“Angry, selfish, gifted, weird!”

It took 36 years for Clem Bastow to discover she was none of those things. Her autism diagnosis has changed everything for the better.

To this day, I don’t know why I decided to sneak a glimpse at the physed teacher’s notes in Grade 4. The very notion of a clandestine peek at the teacher’s clipboard was, for a rule-obsessed kid like me, tantamount to breaking into the principal’s office on a Mission: Impossible-style heist to rewrite the school curriculum. And yet, there it was – the purple clipboard with the hastily scribbled notes that would form the basis of our end-of-term reports. It was practically whispering, “READ ME”, and I was Alice in Wonderland.

It was 1991 and I’d just moved from a Catholic primary school in Port Melbourne to the state school a few suburbs over. My old school didn’t even have PE class, much less extensive reports: I just had to know!

So, while our teacher was busy sorting netball bibs, I scanned the page, searching for “Clemmy”... found it! My shoulders fell: the sum total of my physed teacher’s observations of me were the words “inappropriate arm swing”.

The rest of our phys-ed class passed in a blur as I tried to wrap my head around that sentence. Was I not, in fact, the Boonie of the rounders court? I knew I wasn’t particularly good at sport, but I enjoyed it. The sudden realisation that I’d been running around with Kermit arms all this time was shocking. It was just the latest, and certainly not the last, moment that gave me pause as a kid: Hang on a minute, I have a sneaking suspicion I’m not actually like anybody else around me.