Donna Williams' Personal Space

Hi ! Welcome to my website. I'm Donna... So who's that?

I was born in the rock and roll years of the 1960's , in the inner city of urban Australia in the days when 'autism' was unheard of even though the condition had always existed.

I grew up in a family with more challenges than my own and spent most of my first 24 years on fairly continuous antibiotics with undiagnosed food intolerances, food allergies, blood sugar problems, nutrient deficiencies and two primary immune deficiencies. In a nutshell, I was highly erratic, distracted, impulsive, often giggly and smiley, generally in a drugged state and was sick most of my early life. This meant I was unable to answer a direct question, to stay sitting in a seat, to hand in any work or acknowledge what I did or didn't understand.

Assessed as psychotic in infancy, I was later labelled emotionally disturbed and tested for deafness a number of times all the way into late childhood and although the word autism came up in late childhood in the 1970s it wasn't until the 1990's, in my 20s that I was formally diagnosed with autism.

Being an alienated out of control feral child taught me a lot. It taught me about assumptions, integrity, resilience, passion, adaptability, war, humility, empathy and it made me a natural anthropologist, watching from the sidelines even when I seem like a walking cartoon and a one-woman-show.

I lived in an emotional and perceptual chaos which taught me surrealism and the relativity of the word 'normal' for there are many different versions of 'normality'. I was nine before I could fluently understand with meaning three sentences in a row, was largely meaning deaf and meaning blind as well as face-blind but learned to map pattern and feel shifts and changes with remarkable ability in spite of pretty much no ability to interpret.

I had no idea why anyone did anything but I knew if someone was 'real', when a fight was coming, whether others were trying to invade 'my world'. My senses and perception were chaotic, fragmented and constantly shifting and fluctuating and the ability to understand things with meaning was so delayed I looked like I wasn't 'on line' but also like someone very behaviourally and emotionally disturbed.

I stored huge strings of sound patterns and sang and chattered to myself most of the time, often in stored lines, jingles and adverts. In other words, my condition helped me develop, instead, a highly refined capacity to sense pattern shifts, a great natural capacity for mimicry, parody and characterisations and a seemingly bottomless memory for stored strings of information even though I have the short term memory of a goldfish and very tumbled receptive information processing.

I loved life and I loved the sensory world but my world was not that of a visual thinker. As someone with fragmented vision and meaning blindness, I learn kinaesthetically; through direct physical experience and hands-on doing. I learn through the repetition of patterns, not mentally, but experientially.

I don't think in pictures. I'm a kinaesthetic thinker, a systems thinker, a musical thinker. Mine is a physical and sensory world of pattern, theme and feel. My mind is like a mosaic, my conscious thoughts intangible until I experience them after they've been expressed- usually through arts.

I am always surprised, have a great trust of unknown knowing, and have come to allow my preconscious mind to unravel and surprise me. I'm not a thinker, I'm a doer. Only through doing can I realise what my intangible thoughts may have been.

My reflection was my best friend and family and until adulthood I inhabited my body along with a number of other 'characters', a male persona who embodied logic and detachment and resembled a walking encyclopaedia, called Willie, and a female one who embodied stored characterisations and the exuberance of mania, called Carol, who both helped me survive. I associated Donna with the sensory-oriented, more feral self, the feeling self and very much a ‘cat-person’ interacting and communicating indirectly. Today there is generally ‘one’ relatively cohesive Donna.

I was fascinated by my playground that was the wilderness of the streets in what was a feral childhood with all its fortune and its horror. When I was nine I was put on zinc, vitamin C and multi-vitamins and I realized meaning existed, not just pattern. At fifteen my estranged and equally feral family could no longer cope and I had to fend for myself in a world vulnerable to the wants and prejudices of strangers walking a tightrope of homelessness.

After a return to education in adulthood, I had the fortune that my health finally collapsed completely at the age of 24. It was only then that this rather 'crazy girl' I was finally diagnosed with severe digestive and immune system disorders, the beginning of over a decade of journeying into treatment. It was a year later, after intervention by medically qualified practitioners in nutritional medicine that I began to hold conscious awareness as a relatively cohesive self and could work towards guiding my own life instead of merely surviving moment to moment.

In the chaos and disorientation of that time I wrote my autobiography, Nobody Nowhere in a desperate last attempt to understand where I'd been and ask if there might be some hope beyond what I'd struggled to construct as 'life'. The book, the first of nine books I've had published, got left behind in the UK at the time and accidentally became an international bestseller, read by millions of people the world over, and the first mainstream publication of an autobiography of someone who came to be diagnosed 'autistic'. I have since moved into writing films and completely several screenplays as well as my first fiction novel.

I'm wild and woolly, with an incredible naughty streak, prone to euphoria as much as phobia and compulsion with a great determination to strive for balance and detachment yet a great love of connection and discovery.

I baby-sit and manage mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders which contribute to my compassion for others, my understanding of condition versus culture and ironically helps me connect with others so much more based on our individuality and personhood. I do most of that connecting through art which is a huge part of who I am. I'm wildly prolific as a writer, artist, sculptor, singer-songwriter and screenwriter. In my spare time, I have, on and off, been a community volunteer, seeking to stay connected to the world around me in spite of a dance I have with social phobia.