This is My Life
by Alain English

This book you are holding
Is my life
My experiences, my feelings
My actions all bound up
And summarised in ther

This is my life
Although very often
I wish it had not been

I don't want to blame
Or vilify anyone
My journey is my own

Many times I have judged myself
As a failure
As a self-deluded idiot
Who could never face the truth
As a coward
Who has made all the wrong choices

As I write this
I am thirty-two years old
And many of my peers
From university and school
Have careers, relationships
And even families
These are things
I do not have
So by their standards
I am a failure

I have a condition of mind
The doctor's call
Asperger's Syndrome
Which means a disinterest in
And difficulty establishing
The type of life
That is lived by others

I am an actor
I have always been acting
Finding myself to be inadequate
I found it necessary to pretend
On stage
On camera
And in real life
Creating my own fantasy world
Exciting, romantic, predictable
And safe
Away from the exhausting
Painful company of society

Through my fantasies
I have become angry
With a desire to defeat
And defy everyone
Who has injured me
I have developed ambitions
That some would call delusions
I never wanted to be
At the back of queue
At the bottom of the class
I wanted to be a genius
Exceptional in my ability to act

So I chose to act
As a job
When a skill with words
Mean I should have been
A writer
But acting, not writing,
Brought me applause
And appreciation
Otherwise denied me
Through my condition

So I pursued it
Nagging doubts forever
Gnawing way at my brain
Because when I come out
Of my fantasy world
I realise, no
I am not exceptional
It's a truth I have wrestled with
Torn between what I wanted to do
And what I felt I should do
Denying my present
Denying my past
Denying the life
You are holding in your hands

This is my life
This is my mind
A labyrinth of half-remembered
Half-truths that change
From day to day

Some day,
Like everyone else,
I will die
But when I reach that point
Whenever it may be
I hope I will be able to say
I have lived

But whatever happens
Whatever has happened
This is my life
And now it's yours

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