My World is Not Your World [Paperback]

Alison shares her experiences in a dramatic and sometimes humorous way starting with pre-school experiences followed by her school years where she was considered very slow and stupid. Then into the adult world of work and university where she is forced to use every last bit of ingenuity and tenacity to cope with life.

We strongly recommend this book to anyone dealing with Autistic and Dyslexic children and adults. This book challenges all of us to understand life from a completely different perspective.

I begin with my first experiences of the senseless confusion at play school and describe the terror of being unable to make sense of my surroundings. I am bewildered by the vast place of mesmerising, confusing fragments of noise, light and sensations. A place where multicoloured blurs [children] rush past sometimes knocking into me.

Despite my protests, I am continually sent to places full of incomprehensible chaos. I spend my primary school life tormented by confusion, bemused by the shapes on a page of printing 'should I read the black bits or the white bits?', puzzled by the riddle of 'why high notes on a piano are not further from the ground than low notes' and baffled by the way people treat me and why I am considered unintelligent.

As a comprehensive school student, I could barely read or write and was desperate not to be a social outcast, but was unable to conform to 'normal' teenage activities. The tragedy was that nobody understood what was wrong, not even my parents. This ignorance left me stranded in life and wondering why I should carry on living, let alone why I should study towards my GCE's.

I search to give my life some meaning as I struggle through an electronic engineering apprenticeship, trying to hide my inadequacies and refusing to give in to them. Then against the odds I achieve outstanding academic marks, I'm not an idiot, I'm good enough for a top university.

Flung out into the big wide world of university life, I was soon totally stranded with my lack of social skills and my inadequate comprehension of myself and the environment around me. Although I could now compensate for many of my difficulties, including coordination and vision problems, my compensations were to challenge my pain threshold and endurance capabilities.

In the years of unemployment that followed, I searched for understanding and consistency and finally began to make real sense of my surroundings, other people and more importantly myself. I have come to a point, at the age of 27, where life now makes reasonable sense and I want to share my experiences in an attempt to show everyone that some of us are just different.

I dedicate this book to all the children and adults suffering from and working with those who suffer from similar problems.