I remember hearing a joke that I didn't see the humour in, about a doctor taking his motorcycle to the mechanic and the mechanic asked why he was paid less, and the doctor said that he had to operate on a patient's heart while it was still beating, while an engine was stopped. Not true, but anyway. What people forget when it comes to being smart is that if your car breaks down, the doctor probably won't know what to do, unless, perhaps, they came from a poorer family, in the late 80s early 90s and rather than a brand-new BMW, their parents bought them a second-hand Holden Gemini or Ford Escort to drive to university and they changed the oil and spark plugs and the like themselves. Whereas if you have a heart attack, a mechanic can't perform an angioplasty.

Each autistic person, however, needs to be seen as an individual. Some are good at math, some are not. When I was in Year Three, I used to drive my mother mad, because I used to love sitting down and doing word puzzles out of my book and picking the correct homonym.

I have said that if I had a girlfriend and wanted to propose to her, it would be inspired by some Alfred Hitchcock novels I read as an 11-year-old with The Three Investigators, whereby she'd receive a series of clues that would lead her to a book and she'd have to find the words, as in, Page 11, Line Five, Word Seven, "Will," etc. Then, she would be given a series of clues that would lead her to my great-great-grandparents' grave, where she'd have to find a box.

Something that people can forget when they say that autistic people can be childlike and not age appropriate is that it can go the other way. I remember, when I was 12, I went to a party for a man who turned 50 (with my parents, of course) and the man and his wife had two sons, and their youngest got on well with my brother, even though he was four and a half years younger, whereas I sat and ate my evening meal with a woman old enough to be my mother and I could talk up to her, rather than her talking down to me. I didn't get on with the man's son. I didn't see much of his eldest son, but I got on better with him, even though he was eight and a half years older than me.

Also, you can find that an autistic teenager is not a follower of the latest craze (as a comparison, this man's younger son had to have brand name clothes and the like, while I was happy with Kmart clothes. My brother used to say to me, "Get a pair of Nike Air shoes," and I'd say, "A shoe's a shoe." Well, it is and it isn't. It depends on what you do with them but a pair of shoes that cost $200 could have been made in the same factory as a pair of shoes that cost $40, and the only difference is the label.

When I was 15, I was more interested in discussing historical events than I was in the latest craze.