One Tight Place To Another

 

To those of you that don’t know me, my name is Jamie and I’m giving this presentation for Autism Awareness Week (2021).

I was born into circumstances way beyond the control or understanding of a child. My mother had me when she was not much older than a child herself, leaving me to be raised singlehandedly by my grandmother.

My grandmother worked as a cleaner and rented rooms out to lodgers just to get by. Having no father around, I often found myself looking up to some of the lodgers like surrogate father figures.

When I was about 9 years old, I’d grown particularly close to one of the lodgers from a neighbouring county. Our local team, ‘The Wolfe Tones’, were set to play the lodgers home team and my class at school were tasked with painting pictures of our team winning.

But me being me, had other ideas. I was determined to paint the other team winning. I didn’t care that my picture wouldn’t be displayed along with all the others. I was content with simply taking it home to show the lodger.

Because I refused to paint what they wanted me to paint, I was sent to the principals’ office. Despite how intimidated I was, still I refused to compromise what an adult might define as their artistic integrity.

For that, the principal struck me across the face. I remember the slap stung fiercely as I bit back tears of terror and rage. He frog-marched me out to the teacher and made me apologise after which I ran home and told my grandmother what happened. My grandmother, this little old woman didn’t waste a second, barging straight into the principal’s office and telling this six-foot man that she’d stick a hurly up his backside if he ever laid a hand on me again. 

But despite my grandmothers’ best efforts my education and in many ways my life from that point on took a darker turn. The principal had his own kids in the school. Suddenly, I was a liar because nobody wanted to believe the truth. It was easier for them to cast me as a troublemaker. I bounced through nine different schools before reaching college. Most of the time I spent truant, I’d hop on a bus into the city and hang out at the cinema or the library all day.

My truancy eventually led to me going into the care system where I was educated in a small on-site schoolhouse. The teacher their literally told me that I would never amount to anything. I’ve since spent much of my life striving to prove her wrong but at 15, by the time I left care I was far to rebellious for my grandmother to handle.

So, I went to live with my estranged mother and siblings in London. After a breakdown in an already strained relationship, I found myself homeless in London at the age of 16. I went through the all kinds of hell going through the hostel system, being placed in temporary accommodation alongside career criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, and asylum seekers when I should have been studying for my GCSE’s. 

I was one of those kids that was failed by the system, falling through the cracks time and time again. I was lucky, my grandmother sold our house and gave me my inheritance at 17. I had nearly 100k euros… which I spent in ten months before turning 18. 

I came to Aberystwyth on holiday with my grandmother and ended up enrolling at college. I’d gone from abject poverty to excess almost overnight. I’d see my peers unable to buy lunch, so I would buy lunch for the whole class. I did that so I could feed those that couldn’t feed themselves without directly offering them charity because I knew all to well what it was like to feel hunger and shame. 

But I was naive and quickly the money was all gone and so were most of my friends. Jas was one of the ones that stuck by me when I had nothing. We started a business together. A small clothes shop down a little side street in 2010. Many things placed strain on the partnership, but in the end, it was the icy weather that killed off the passing trade which had been keeping us afloat.

 

I lost two of my best friends to suicide before, I want to say finding the courage to get help for my own issues but really I think it was more like I was desperate enough to need that help more than anything else. I was struggling to come to terms will all of this whilst also providing palliative care for my grandmothers’ bladder cancer.

 

It wasn’t until after the deaths of my best friends and my grandmother that I eventually got diagnosed as being on the Autistic Spectrum in my mid-20s. After my grandmothers’ death, I had no references or qualifications to fall back on. I had to re-build myself from the ground up.

Again, I was lucky and stumbled onto the Centre for Widening Participation & Social Inclusion. Though them I undertook an access course to university and have since graduated twice over with a BA in Creative Writing, Drama & Theatre Studies, and an MA in Creative Writing, despite never completing secondary school. Whilst undertaking my MA I took a chance and applied for a Dollar Baby contract from Stephen King to adapt one of his short stories into a film. If truth be told, although I’m a massive Stephen King fan I hadn’t actually read the story I’d applied for, I was just drawn to the title ‘A Very Tight Place’ because the production company I’d been freelancing for had already produced a feature titled ‘A Thin Place’ and the similarity simply amused me. To my surprise, I was fortunate enough to be granted a Dollar Baby contract of my own.

King’s ‘The Body’, more commonly known as ‘Stand by Me’ was a basis for my undergraduate dissertation. So, I eagerly read the story ten times over making notes for my script. I had the notion of altering the gender dynamic of the antagonist and protagonist and from that seed my incarnation of ‘A Very Tight Place’ was born.  

Although it must be said that it was a very traumatic birth. Preproduction was such a nightmare with so-many will-they-or-won’t-they moments most of us ended up feeling like we were trapped in a very tight place ourselves!

 

Because I recorded all of the production meetings, script readings and rehearsals. I invited all the cast and crew to join me for this presentation to take a look at some footage and discussing how our attitudes and behaviours made each other feel and how those feelings impacted the project.

 

It was meant to be a constructive look back at what we accomplished, celebrating that our film is going to be screened next month alongside other Dollar Babies. But my intention was taken the wrong way by individuals that don’t want certain footage being seen.

Many of the productions issues stemmed from what could be described as ‘creative differences’ which led to the project being starved of resources. There was one particular instance where it was suggested that I use my autism in crowdfund pitch for production budget.

Naturally, this was something I didn’t feel comfortable with. As I thought it felt like inspiration porn. A phrase coined by the late comedian and disability activist Stella Young and is defined as the portrayal of people with disabilities as inspirational solely or in part on the basis of their disability. There was a debate that would have been nice to have looked back on and discussed but people are more concerned with the possibility of looking bad rather than being able to consider the possibility that they might have acted badly and could still learn from the experience given half the chance.

 

But things are never that easy. To some, me attempting to give this presentation has been viewed as me being a troublemaker, stirring up drama. When in reality, even after 20 odd years I feel like I’m perpetually that 9-year-old kid still being woefully misunderstood by the world.

 

I initially only undertook my undergrad in Theatre because I thought it would be a constructive way of working through my autistic traits. I hoped that performance would enable me to gain confidence and slowly as I fell in love with the subject, it did.

 

As both the subject and director of this experimental presentation I am reluctant to exert any control over the narrative. That’s why Juliette Daum has kindly edited some footage which I will be screening in a moment. I don’t think there will be anything too controversial…

 

I just want to say a big thank you to Juliette, who as well as edited the footage your about to see, she actually acted in my Dollar Baby herself. She caught the film bug on set and has made massive leaps forward in the industry since. She was one of the first people I was lucky enough to provide an academic reference for. Each one being a sort of fuck you to that teacher who said I’d never amount to anything.

 

Thanks to everyone still watching, I guess there is something to be said for finding a silver lining in a global pandemic, a captive audience.