My name is Brian and I used to be in absolute awe of autistic people who were able to make their own way out into the world – I genuinely believed they were some of the bravest people with passports in hand… and it wasn’t until I turned thirty-five that I learnt I’d been one of them all along.
I kid you not, whenever I learnt about an autistic who travelled the world… especially those who did so independently… I stopped to admire them for their accomplishment – I used to work with a woman on the spectrum who’d made journeys to Peru and Egypt… and I befriended a man in Malaysia who’d been doing the epic Southeast Asia binge for months.
They’d spoken of their journeys with the kind of confidence and joy I’d found so infectious – I wanted to hear more and more. It wasn’t long, though, before they shared a few of the bad things also.
The bad struck me pretty fiercely – I found myself feeling for these people… as well as all the rest… and wishing they hadn’t copped it in the first place. Nobody deserved the bad… neurodivergent or not… but upon my own diagnosis in 2024… I found myself recalling a lot of that same kind of bad happening to me.
It was a lot… and to be honest, I appreciated how it was making sense to me.
The nerves I felt during my first trip, landing in distant Broome and immediately feeling vulnerable and so out of place? Leaving Australia for the first time and sitting on a Fijian beach with an internalised anxiety attack in play. Moving through the chaos of Bangkok traffic and constantly asking myself Why did I do this?
I have my share of war stories, much like everyone travelling with and without the little spicy condition I wish I’d known about all along – my tales have played out on the Thai coast, Spanish streets and plenty of others where my anxiety has been alight, my resentment for being forced off script has played out and my sensory issues exploited by the environment and people around me.
One silver lining in play was that plenty of those people hadn’t intended to hit my head with a figurative sledgehammer.
The universe has definitely made its effort in getting in my way and a lot of times I felt like I should have been obeying it… but then I be like, yeah nah. I think back to a lot of the obstacles getting in my way and it just makes me want to grab my passport and backpack and just keep going.
Thanks to that I’m still able to dream of seeing the northern lights in Iceland and visiting one of my dearest friends on Reunion Island one day – I’m still able to look at the world around me and realise that there’s a place in it for an awkward autistic like myself.
Brian Sherlock
Author Bio
Brian Sherlock is an indie author from Melbourne who cannot stand Krispy Kreme donuts and made the decision to write about his journey as an autistic traveller – the first one is titled Western Steps and can be found on his site bribrithewriter.com.
Western Steps link – Western Steps
