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When I say weak, I mean mentally. I thought others looked at me with derision because something was wrong with me, and I became to associate that weakness with my name. What doubled up on that line of thinking when I was younger was I had a close friend at the time that was also named David, and he was diagnosed as ADD (ADHD by today’s standards). He was obviously so, and I was probably the only friend he had. He was often the target of bullying. Yet I was not that strong friend that defended him. I often was frozen in the face of adversity as I had a hard time understanding the social nuances of many of the situations at the time they were happening. All I knew was that after all was said and done, I was there for him, to help him feel like he still belonged to something. 

As such, I took the name David as a name that weak people had. He and I were both weak in the face of agressive adversity of our peers. And that took me to not liking the name David. Because that was the problem, right?

I had one advantage that my friend did not. I was apparently quite intelligent. I was the type that never had to study, but when tests came around, I would pass with high marks, sometimes perfect scores. My friend David struggled with school, which was due to his ADD. During our elementary school years, he started at a school designed to help him while I stayed in mainstream schools. We lived in the same neighborhood, so we still spent a lot of time together, enjoying the same activities. 

All the above was in the 1970’s and early 80’s. I had other friends, a few, but I did not relate to them as well as did with David. We were kindred spirits, but it would not be until much later in my life that I would be able to reflect back on why that was. 

While my friend David dealt with his struggles, I did have my own. My father was a Vietnam veteran, and he brought back with him a very severe case of PTSD. Later he would be diagnosed as 100% disabled due to his PTSD, despite having no phyiscal injuries. It was pretty bad, and I grew up in the middle of it. All I can really say that my childhood was chaotic. I already had a shortcoming with understanding people and social situations, but compunded on top of that was a social situation at home that was full of emotional and verbal abuse. I was told that before my father went to Vietnam he  was a different person, but the father I grew up with in addition to the above was a narcissist on overdrive. Nothing could ever be his fault, and almost everything that ever went wrong in our house was either my mother’s fault or mine. 

I do have a younger sister, but it was clear from early in her life that she had some developmental issues. Eventually she was diagnosed as Autistic (level 2) and my father was aware of that, so my mother and me were his only targets. Apparently I was normal enough in his eyes to be the cause of all that went wrong. 

I did make mistakes most kids make. But there was no compassion or understanding, there was no gentle but firm lessons. It was screaming and blame. Sometimes objects would be thrown (thankfully never at a person). But that is how I grew up. I developed a fear of authority that to this day still holds a strong grasp on me. Mind you, not a rebellious fear, a hide-until-it-is-over fear. My pulse rate is up and my legs are bouncing wildly while I write this. 

So, me being Autistic as well, never became a topic of concern. Because, I was smart. Mensa-level smart. I was just taken for some smart introvert. But to all family and everyone else, I was a-okay.

I was not, however. But my young mind blamed it on the name. I thought that people perceived me as someone weak and to be avoided because of my weak name, so when I was changing my last name (which was actually me reaching out to my father trying to connect with him in some way, as he always spoke about his “real” last name) I also changed my first name. Connor, to me, was a name of strength. 

So I was, in the 90’s, living with a new name, first and last, and was thinking that life would be better now. I had a strong first name and a rare-ish last name. I could magically be better now. 

But the thing about being Autistic, and unknowingly so, is that a name change really does not do much with how your brain is wired. So I continued to fumble through life, making the same mistakes, because I would try to emulate being a “normal” person, which I later learned was called masking, and still failed at living a fulfilling life. 

My main enemy turned out to be money. And as is typical for “normal” people, they tell you that you cannot make money doing the things you like to do. Perhaps due to my upbringing, I was really into escapism. I love SciFi and Fantasy. And this only drew a lot of ire from my father, because he wanted a son who played sports. And perhaps what really got to him, I was actually really good at sports. When I played them, that is. When I did, it was mostly compulsory school sports. But he would see me play, and he would even tell me that I am a “natural”, which I later found out is a sports concept. 

Yes, I am Autistic, but I had a knack for sports. My visual-spatial scores in various tests I would take I always scored in the top 99th percentile. I was able to mentally figure out trajectories of game balls very quickly. I was also able to react quickly to situations as I was able to mentally work out where everything and everyone was going. When I played baseball, much to the ire of coaches and other players, I would swing at and actually hit very well balls that were outside of the strikebox. It peeved them that I was not supposed to, but I did and got really good hits. And my father saw all this, and tried to push me in that direction.

But by this time I was a voratious consumer of all things SciFi and Fantasy. I was reading, going to hobby stores, and veing very much the son my father did not want. And I do not know how to say this in the right way, so forgive me if I do, but by my mid-teens my father and even some of my friends thought I was gay. This would be the early to mid eighties. But I was not gay, I just grew into liking certain things that were not mainstream at the time. I also never thought of, nor do I know even, think of things in terms of gay or not-gay. I just go about life with an asexual worldview is the best way I can explain it. 

For my father, however, what perhaps closed any hope he had of my being a son he wanted was when I was liking things that were military realated. I was building military scale models and I had the old 1 foot tall GI-Joe action figures. The military models I really like because they were very mechanical. Also, in my mind I perhaps placed them in a more SciFi setting at I built them, but my father did not know that. He would just see, and not ask any questions. My GI-Joes on the other hand, they typically come with “fatigues” or camoflaged clothing, which was fine, but I also liked the look of dress uniforms. Which was not typical GI-Joe fare back them. So I asked my mother to teach me how to use her sewing machine so I could make them. And she did. And I think all my father saw was his son using the sewing machine making something that was not manly-like. Despite he himself wearing dress uniforms when he had to in the military, I believe all he saw was his son sewing dresses. 

And in case I started weaving an image of him just watching me do these non-traditional things for a boy, as he saw it, he would certainly take it out on my mother and I in other ways. Perhaps the most hurtful thing he said to me, when I was cooking food in the kitchen because like many Autistics, I have very narrow preferences and I learned it was easier to make my own food, he one day walked by and told me in a deadpan way that I would make a really good housewife for someone one day.

I really do not know how much I should put into this, but I wanted to paint an image as to my foundation, which had it been different, I perhaps would not have struggled as hard as I did in life. 

I started talking about money earlier, because that is why I did not persue my life passions. I had to live a life that I did not like or want, because that is what typical people do. And I was desperately trying to be a typical person. Despite seeing some people make a living in areas I would love to exist in, I would be told they are the exception, they had a lucky break, and that is something that would never happen to me.

So I lived my life in a way that I was not enjoying. In fact, I began to think I was just bad at being a person. Keep in mind that up until this point, I was masking hard and putting up the appearance that I was “normal”. It was not until I was forty-two years old that I had a lightbulb moment. I had seen the movie about Temple Grandin’s life and completely saw myself on the screen. The portrayal was spot-on to who I was. How they displayed how she thought by drawing out the schematics of what she was thinking I totally related to. That was me, and that was how I thought. Almost everything about her portrayal in the movie was me. Save for the fact that she had a supportive mother, and I had absent parents, one of whom despised me. For my mother’s part, I really cannot place any faults on her, she had to deal with my father in the same way I did. She also had to be a mother to my sister since my sister was heavy-needs as we grew up (she is two years younger than I)

I was never planted in an environment for me to grow. I was a tumble weed being pushed around by a world I did not truly understand how it worked. I was for all intents and purposes an alien stranded on a planet of humans.

So after seeing that movie about Temple, I started to understand that I had Aspergers (which was still a diagnosis at the time) and lived self-diagnosed for a long time. Fortunately, at least at that time, I finally landed in an environment where I felt at home. I managed to get a position at Blizzard Entertainment, a maker of computer games. Due to my love of SciFi and Fantasy, this was a dream job. It was tailored-made for my Autistic brain, as the company culture was very much atuned to “weird” people, like me. The environment was very open and diverse. Everyone who worked there was able to be their honest, true self, including me. Now, I worked in Austin, Texas, which was a different culture than what was going on with the Irvine, California campus.

Things would eventually change, though, and as executives started to jump ship, likely due to the looming lawsuit Blizzard would see happen in California, the company changed internally. In hindsight, I should have stayed, as the Austin campus was not impacted much, but thinking I was making a smart move, I decided to leave Blizzard. But my time there helped my grow into my Autism, and understand myself better. I was also able to express my joys of all things Sci-Fi and Fantasy there, as it was very much encouraged. The company really wanted employees to “express their inner geek”, to paraphrase what employees were told. And I did just that. I really began to be who I want to be. I did the things that made me happy.

So I left Blizzard on a high-note and with cash in-pocket, because I left using a program they had to help you get into the next big thing in your life. I wanted to go into making things. At first I created a little thing I called Red Gryphon Creative, where the plan was to do custom wood-working. I planed to make things like elaborate thrones and elvish bookcases. Really embrace fantasty-styled furniture. My problem was I lacked a space to really do that kind of work. My family (my wife and two adult childen) lived in an apartment, and while we did rent a garage, the air-flow in it was bad and most of the time in Texas that garage was too hot to work in.

Also, at this time, I was forty-nine going on fifty, and my body had other plans. I was not able to be as physical as I had been, particularly since about that time fibromyalgia flared up me, which is something my mother had as well. I also had a bad back where in the past I could work through the pain, but it became more crippling by that age. I was still looking to get something going in making such furniture, but in the mean time I decided I wanted to work where a lot of my passions were. So I got a job at a hobby store.

This allowed me to really get my Sci-Fi and Fantasy geek on, and after proving I had a really good head on my shoulders, the owners allowed me to do things in the store that made it really take off. While I was not my own boss, I had a lot of liberty to make decisions for the store that really made me happy. Especially when actions I took, that most employees at first thought were not going to work, actually did work and worked to spectacular effect. I would eventually win over everyone and I was existing in a small part of the world that made me happy.

Then Covid happened. And while it was actually a boon for the hobby store, things really took off, the strip mall they were in was controlled by a large grocery chain in Texas that decided to hike the rent up really high. Sadly, the owners decided to close that store. They did have another store, but I disliked a few of the employees that worked there and it was not going to work out between me and them.

So out of a job, I decided that the area where the closed store was in was still viable for a hobby store. I actually disagreed with the owners that the higher rent was not doable, but it was their store. So, I took it upon myself to be a business owner. I felt I had all the qualifications to do make it happen. And in the beginning I did. Everyone was impressed by how things proceeded. But my Autism would soon become a problem for others. They had no frame of reference on how to deal with me. They would soon neigh-say things I was trying to do, and despite me being the actual boss on paper, they began to bully me. These I should mention were investors. It was supposed to work where they invest and I give them monthly reports on how their investment is going. In the end, they got their noses in on the daily operations and I did not really know how to say no. If you recall, earlier I said I had a problem with authroity figures, and my reaction was to shy away and hide when push came to shove. And that is what I did, I shrank away from my dream business and eventually experienced a “Dark Night of the Soul”.

Short story is that I closed the business, and not in a clean way, shortly afterwards. I was in crisis. But I was not ready to give my dream over to those who ultimely were actively driving me out of my own business, some conciously doing so, because I did not fit their idea of a business man. That my processes and actions were hurting the business, in their view. When the truth is, and I know this to the very core of my being, had they just let me be, the business would be thriving right now.

But that is not how it worked out. I even attetmpted to take my own life. I was a man in crisis.

During the period of healing, I eventually decided to get officially diagnosed. I wanted someone to professionally at least confirm what I had deduced about myself. It was a bit of a relief at first, but then came the unmasking. I let all my masking strategies collapse. And I found that once you do that, it is not realistic to start them up again.

I am fifty-six years old as I write this. And had today’s understanding of Autism had only been around when I was young, I feel that I would have had better guidance through life. But I am keeping a stiff upper lip, as they say, and moving forward with a better wisdom of how I approach projects and people. 

I think that is enough for the bio. There is a lot more depth to a lot of it, but I felt it has been a pretty long read already.