The Human Rubric: A Memoir of Life in a Neurotypical World

Prologue

The Bag

My supervisor sat opposite me in a little clinic room off one of the wards.

It was one of those rooms that was never fully one thing. A couch. A hoist. A sink. Two bins, one for medical waste. Hand steriliser. Gloves. Medical equipment spread around the edges.

Fluorescent light. No windows. Door to my left.

A table stood between us. I sat on a plastic chair with a foam pad for comfort.

She put her bag on the chair beside her.

A brown duffel bag, thick cotton canvas. Chosen for endurance, not appearance. Threads hung from the seams. The corners were dented inward, and plastic piping showed through the hem. I imagined it placed on many floors, dragged through corridors, lifted in and out of cars.

The zip was heavy and brass-coloured, with chunky teeth that looked as if they had been made before things were designed to be discreet.

It was full to the brim.

How did she carry it all day?

Whatever was inside, it was there for her work. Perhaps everything she needed to see people more clearly.

The water dispenser gulped. A bubble formed, rose, and popped.

She rummaged through the bag, taking things out, putting them back.

She brought out two ring binders full of pictures, nine red-and-white blocks, a set of cards, and a few pencils.

I’d got to know her over several months. She was kind, human, confident. Her confidence made help seem possible.

As she searched the bag, my mind turned inward. The room disappeared at the edges.

I arranged my face to look calm and composed while I searched for the marking scheme. In the pause, I snapped back to the room, checking for a rule I might have missed.

Mid-placement review: on track to fail.

At the front door, my mother, colour rising in her face.

A playground line-up. Two captains scanning bodies. My eyes fixed on the ground.

A boy blinking, and then my own eyelids becoming a job I had to do consciously.

Howard’s laughter. The classroom too bright.

The taste of cider at the back of my throat. Pain floating away. Nothingness emerging.

All of it passed through me.

I’d been waiting my whole life for someone to show me an answer, and now part of me no longer wanted one.

Her voice brought me back. I grabbed a cup of water from the dispenser.

Her tone was factual. She explained the logic of something that was obvious to her.

‘There’s a distinct pattern,’ she said. ‘Once you can see it, it will make sense.’

I had spent my life trying to work out the hidden criteria. Now someone else had brought the marking materials.

The First Rubric

The first rubric wasn’t something I wrote down.

It began as a set of rules I learnt through other people’s reactions.

My mother’s red face.

My father’s roughness.

Teachers’ instructions.

Boys in the playground.

Laughter that followed a mistake.

At home, it was okay to speak unless I was told not to. If I was told not to, I didn’t speak at all.

Away from home, the rules changed.

Don’t draw attention.

Don’t ask questions.

Don’t be seen getting it wrong.

And, most important of all: don’t embarrass the family.

Later, the rules started coming from me. I carried them everywhere, revising them privately, telling no one. I assumed everyone had them. I didn’t think to ask.

As a child, I didn’t call what I was doing a rubric. That word came much later.

My rubric helped me get from one stage to the next. Usually, when I arrived at ‘the next stage’, the previous rubric rarely continued to work as it did before. Each time I felt confused and developed a new version, rubric 2.0, rubric 3.0, rubric 3.1 . . .

I thought I was looking for people.

Really, I was looking for a marking scheme.

Part I

The First Rules

Before I realised I was systematising my way through life, I gradually became aware that the world I lived in had rules people didn’t speak about.

There were rules my family had that I assumed might apply to all families. Back then I thought it was the same for everyone.

Rules.

Don’t show us up.

Don’t tell the neighbours.

Don’t embarrass your mother.

Don’t bring shame on the family.

There were rules about the body.

Don’t shake your leg.

Don’t rock on the chair.

Don’t fiddle with your pencil.

Don’t fidget.

But in reality, don’t move at all. Don’t be seen.

Other rules I made up myself.

Don’t blink too much.

Don’t look strange.

Don’t ask questions.

Don’t let other people know what you’re thinking.

Don’t show any signs of weakness.

There were rules about morality I learnt at school and at church.

Be good.

Bad people go to hell.

Don’t say the wrong thing.

Upsetting others is bad.

Every rule I broke, and there were a lot, came with a consequence.

Heat in the face.

Silence of others.

Laughter.

Pointing.

Panic.

Irritation.

A sudden awareness that I had done something wrong and a frantic search to find out what it was before anyone had explained what the wrong thing was.

So I started collating what to do and what not to do.

Not consciously.

Not yet.

But the collection had begun.

The Doorway

My mother often reminds me how embarrassed she was as a young parent.

Once, she left me outside the supermarket in my pram. At home, unpacking the shopping, she suddenly realised she’d forgotten me.

In conversation, she’d put a hand to her mouth and say, ‘Jaysus Christ, you’ll never guess what I did to Jim the other day.’

One of her stories took place in my aunt Breda’s house. I was about three.

At the time, bold orange and brown geometric patterns covered everything. For years I couldn’t understand how people liked it.

I tried not to look at it.

Awful colours. Awful designs. Awful. Awful.

Flared trousers.

Awful.

Beehive hair.

Awful.

Don’t look at it.

I kept my thoughts to myself.

The adults were drinking tea.

At social events, while adults talked, I tended to play under tables whenever possible. Under tables, I felt protected. The sound was muted.

The visitors themselves blur in my memory. They were a family my aunt knew. I didn’t know them and never met them again.

Before they arrived, my aunt Breda was talking about them to my mother. A phrase I locked onto was ‘a crowd of lunatics.’

Lunatics.

A new word.

She said it.

I heard it.

I repeated it.

As soon as they came through the door.

The hallway fell silent. My mother’s face went blank. Then red. Then she smiled, but it was an embarrassed smile.

‘Jim, what are you saying?’

‘Aunt Breda said they were a crowd of lunatics,’ I said.

‘No, she didn’t say that,’ my mother said.

But you said . . .

I felt confused.

If a thing had been said, it existed.

If it existed, why could it not be repeated?

I don’t think I was told off privately. I was too young, and perhaps my mother realised it was her error for gossiping.

After the visitors left, I think they laughed about it. 'What was young Jim doing, telling them they were a crowd of lunatics?'

Later, my mother retold the story as funny. By then, it was funny to me too.

But the lesson underneath it wasn't funny. There were things people said, things people meant, and things people knew not to say. I had no way to tell the difference.

If I was told literally, I understood. If my mother told me not to tell anyone, I didn't tell anyone.

‘You can’t tell anyone,’ she would say. ‘You can’t let Jean down the road hear about that. She’s got a wagging tongue. She’ll tell everyone.’

So I put things into a safe in my head.

Later, my grandfather told me that my grandmother had had a mild heart attack, but not to tell anyone. So I didn’t. Not my mother. Not my father.

When they found out, my mother was upset.

‘Why didn’t you tell me or your dad? Didn't you think we would have wanted to know?’

But Grandad had said it was nothing to worry about. He had told me not to tell anyone. So I didn’t. I put it in the safe in my head along with everything else, and it became inaccessible.

Literal, I know. But that was how it worked.

The rule I formed was simple: speak unless told not to. But if told not to, don’t speak at all.

Eventually, I learnt there were things you could say inside the house and things you couldn’t say outside it.

Even now, I can picture the neighbours queueing at Waterstones, eager at last to know what happened behind our old front door.

Blinking Hell

By ten, the glitches had begun to show. I watched other children intently, alert to the rules of being a person. I collected data without knowing that was what I was doing. No one, including me, had words for it. I didn’t understand obsession. It didn’t feel like a symptom. It felt like my mind snagging on something and refusing to let go.

In 1977, I was ten and at a primary school in Sydenham. I’d got used to sameness: the classrooms, the playground, the low-level noise.

The caretaker polished the floors each day. The whole school smelt of it. Underneath the polish was the hot metal tang from the radiators, always on, covered in thick paint and too hot to touch.

Then one day, I saw a boy a few years younger than me.

It was in the playground. Everything else was moving — shouts, running feet, wind in the trees — but he was still, expressionless, blinking with unnatural control. I focused on his eyes: long lashes, lids snapping shut at fixed intervals.

What must that be like, having to do that all the time?

Back in class, my eyes felt dry. I was sensitive to small, hard-to-explain changes in my body. I waited for a normal blink.

It didn’t come.

My heart slammed. A sharp tightness rose in my throat.

Why haven’t I blinked?

I should’ve blinked by now.

I forced a blink. I made it last longer than usual. Relief came immediately, and the sting began to ease.

But the relief didn’t last. Dryness clawed back, and panic followed.

My eyelids don’t blink by themselves anymore.

I lost trust in them.

If they weren’t going to do the job by themselves, I’d have to take over.

And like that, I became a blinker.

All afternoon, I blinked deliberately. I monitored each one, counting the seconds between. I didn’t think anyone would notice. Then my brother Paul asked, ‘What’s wrong with your eyes, Jim?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ I replied quickly.

He didn’t answer. He stared at me with his head tilted.

The next morning, at breakfast, he paused again, eyes fixed on me.

‘Paul,’ I whispered, ‘stop staring at me. Eat your breakfast.’

He looked away, but his eyes kept returning to mine every few seconds.

Questions came.

How long is this blinking going to last?

Is it possible to catch it from someone else?

What if it never stops?

I kept the problem to myself. I was frightened, but I couldn’t see how anyone else could help me fix it.

The following day, I woke, lay in bed for five minutes, and the question arrived before I could stop it.

I wonder if the blinking problem has gone.

I regretted it immediately. The question echoed in my mind, and dread washed through me.

My heart sped up again. The sensation returned. My eyelids wouldn’t work unless I forced them. Another day spent blinking on command.

It carried on until the weekend. Then, for whatever reason, I forgot about it. The problem vanished.

Weeks later, I saw the boy in the playground again. I watched him blink, and my own blinking became deliberate immediately.

It was unbearable — a torment of being locked inside raw awareness of the self.

But this time I had evidence. I’d escaped it before. That meant it could let go again.

An answer came quickly.

Distraction.

I must’ve got distracted last time.

I applied my solution and distracted myself with the teacher’s logic puzzles.

A boy sitting at a desk opposite was further ahead in his book than me. I set myself a goal of overtaking him. This new goal needed to be more important than the blinking.

The solution worked.

For stretches, I forgot about my eyes.

When I remembered them, the urge returned. But now I could see what it was more clearly. I didn’t need to control my blinking. I needed to stop bringing my awareness to it.

Over time, the blinking cycle shortened. Detachment that had originally taken days began to take minutes. If it started, I could sometimes let it go by focusing on something else before panic took hold.

The only problem left was the boy in the playground. As long as I didn’t see him, I was fine. I began avoiding the places he usually stood and looked away if I spotted him.

Sometimes he’d walk towards me, and I’d notice his eyelids at the edge of my vision. I’d drop my gaze to the floor, fixate on the cracks between stones, and keep walking until the bell rang, when I knew it was safe to look up again.

Years later, I would find clinical language for parts of this. At ten, I only knew the private rule I’d discovered: the more I watched, the worse it got.