Twenty years ago I stopped looking around me.
I wonder what happened.
Twenty years ago I worked at boarding houses.
At one time we had four types of boarding houses in the Netherlands: Boarding houses for abused children, boarding houses for the mentally disabled, boarding houses for people with psychotic problems and boarding houses for the physically disabled.
I worked at the first two types.
Not very long though. About three months at the first type and about four and the second.
Especially the first boarding house caused a lot of problems.
People told me that that must mean that I was abused as a child and I believed them.
Why wouldn’t I.
In my youth I have lived in a boarding house for a few years and never got a straight answer as to why I had to live there.
So this was as good an explanation as any.
In hopes to solve the problems I found myself a shrink. Who told me that I had very severe problems that where caused by the fear that resulted from the child abuse I had experienced in my youth.
The fact that I did not actually experienced that fear seemed a measure the depth of my fear.
From the large amount of problems I had, he deduced that I must have been the victim of one of the worst cases of child abuse he ever witnessed.
The only way to solve my problems would be to learn to feel the fear.
To learn to live with the fear.
To learn which parts of the abuse caused the fear.
To go with the fear and to go against the fear.
To eat and drink fear.
And at some point I would survive the fear.
So that what I’ve been doing for the last twenty years.
Only this morning I realized that it was all wrong.
I was never abused. Autism was misdiagnosed forty years ago.
Which lead to my placement at a boarding house for abused children.
Which actually was a good thing.
Abused children need a lot of structure. Just like autistic children.
So at that boarding house life was much more structured that my parents ever could have managed.
I loved it there.
It was the one place where I always felt save.
So in my mid twenties not knowing what was wrong with me and not knowing what to do to feel save. I chose to go back to the one place I felt save and go and work at boarding houses.
The thing is. I wasn’t the only one making that decision.
A lot of the people who lived at boarding houses in their youth at some point decided that they wanted to work a boarding house.
But must of those people where actually abused as a child.
And of course almost nobody knew anything about autism twenty years ago…
Comments on this entry are closed.