It’s taken a long time to feel like I have any right to tell people I am a writer. When I had an essay published in Vittles earlier this year, I thought that would be the final nail in the coffin for my insecurities. However, I hadn’t prepared myself for the obvious follow-up question: what do you write?

It turns out that the only thing that can make my internal monologue protest even more is by saying that I write about music.

Growing up, I’d make intense friendships centring on shared interests. This is totally normal, and not exclusive to autistic people. The problems would happen when everyone else moved on, which struck me as a deeply personal rejection. When my primary school friends took me to one side in Year 4 and told me they no longer liked B*Witched and were instead really into Buffalo G, I climbed up an ornamental tree at a birthday party a few days later out of spite, and then promptly fell out. History has proved me right - who remembers Buffalo G? - but still, my reaction was more damaging to my friendships than changes in 2000s Irish girl group allegiances.

Not that I realised this at the time, of course. Years later, in my mid teens, I became obsessed with The Automatic, and I met my first girlfriend while posting online about them. Everything was going well, until they began a well-publicised feud with The Horrors. I instinctively did not like The Horrors. Not because of their music, which I’d deliberately not listened to as I’d already identified that they were much too fashionable for me. I was terrified of my girlfriend getting into The Horrors, and then she did. Instead of maybe, I don’t know, listening to them like a reasonable human being, I completely defined myself by a refusal to engage. Unlike with Buffalo G, I have not been validated by long-term critical consensus, although I still can’t bring myself to see what I was missing.

During this whole period of my life, I knew I was autistic. With hindsight, I know that most of the friends I made online and then at university were, too. But at the time I felt like an anomaly, and I couldn’t stop myself reacting with terror every time I thought I was getting abandoned because I wasn’t cool enough, or creative enough - both things to which I desperately aspired, and both things I had internalised that I was clinically incapable of being. In the 1990s and 2000s, conventional wisdom dictated that autistic people were not capable of having a sense of humour, or being able to make art. Of course I was ridden with shame, and of course I latched on to the hope that there was any kind of short cut to being socially acceptable, especially one as seemingly easy as just liking the right bands.

I couldn’t shake my deep-seated embarrassed about how I behaved over all of this for years. I lived in a vicious cycle of being ashamed of not being good enough, and being ashamed of how I behaved in the wake of that.  It’s been a relief to work out what’s really been the root of what felt like some incredibly childish strops; even more of a relief to reconnect with the people I cared about as a teenager, and to realise they still care about me, too.

More than that, now that I’ve been living during an culture war with no sign of abating and much higher, more tangible stakes, I’ve realised how little it matters. Yes, writing about music feels exposing for me, and like I’m revealing every reason why I shouldn’t be taken seriously. But at the same time, some very vocal people are adamant that I shouldn’t be taken seriously based on fundamental aspects of my existence, so does it even matter whether I’m cool or not at this point? (Let alone that I am now in my mid-thirties, so that ship has long since sailed.)

When all is said and done, history won’t care who my favourite band was - history has bigger things to worry about. Besides, the first time I let myself love a band without worrying about being judged, I met my soulmate. We got married last year. Until I met her, I had spent most of my adult life believing I was fundamentally unlovable. That’s a story for an essay in and of itself, though.

The circumstances of how we met meant that I gradually let go of the fear of liking the wrong thing; if I’d kept forcing myself to restrict myself to listening to bands with an exemplary Metacritic score, I’d have never met my favourite person in the world.

If that wasn’t enough, I started to pursue jobs I thought I’d never be considered for, and ended up being hired as an academic researcher, despite not having an undergraduate degree. After that, I began working in a different field which makes such an absurd amount of sense for me as a career that I can’t believe that it wasn’t something I did sooner. Most incredibly of all, long after giving up pursuing writing professionally following a very stereotypical secondary school careers advice session, I submitted a pitch for an essay. It was commissioned, published, and I was paid.

At the age of 34, I have finally stopped climbing up the ornamental tree.

——

If you’ve subscribed from my Vittles essay, thanks so much for signing up! It’s been a while since I’ve published anything as I’m still trying to balance a day job on top of writing with limited success, but I was so chuffed it resonated with people. Here are three of my favourite pieces of work:

• My nipples got switched around during gender-affirming surgery, so inevitably I wrote about it.

• During a relentless period of job-searching, I wrote this essay about getting addicted to failing at video games.

• I wrote over 2,000 words arguing the case for a queer analysis of the first Kaiser Chiefs album. (If anything I’ve written is equivalent to a portrait lurking in my attic, I have to admit that this is it. At first I thought it’d be more evidently comical, but it turned into a real Pepe Silvia moment.)

If you enjoy my writing, please feel free to share with a pal, or if you would like you can leave me a tip at my Ko-Fi page.

Lastly, if you haven’t heard it already, the new Slime City album is a total blinder! I went to see them in London on Saturday night, and felt compelled to undertake 2008-levels of pogoing despite the fact that my knees are definitely in 2025.