After a particularly stressful day at work three years ago, Jo Bervoets, 51, an engineer from Antwerp, Belgium, headed home, only to discover the train station was noisier and more chaotic than usual.
“I was already a little bit lost in my head before I went to the train station,” says Bervoets. He had recently started a new job, and the fact that he couldn’t connect with his new coworkers had left him feeling anxious. “I just took whatever train was going in the direction of Antwerp.”
When the train pulled into his station, Bervoets headed for the shared-bike station where he usually grabbed a bicycle to pedal to his neighbourhood, but there was none available. Feeling overwhelmed, he suddenly realised that he didn’t know how to get home.
“I phoned my wife, and somehow I got home,” Bervoets says. After three months at his new job, he’d burned out. “I completely crashed, and it was black.” He says his memory is still fuzzy about what happened that day.
Too upset to return to work the next day, Bervoets consulted a psychiatrist. She decided to send him to another specialist for testing. After two months of evaluation, he received a formal diagnosis: autism.
“It was a surprise,” says Bervoets. He and his wife, Els, did some online research and quickly realised that the diagnosis explained some of his odd behaviour, such as insisting that things had to be in a certain place and turning off the lights in a particular order. “Very quickly, it made sense,” he says. “It was a relief.”
ABOUT AUTISM
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