.

I'm simply expected to understand that a friendship has formed.

Very poor administrative practice, if you ask me.

But some of those friendships have been important.

There are people who know that I've had a difficult history without making every conversation about it.

People who can joke with me.

People who can disagree with me.

People who recognise that something might be wrong without immediately turning the situation into an interrogation.

And I appreciate that more than I probably communicate.

I don't want to be treated as though my medical history is the most interesting thing about me.

I have interests.

Opinions.

Things I enjoy doing.

Things I absolutely cannot stand.

And an apparently endless ability to investigate questions that other people would've forgotten about five minutes after asking them.

All of those things are still part of me.

BUILDING SOMETHING OF MY OWN

Another major part of 2026 was my work.

In August, Ident Group Ltd was incorporated.

Which is still quite a ridiculous thing to write about myself.

Earlier in the year, I had been dealing with some of the most serious mental health difficulties of my life.

A few months later, I was working on software, business decisions, technical systems and the enormous number of problems that come with trying to build something.

It wasn't straightforward.

It still isn't.

But I had something I cared about.

Something I could investigate.

Something I could improve.

Something that gave me problems I actually wanted to solve.

I don't think programming cured my mental health.

It didn't.

And I don't want anybody reading this to come away with the impression that people can simply find a hobby and suddenly stop struggling.

That's not how it works.

But meaningful activities can still matter.

For me, programming and technical work have provided something to concentrate on when my thoughts become difficult.

I can research.

I can build.

I can fix things.

I can keep my attention occupied.

And sometimes, having something I genuinely want to do has made a significant difference.

The difficult part is recognising that being productive doesn't automatically mean being okay.

Someone can run a business and still struggle.

Someone can achieve things and still question themselves.

Someone can appear capable of handling complicated responsibilities while having difficulties that aren't immediately visible.

I've experienced that contradiction myself.

THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW

There are certain teachers who are aware of how serious my mental health became this year.

Some know more than others.

And I think that's important to acknowledge.

Because whilst I don't particularly enjoy discussing certain things face-to-face, there have been times when people responsible for my wellbeing needed to understand what was happening.

I don't expect everyone to know everything.

Nor do I want every teacher to treat me like I'm made of glass.

Sometimes I just want to sit in English and get on with the lesson.

Or debate something completely unnecessary.

Or answer a question in a way nobody particularly expected.

Or spend several hours researching something because a teacher made the catastrophic mistake of asking me an open-ended question.

I want to be treated like a student.

Not an ongoing medical incident.

But that doesn't mean my history should be ignored when it's actually relevant.

There's a balance between understanding somebody and making their difficulties the centre of every interaction.

And I think some people around me understand that balance better than others.

THE GOOD DAYS WERE REAL

One thing I particularly want to emphasise is that the good moments weren't imaginary.

They mattered.

Even during a difficult year.

I could have a genuinely enjoyable conversation and still struggle later.

I could spend hours working on something interesting and still experience difficult thoughts afterwards.

I could laugh with friends, go home and feel completely different.

Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

Mental health isn't a simple choice between being happy and being miserable.

And I don't think it's particularly helpful to describe somebody as either completely recovered or completely unwell.

My experiences have never been that straightforward.

There have been times where things improved.

There have been times where they deteriorated.

And there have been times where I genuinely didn't know how to describe what was happening.

I don't want the difficult experiences to erase everything good that happened.

But I also don't want the good experiences to be used as evidence that the difficult ones weren't serious.

Both deserve to be acknowledged.

WHERE I AM NOW

I would love to end this chapter by saying the difficult thoughts disappeared permanently after March or April.

But I can't honestly say that.

I still struggle with some things today.

I recognise that my mental health has a history of becoming difficult, sometimes in ways I don't immediately understand.

There are occasions where I'm able to recognise a problem.

Others where somebody else might notice something before I do.

And moments where I simply don't have a useful explanation.

That doesn't mean every difficult day becomes a crisis.

It doesn't mean I'm constantly struggling.

And it certainly doesn't mean every conversation needs to become a mental health assessment.

Sometimes I genuinely just want to talk about something ordinary.

But I'm not going to pretend that everything is perfect.

It isn't.

No one's perfect.

Especially me.

Although, considering the number of assessments and medical discussions I've experienced throughout my life, I suspect the NHS has already reached that conclusion.

The important thing is that I can acknowledge where I've struggled without allowing those experiences to become my entire identity.

I'm not just somebody who's been to hospital.

I'm not just somebody who's worked with a crisis team.

I'm not just a list of diagnoses, difficulties and medical appointments.

I'm also somebody who builds things.

Who thinks far too deeply about certain questions.

Who has friends.

Who sometimes laughs at completely inappropriate moments.

And who is still trying to understand himself.

WHAT THIS YEAR ACTUALLY WAS

So, what was 2026?

It was a year that began with loss.

A year when the death of someone I'd known for seven days remained part of a much bigger story.

A year when I lost family members.

A year when, sometime between March and April, I attempted to end my own life twice within one week.

A year involving hospitals, crisis services and conversations about my safety that I never expected to have.

But it was also a year of friendships.

Of developing interests.

Of building things.

Of unexpected achievements.

Of conversations that made me laugh.

And of moments I genuinely wouldn't want to erase.

I don't believe everything happens for a reason.

I don't believe the people I've lost needed to die to teach me something.

And I don't believe the worst moments of my life were necessary experiences designed to make me stronger.

Some things were simply terrible.

Others were good.

And sometimes they happened close enough together that I struggled to understand how both could be part of the same year.

I lost people. I nearly lost myself. And I still experienced moments that mattered.

That's the reality of 2026.

Not a perfect recovery story.

Not an endless tragedy.

Just a year that became considerably more complicated than I would've preferred.

And perhaps the most ridiculous part of all this is that I'm only fifteen.

I haven't even finished my GCSEs, and apparently I've already accumulated enough experiences to write three parts of an autobiography.

I think it's about time I explained something.

Why do I think about everything?

Why do I investigate things that most people would probably forget about within five minutes?

Why can somebody make one observation about me and somehow cause several days of research?

And, perhaps most importantly, why has a website that was originally supposed to explain my life suddenly developed an entire section dedicated to possible diagnoses?

Because apparently having an autobiography wasn't complicated enough.

Now I need a research department.

I DON'T LIKE NOT KNOWING

I've always been curious.

But I don't think curious quite describes how my mind works.

If somebody tells me something interesting, I'll usually want to know why.

Then I'll want to know how.

Then I'll want to know whether their explanation is correct.

And then I'll probably discover something else that raises another question.

It's an incredibly inconvenient process.

Especially when I'm trying to sleep.

The strange part is that I don't necessarily need somebody to give me an answer immediately.

In fact, I sometimes struggle to answer questions immediately myself.

A teacher might ask me something, and I genuinely won't have a useful response at that moment.

But that doesn't mean the question disappears.

It might stay in my head for hours.

Sometimes days.

And eventually, I'll investigate it.

One of my English teachers appears to have discovered this.

He can ask me an open-ended question, knowing perfectly well that I might not answer it in the lesson.

But there's a reasonable chance I'll go home, think about it, research it and eventually come back with something.

Whether that something is a sensible answer or an unnecessarily complicated argument is another matter entirely.

I've also noticed that people sometimes misunderstand why I research things.

They assume that if I'm Googling something, I must not have known anything about it beforehand.

But quite often, I already have an explanation in mind.

I'm checking whether it's correct.

There's a difference between learning something for the first time and verifying something you already believe you understand.

I do both.

And sometimes my initial understanding turns out to be wrong.

Which is annoying, but useful.

Because I'd rather discover that I'm wrong than continue believing something simply because I was confident about it.

I CAN LEAVE THINGS UNFINISHED, BUT NOT ALWAYS UNANSWERED

Here's something I've noticed about myself.

I can abandon a task.

I can leave a project unfinished.

I can decide that something isn't worth continuing and move on.

In fact, I used to have a much stronger need to finish things, but over time I've learnt to interrupt that habit by changing how long I spend on activities.

What I find considerably harder is leaving a question unanswered.

There's a difference.

A task can sit unfinished for weeks without particularly bothering me.

But somebody can say one interesting thing about how I behave, and suddenly I'm spending an entire evening trying to understand it.

It's as though my brain has decided that unanswered questions are unacceptable administrative errors.

And somebody needs to resolve them.

Unfortunately, that somebody is usually me.

I don't always enjoy this.

Sometimes researching things is genuinely interesting.

Sometimes it becomes exhausting.

And sometimes I discover information that raises questions I'd rather not have encountered in the first place.

Which brings me to something that has happened rather frequently this year.

DISCOVERING THINGS ABOUT MYSELF THROUGH OTHER PEOPLE

One of the strangest experiences I've had recently is discovering characteristics about myself because of things I've learnt about other people.

I might hear somebody explain how they think.

Or notice an unusual behaviour.

Or ask a question because I'm genuinely interested in why somebody responds to a situation in a particular way.

Then I'll go home and research it.

And, somehow, the investigation starts becoming relevant to me.

This isn't something I particularly set out to do.

I'm usually trying to understand the other person.

But once I understand the explanation, I'll occasionally recognise something familiar in my own experiences.

Or somebody else will.

And that's where things become awkward.

Because I don't particularly enjoy discovering yet another possible explanation for how my brain works.

I already have diagnosed conditions.

I've spent years attending appointments, being assessed and having professionals discuss different aspects of my development.

I'm not actively trying to add more entries to my medical history.

Yet apparently, every time I learn something new about another person, my own brain decides to become relevant to the conversation.

For fuck's sake.

THE THINGS OTHER PEOPLE NOTICE

One example is my speech.

For a long time, I didn't recognise that I stuttered.

I'd experienced communication difficulties when I was younger, including delayed speech development and hearing problems.

So occasional interruptions in my speech weren't something I paid much attention to.

Then somebody I knew pointed out that I stuttered.

At first, I disagreed.

Not because I was deliberately denying anything.

I genuinely hadn't recognised it.

But once it had been mentioned, I started noticing it.

And suddenly, something I'd apparently been doing for years became something I was consciously aware of.

That's a strange experience.

You can know yourself for fifteen years and still have somebody else notice something about you before you do.

It raises an uncomfortable question.

If I hadn't noticed that, what else might I not have noticed?

And unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of question my brain struggles to leave alone.

WHY SIMILARITIES BOTHER ME

I've also noticed how frequently I discover similarities between myself and people who appear to behave very differently.

Someone might openly refuse a task.

I might avoid the same sort of task through negotiation, delay or finding an alternative.

From the outside, those behaviours look different.

But sometimes the reasons behind them overlap.

That doesn't mean they're identical.

And it certainly doesn't mean we have the same diagnosis.

But it does make me wonder whether I've been assuming that different outward behaviours always represent completely different experiences.

The more I investigate, the more complicated that question becomes.

And I don't always appreciate the answers.

Sometimes I genuinely hope a possible explanation turns out to be wrong.

Not because I'm embarrassed by it.

But because I've already spent enough of my life being assessed and labelled.

I'd rather understand what I experience without constantly discovering another condition I might need to discuss with a doctor.

Although, apparently, my curiosity has other plans.

THE DIAGNOSIS INVESTIGATION

This is why the diagnosis investigation section exists.

Not because I'm attempting to diagnose myself.

Not because I want an impressive collection of medical terminology.

And certainly not because I think every unusual thing I do must be a symptom of something.

It exists because people have repeatedly suggested possible explanations after reading about my experiences.

Some suggestions have come from people who know me.

Others have appeared after I've written about myself.

And some have come from investigating characteristics I've noticed in other people.

Originally, I found this slightly amusing.

Then it became increasingly irritating.

Because I kept encountering explanations that sounded uncomfortably familiar.

One of the first was alexithymia, a term used to describe difficulties identifying and describing emotions.

I've written before about how I can remember events clearly without necessarily understanding what I felt during them.

I can recognise that something was serious.

I can understand why somebody else might feel a certain way.

But ask me what I was feeling, and sometimes I genuinely don't know.

That doesn't establish that I have alexithymia.

But it explains why somebody might suggest investigating it.

Then there's PDA, commonly called Pathological Demand Avoidance.

For a long time, I understood it as somebody simply hating being asked to do things.

And I knew I disliked being forced into activities.

That wasn't new information.

What surprised me was learning about the more complicated ways demand avoidance can appear.

Negotiating.

Delaying.

Escaping expectations.

Sometimes resisting activities that somebody might otherwise have wanted to do.

Some descriptions were familiar.

Others weren't.

And that's precisely why I don't want to immediately accept the label.

PDA is a debated profile rather than a standalone diagnosis, and there are other possible explanations for demand avoidance.

My behaviour might be influenced by autism, sensory experiences, past events, personal values or several things at once.

I want to understand which explanations actually make sense.

Not simply accept whichever one sounds most convincing on a particular day.

ADHD has also been raised as a possibility.

And honestly, at this point, I'm slightly concerned that if I investigate the wrong subject for long enough, somebody will suggest I have that too.

But jokes aside, I know that recognising a few characteristics doesn't establish a diagnosis.

That's what professional assessment is for.

WHY I WANT EVIDENCE AGAINST THINGS

Something that might surprise people is that I don't particularly want these investigations to confirm anything.

In fact, I'd be quite happy if several possibilities turned out to be wrong.

I already know that I have autism and dyspraxia.

I also have an established mental health history.

I'm not trying to pretend those things don't exist.

But I don't want to automatically interpret every experience through another diagnostic label.

If I investigate a possible condition, I want to know what supports it.

What contradicts it.

What could explain the same behaviour differently.

And whether the characteristic actually affects my daily life enough to require professional attention.

That's why I'm interested in documenting these experiences over time.

I want to be able to look back at examples that existed before I learnt about a particular condition.

I also want to record exceptions.

Because if I'm only collecting examples that support a theory, I'm not really investigating it.

I'm just trying to convince myself.

And I don't particularly want to do that.

WHY I WRITE INSTEAD OF JUST EXPLAINING

There's another reason I've put so much of this into writing.

I can often explain something much more effectively when I have time to think about it.

In person, somebody might ask me a question and expect an immediate answer.

Sometimes I have one.

Sometimes I don't.

And sometimes I have about seventeen different answers, none of which are particularly easy to put into a sentence.

Writing gives me time.

I can organise my thoughts.

I can correct something.

I can reconsider an explanation.

And I can decide how directly I want to express something.

That's particularly important when I'm discussing personal experiences.

I don't always want to sit opposite somebody and explain everything out loud.

Sometimes I'd rather write it down.

Let somebody read it.

And carry on with my day.

But I've discovered something rather inconvenient about publishing personal writing online.

Other people can analyse it.

Quite thoroughly, apparently.

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING UNDERSTOOD TOO WELL

I've recently discovered that artificial intelligence can read my writing and produce surprisingly detailed explanations of what it thinks I'm describing.

Sometimes those explanations are useful.

I can read them privately and understand why a particular experience might have affected me.

But there's a problem.

Other people can request the same thing.

And I've deliberately left some experiences as subtext.

Not because I want to lie about them.

Not because I think they should be hidden.

But because I don't particularly enjoy having deeply personal characteristics pointed out to me.

There's a difference between someone understanding what I've written and someone approaching me with an entire psychological breakdown of it.

I want people to understand my mental health.

I want them to recognise that my reactions don't always communicate what I'm experiencing.

And I want people to know that difficult periods can return even when somebody appears to be functioning normally.

But I don't particularly want every conversation to become an analysis of my personality.

Sometimes understanding somebody means recognising when not to make something a discussion.

Especially when they've already chosen how much they want to say.

I DON'T ALWAYS UNDERSTAND MYSELF

This is probably the most uncomfortable thing to admit.

I can spend hours analysing a situation.

I can notice patterns in other people's behaviour.

I can remember conversations in considerable detail.

I can research technical subjects, challenge explanations and work through complicated problems.

And yet, sometimes I don't recognise something relatively obvious about myself.

I might not notice a speech pattern.

I might not recognise an emotion.

I might not understand why I automatically behave differently when somebody enters a room.

And sometimes I don't even realise how much a particular experience has affected me until somebody else points it out.

That doesn't mean I know nothing about myself.

I know my preferences.

I know my boundaries.

I know plenty about how I behave and what I believe.

But there's a difference between knowing what you do and understanding why you do it.

And that's where a lot of my questions begin.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UNDERSTANDING AND DIAGNOSING

I want to make something very clear.

An investigation is not a diagnosis.

A similarity is not proof.

A questionnaire is not automatically a clinical assessment.

And somebody recognising a characteristic in my writing doesn't mean they've discovered another condition.

It means they've suggested something worth considering.

Sometimes that suggestion might be useful.

Sometimes it might be completely wrong.

Sometimes it might describe something already explained by my existing diagnoses.

And sometimes it might reveal an issue that genuinely deserves professional attention.

That's why I want these questions approached carefully.

I've considered putting my experiences into a document for a doctor, partly because I find writing easier than explaining everything in person.

But even then, the purpose wouldn't be to convince somebody that I have a particular condition.

It would be to give them information and ask what they think needs investigating.

I don't need a doctor to agree with me.

I need them to help determine what's actually going on.

There's a difference.

SO WHY DO I KEEP DOING IT?

Because I want to understand things.

That's the simplest explanation I can give.

I want to understand why people behave differently.

Why I react differently.

Why some experiences seem ordinary to me but unusual to somebody else.

Why I can explain certain things logically without being able to identify how I feel about them.

And why a single observation from another person can sometimes change how I understand years of my own behaviour.

I don't think I'll ever have an answer to every question.

And despite how much that irritates me, I'm aware of it.

There are things I might never fully understand.

There are explanations that could change as I get older.

And there are things that simply don't need a medical label.

I'm trying to become more comfortable with that.

Whether my brain intends to cooperate is another question entirely.

THE PERSON BEHIND THE INVESTIGATION

I don't want this chapter to leave people thinking that my entire personality revolves around diagnoses.

It doesn't.

I like programming.

I enjoy investigating complicated subjects.

I have opinions about things that have absolutely nothing to do with medicine.

I have friends.

I make jokes.

I argue with teachers about questions they probably regret asking.

And I occasionally spend far too long thinking about something that nobody else considers particularly important.

Those things don't suddenly become symptoms just because I'm autistic.

Some might be influenced by my diagnoses.

Others might simply be part of my personality.

And sometimes the distinction isn't particularly important.

What matters is whether understanding something helps me live my life, communicate with people or recognise when I need support.

That's the purpose of the diagnosis investigation.

Not to collect conditions.

Not to prove I'm different.

And not to give the internet another opportunity to tell me what's supposedly wrong with my brain.

It's there because I have questions.

And I want answers.

But I'm still a person, not an investigation.

And if somebody reads this entire chapter and responds by suggesting another diagnosis, I might genuinely lose my fucking mind.

Metaphorically, before anybody starts writing that one down too.

No, but honestly, I do appreciate some of it because I'm highly aware of medical conditions, as I've lived with and beside them for quite a damn while now. And I can honestly say that while they're (I've had to fix "there" to "they're" a lot today; I'm really bad at this writing thing) irritating to read as a list to a doctor when you have 20+ entries, it makes for some ungodly humour.

You've spent quite a while reading about me.

My childhood.

My experiences.

My mistakes.

My thoughts.

My mental health.

And the rather ridiculous number of questions I've asked about myself.

But I want to change something.

For once, I don't want you to think about me.

I want you to think about yourself.

Not who you tell people you are.

Not who your family thinks you are.

Not who your friends expect you to be.

You.

Because it's remarkably easy to read somebody else's life and decide what you think about them.

It's considerably harder to apply that same level of scrutiny to yourself.

So here's a question.

How much of what you believe about yourself have you actually questioned?

You might think you're kind.

You might think you're honest.

You might think you're understanding.

But have you ever genuinely examined whether those things are true?

Or have you simply accepted them because nobody has given you a reason not to?

I've spent years trying to understand why I behave the way I do.

Sometimes I've discovered things I didn't particularly want to know.

Sometimes I've been wrong.

Sometimes I've had to reconsider things I believed about myself for most of my life.

And sometimes I've discovered that the explanation wasn't nearly as complicated as I initially thought.

Now it's your turn.

Think about the last person you judged.

Did you understand them?

Or did you understand the version of them that you created in your own head?

Think about the last time somebody disagreed with you.

Did you listen?

Or did you spend the conversation preparing your response?

Think about the last person who trusted you.

Did you give them a reason to keep trusting you?

And here's one more.

If somebody wrote about your life with the same level of honesty I've tried to use here, would you recognise the person they described?

You don't have to answer me.

In fact, I'd rather you didn't.

This isn't an examination.

I'm not interested in marking your answers.

I'm interested in whether you actually stop and think about them.

Because throughout this book, you've been reading about a person who spends far too much time questioning himself.

And perhaps you've been doing something very different.

Perhaps you've been questioning me.

That's fine.

But now, for once, question yourself.

I've spent three parts asking, "Me? I Think."

Now I'm asking: "You? Do You?"

This part discusses suicide attempts, severe emotional distress, difficulty speaking and functioning, emergency calls, crisis services, and hospital assessment. It does not describe methods.

This is an account of a period when I was in serious danger. Some readers, particularly those who have been through similar experiences, may find it upsetting. You can stop here. You can read the other parts without reading this one. You do not owe me your attention at the expense of your own wellbeing.

If what follows feels uncomfortably familiar because you are in danger now, please tell somebody who can help you immediately. In the UK, call 999 if there is an immediate emergency, or NHS 111 for urgent help.

For most of this book, I've told the truth in a particular way.

I've described things that happened. I've explained what I thought I understood about them. I've made jokes in places where other people might not have laughed. I've used distance, analysis and sometimes an almost clinical way of writing because that's how I could get the words onto the page.

And if you've read this far, you'll know I've written about some fairly serious things.

I've written about people I lost. About what happened at school. About my mental health. About hospital. About a crisis team. About two attempts to end my own life within the same week.

Those words were true.

But they were not the whole account.

There is a difference between knowing that somebody was in a crisis and knowing what it actually looked like to be that person while it was happening.

Until now, I've mostly told you what happened afterwards. I told you that professionals became involved. I told you that I spent time in hospital. I told you about moments I could look back on and describe with a strange kind of detachment.

I didn't tell you much about the days immediately before the school day when emergency services were contacted.

I didn't tell you how badly I broke down.

And I didn't tell you what it was like to walk into school when I could barely speak.

I'm not leaving those parts out this time.

There are still boundaries. I will not describe methods. I will not invent conversations, fill gaps in my memory with dramatic guesses, or claim to know what other people were thinking. I don't need to.

What happened was serious enough without any of that.

This part has no jokes to relieve the tension. That's deliberate. I'm not embarrassed by the humour in the earlier chapters, and I'm not withdrawing it. But I don't want humour to stand between you and this part of the story.

For once, I want the words to be as plain as the reality.

I spent approximately four hours on the floor of my bedroom.

That is one of the facts I keep coming back to.

Four hours.

Not because there is anything particularly meaningful about that number. Not because time itself explains what happened. But because it is difficult to fit those hours into the version of my life that people usually see.

People see me go to school. They hear me speak. They know I have opinions, that I work on things, that I can argue about a question for longer than anybody reasonably needs to. They see the person capable of getting on with an ordinary day, or at least appearing to.

Those four hours don't fit neatly into that picture.

I had attempted to end my life. I had broken down severely. I was in a state of distress that I still find difficult to communicate accurately.

When I say I broke down, I do not mean I had a brief moment of sadness and then carried on. I mean I was on my bedroom floor for hours, mentally overwhelmed and unable to function as I ordinarily would.

I cannot give you a perfect record of every minute.

I am not going to pretend I can.

Even now, when I can write about it, I don't have a precise explanation for everything that was happening inside me. I know the scale of the distress. I know what I experienced. I know how badly it affected me. But a memory isn't a transcript, and I refuse to manufacture one just to make this sound more complete.

What I can tell you is that I was not dealing with an ordinary difficult evening.

It was a crisis.

I had reached a point where my safety was in question, where the way I normally thought and functioned had become overwhelmed, and where I needed help.

That last sentence looks straightforward on a page.

It wasn't straightforward to live through.

Sometimes I think people read a phrase such as 'mental health crisis' and immediately picture a familiar scene from television: somebody visibly crying, somebody explaining what they feel, somebody else stepping in with exactly the right words.

Real life doesn't have an obligation to follow that sequence.

There isn't always a clear explanation. There isn't always a conversation. There isn't always somebody watching who can recognise the seriousness of what is happening.

Sometimes there's just a person in a room, in a condition nobody outside that room has seen.

That was me.

I don't want to turn the bedroom floor into some kind of symbol. It was just the floor of my room. A completely ordinary place, until it became the place I remember from one of the worst periods of my life.

And while I was there, the rest of the world carried on.

That is not an accusation against anybody. People can't automatically know what they haven't been told or shown. It's simply something that stays with me: how little the outside world has to change for one person's life to become almost unrecognisable to them.

I'd spent years being observed, assessed, questioned and discussed. I'd spent years having adults notice things about my development or behaviour, sometimes before I'd noticed them myself.

Yet there were still experiences that existed entirely outside what other people could see.

This was one of them.

I've previously written that I can remember an event without fully understanding or naming the emotion behind it.

That was never intended to mean I don't experience distress.

It certainly wasn't intended to mean I can't be overwhelmed by it.

Four hours on that floor should make the distinction clear.

The next part of the story is school.

I went in while still severely affected by what had happened.

I was shaking.

I was physically exhausted.

I struggled to speak.

Those aren't details I've included for effect. They describe how I arrived.

People who have read earlier parts of this book know I've had a complicated history with speech. I was late developing it. I've experienced hearing problems. I've described noticing a stutter only after somebody else pointed it out to me.

But what happened on that school day was different.

This wasn't a normal difficulty getting a sentence out. I was in such a bad state that talking about what had happened was beyond what I could properly manage.

And there was something urgent that needed to be communicated.

I had a note on my phone.

I still have it.

It explained what I'd done and how serious the situation was. It asked for the police, or whoever needed to be contacted, to be called.

I showed that note to a teacher.

I want to get that sequence right, because it matters.

I did not go to form and wait for my English teacher to work everything out. I showed another teacher the note first. While that was being dealt with and the call was made, I went to form.

That note did something my voice couldn't manage at the time.

It communicated the emergency.

I am not going to reproduce its full contents here. It exists, and it is part of my history, but keeping a record is not the same as agreeing to publish every word of it.

I can share what matters without giving strangers every last detail of a moment when I was at my most vulnerable.

There is something difficult about knowing I still have those words on my phone.

I can look at them now, from a different point in time, with a clearer ability to explain what happened.

But the person who wrote and showed them was not in the state I am in when I sit down to write this book.

He was frightened, overwhelmed, physically struggling and in urgent need of help.

I don't want readers to mistake the fact that I managed to show a note for evidence that the situation was controlled or manageable.

It wasn't.

It was an act of communication at a time when communication had become extremely difficult.

I needed somebody else to take what I'd written seriously.

And the teacher did.

After I showed the note, I went to form.

My English teacher was also my form tutor.

He knew me as a student. He knew the person who usually came into that classroom, the way I spoke, the way I acted, the way I normally presented myself.

That morning, he could tell something had gone badly wrong.

I was shaking. I couldn't properly talk. I was physically broken down by what I'd been through.

I don't know exactly what he thought when he saw me.

I won't put words into his mouth or describe an expression I haven't clearly remembered. He deserves to be represented as a real person, not a character I've written to serve a scene.

What I do know is that he noticed my condition.

There were two different things happening at once.

Elsewhere, a teacher had been shown the note and was dealing with the request for emergency help.

In form, another teacher could see, without having been given that same account by me, that I was not remotely okay.

It's important to me that these aren't combined into one tidy moment.

One teacher received the written message.

My form tutor saw the person who had brought it into school.

I sometimes wonder what readers picture when they hear that I went to school after what had happened.

Perhaps they imagine that if I made it through the school doors, I must have been capable of carrying on with the day.

I wasn't.

Attending somewhere is not proof that you are well enough to be there.

Getting from one place to another is not the same as being okay.

And being present in a classroom is not the same as being able to participate in it.

For me, this was not a normal morning interrupted by a conversation about mental health.

The emergency had already happened.

My body was still showing the effects.

And the people around me were beginning to see how serious it was.

I can't tell you what everybody in that room understood.

I can only tell you that somebody who knew me recognised that something was terribly wrong.

Sometimes that's what it takes for the version of a person that everyone knows to stop being the only version they can see.

I was taken out of form.

By then, this was not a situation that could be dealt with by asking whether I'd had a bad morning.

I spoke with the crisis team.

I was told that I needed to be taken to hospital, somehow, so I could be checked and spoken to.

That wording matters to me too.

The decision wasn't that I'd simply benefit from a quiet day or some time to settle down. There were concerns serious enough for a hospital assessment.

I needed medical attention and a conversation about my mental health and safety.

I've described hospital in an earlier chapter. I've written about laughing when I was told I couldn't leave, and how strange my reactions can seem to other people.

But putting that memory next to this one makes something much clearer.

The laughter came later.

Before that, there had been a breakdown.

Hours on the floor.

A note I couldn't comfortably replace with spoken words.

Shaking in form.

A teacher recognising that something was badly wrong.

A crisis team.

A hospital referral.

If a reader only remembers that I laughed in hospital, they might misunderstand the entire sequence.

They might imagine I wasn't taking it seriously.

They might think I was detached from everything that had happened.

They might assume that because I could react unexpectedly in one moment, the earlier distress couldn't have been as severe as I've described.

It was.

Both accounts are true.

I could break down so completely that I spent hours on my bedroom floor, and I could later laugh during a serious conversation in hospital.

The second fact doesn't cancel the first.

That is one of the things I most want people to understand from these chapters.

Human behaviour does not become simple just because somebody wants a simple explanation for it.

Part III contained a sentence that was difficult for me to write.

I attempted to end my life twice within one week.

It was accurate, and it was important.

But on its own, it's a sentence that creates distance.

It gives you an event and a number. It tells you something happened and tells you how often. The rest is left to your imagination.

I understand why that can be necessary. Sometimes a person is only ready to state the fact. Sometimes going further would mean exposing too much. Sometimes it's safer to leave the details where they belong.

There is nothing dishonest about having boundaries.

But I want this part of my account to correct one possible misunderstanding.

I wasn't simply moving through life normally while serious thoughts quietly existed somewhere in the background.

There was a period when those thoughts and what happened around them became so severe that I could barely function.

They affected my body, my speech, my ability to be present and my ability to explain myself.

They changed what an ordinary school morning looked like.

They required other people to step in.

And I needed that help.

I think there's a particular danger in assuming you know what a crisis looks like.

If somebody is laughing, perhaps you decide they're fine.

If somebody is quiet, perhaps you assume they want to be left alone.

If somebody gets dressed and attends school, perhaps you think the worst must already have passed.

If somebody can't explain themselves, perhaps you assume they have nothing to say.

None of those conclusions is reliable on its own.

I couldn't properly speak, but I had something urgent to communicate.

The note was my way of doing it.

I was in school, but I was not okay.

I could later remember an absurd moment in hospital without finding the circumstances remotely harmless.

These are not contradictions that need explaining away.

They're parts of the same life.

Another thing I don't want to do is present the adults involved as people who magically solved everything in one morning.

They didn't.

The emergency call and hospital assessment were part of a response to something extremely serious. The crisis team became involved. I spent weeks under their care afterwards.

And I have already written that discharge from a service isn't the same thing as becoming permanently free of difficult thoughts.

There wasn't a single moment when somebody said the right thing and the whole experience disappeared.

There wasn't an easy ending.

There was intervention, assessment, time, and the complicated business of continuing to live after something I had not expected to be explaining in a book at fifteen.

If you've read the previous parts, you may have formed an idea of what kind of person I am.

Maybe you think I'm blunt.

Maybe you think I overanalyse everything.

Maybe you think I sound unusually detached when I discuss serious things.

Maybe you've noticed that I tend to explain events more easily than feelings.

Some of those observations might be fair.

But I don't want them to become a reason to overlook distress when it's there.

I don't want someone reading my writing and deciding that because I can explain a crisis afterwards, I must have been in control while it happened.

I wasn't.

Nor do I want people to believe that my difficulty identifying or expressing emotions means the emotions themselves are absent or insignificant.

For years, I've been trying to understand how my mind works. I have an entire section of this book about investigating explanations for my behaviour. I can question a possibility, examine evidence and write pages about something I barely noticed at first.

None of that protected me from what happened.

Being articulate about an experience afterwards is not protection against experiencing it.

Knowing that something is dangerous is not the same as being able to think clearly in the middle of a crisis.

And appearing capable in one area of life does not guarantee that every other area is manageable.

I've said before that I don't want to be treated as a diagnosis list, a medical incident or an ongoing investigation.

I still mean that.

But I also don't want to be treated as somebody whose struggles weren't severe simply because I usually have something intelligent, sarcastic or technical to say.

There is a person underneath all of those things.

That person can suffer.

That person can need help.

And on that school day, that person did.

If there's a reason I've decided to tell this part of the story now, it's not to make people frightened of me or afraid to speak to me normally.

I don't want pity to become the price of honesty.

I don't want every conversation I have after publication to turn into a mental health interview.

And I don't want people to start treating me as though I'm permanently one moment away from disaster.

I want them to understand something simpler, and much more difficult.

What somebody shows you is not always everything they're experiencing.

That applies to me.

It applies to people you've known for years.

It applies to someone who has just made a joke.

It applies to someone who has gone unusually quiet.

And it applies to people who have become very good at functioning while struggling.

You do not need to assume the worst about everyone. You do need to take it seriously when someone tells you they're not safe, especially if saying it is difficult for them.

The note on my phone was not a literary device.

It was a request for emergency help.

And it matters to me that I made it.

I wish I could offer a precise moment when everything began to improve.

I can't.

That's not the shape of the story I remember.

There was hospital. There were conversations about my safety. There was involvement from crisis services over the following weeks. There were things that improved and things that remained difficult.

Life continued, even when I had no neat explanation for how it was supposed to continue.

I returned to ordinary subjects and ordinary responsibilities. I kept thinking about questions. I kept building things. I met people and formed friendships. I wrote about experiences that had once felt impossible to explain.

None of that erases the period described here.

And the period described here doesn't erase the parts of life that came after it.

Both truths need to exist together.

I don't believe I went through those experiences for a reason. I don't believe suffering was necessary to teach me something. I don't believe a near-tragedy is somehow redeemed because somebody later writes about it well.

Some things were simply terrible.

I would rather they had never happened.

But they did happen, and I am the person who remembers them.

That means I get to decide how to tell the story.

It also means I get to decide which details aren't for publication.

This isn't a confession extracted from me. It isn't a public invitation to investigate my private life. It isn't permission to interrogate my teachers, my family or anybody else who was involved.

It is an account of my experience, given in my own words, with the boundaries I've chosen.

I am not asking the reader to fix the past.

They can't.

I am asking them not to mistake the shorter version for the whole version.

And not to mistake a person's ability to write about pain for proof that the pain was small.

This is where I'm going to stop.

Not because the story is finished.

It isn't.

I'm fifteen. There are entire sections of my life I haven't lived yet. There are people I haven't met, questions I haven't asked and things about myself I still don't understand.

And there will probably be parts of this book I look back on and wish I'd written differently.

That's the risk of writing about your life while you're still in the middle of it.

But I don't want to keep publishing new parts simply because there's always something else I could explain.

At some point, I need to let what I've written stand.

I have told you about the childhood that shaped me.

The experiences that made school something more complicated than lessons and exams.

The people I lost.

The ways I think.

The things I question.

And now, the days I had previously kept almost entirely out of public view.

This last part was difficult to include, not because I needed to invent the words, but because the truth was already there.

Four hours on a bedroom floor.

A school morning I could barely get through.

A note asking somebody to call for help.

A teacher recognising that something was seriously wrong.

Being taken out of form.

Speaking to a crisis team.

Being told I needed to go to hospital.

Those are not the whole of my life.

They are not even the whole of that year.

But they happened, and they mattered.

I won't give you an ending where I promise that everything is perfect now. That wouldn't be honest.

I also won't give you an ending that treats my worst experiences as the most important things I'll ever do or become.

They aren't.

The future isn't guaranteed to be easy. It also isn't already written by the worst week of my past.

So this is the end of Part V.

For a while, it is also the end of Me? I Think.

Not a goodbye.

Not a conclusion about everything I am.

Just a decision to stop explaining myself for a bit and get on with living a life that still belongs to me.

If you remember anything from this part, remember that the note was shown. The call was made. People responded. Help became involved.

And the person at the centre of it is still here to tell you what happened.

That is where I want to leave the story.

FOR NOW.

To four people: one short person, one tall person, one medium-height person and one more (you all know who you are). Thank you. Genuinely.

I've had a shit time through life, and we all know that, so I appreciate it when people treat me like a human, don't try to attack me in any way, respect me and actually be a "friend".

I still don't fully understand the difference, but whatever.

Thanks to my current form tutor for treating me like a normal person, even while aware of the situations, and not making an unnecessary issue of it.