Matthew

Not always true

When I was in primary school in my family’s home country there was a subject called verbal reasoning. You’re given a statement and you have to choose out of three options: always true; sometimes true but not always true or never true at all. There was a statement that said “everyone is born”. The other students said “always true” – which made sense. I was the only one that chose B: sometimes true but not always true. The teacher did not understand why I would do that.

I said “some people are born but some people are brought out. Some people are born in the natural sense, and some people aren’t born in the natural sense.” He got my mother to come to school, and my mother explained that I was born by Caesarian section. I think the teacher was puzzled but he was open-minded enough not to shut me up, which was a good thing on his part, I believe.

I was born in Birmingham. I think I was four when we left the UK and moved back to my family’s home country. It’s in Africa. For my family’s sake I’m not telling you the name.

My personality’s never really changed that much – always very opinionated, quite bookish, wanting to read a lot, wanting to say what I think even if others might have different opinions – that’s always been the case from a very young age. But also quite introverted, not too many friends. Lots of study, and lots of church as well, because my parents are Christians. From a very young age my parents gave me access to their library, so I could read a lot and form my own opinions. They gave me a lot of intellectual freedom, to think the way I wanted to think. When you are a young child in my family’s home country, that’s not the norm. Well, that’s not the norm for the majority – so, going to the local school, it made the teacher … not quite concerned, but – intrigued. And because of my intention of always putting my point across, teachers always wanted my parents to come into school, just for them to have things explained to them.

During secondary school I was at boarding school and I got bullied a lot – bullied quite badly, so I really didn’t have the time to face my studies. I spent most of my time trying to actually survive. In the country my family’s from, corporal punishment is the norm. As a junior in boarding school I got caned quite regularly by my seniors. And when I became a senior, because I was quite small, and most of my juniors were much bigger than I was, they kind of roughed me up as well.

After school I went straight to a local computer college. I wasn’t good at sports but I could run. My interactions were still limited to things I did by myself. Reading, and the computing work I did, and running.

At boarding school I had failed most of my papers. So after spending a year or two years just learning how to use computers my parents thought it might be best if I came back and tried my luck here, with respect to building a life.

Work and study. It was really that simple. And I ran a lot, as well. When I started working, one of the first things bought myself was a good pair of trainers. It’s something I enjoy. I really enjoy it. And it’s freedom as well. I ran to UCL every day. It was fun.

I don’t think my friends at university knew too much about me. When I speak to them now they tell me they thought I came from a rich family, that I had come to study at UCL because my parents had lots of money. None of them knew that I lived in a council flat in the East End of London. It never came up and it wasn’t an issue. Do I tend to not connect with people emotionally? The answer is, yes, I do, but in a way I try to avoid it if I can. Unless it is excruciatingly necessary.

I was older than most of the other students, but UCL was hard, academically. It was highly competitive as well. Although it was hard, it was great fun. And there’s this thing I call ‘having a tree’: a plan with many routes and options moving in time. I always have a plan for every five years of my life before it happens, so one of my plans was coming to fruition. So that was brilliant. When I started work after UCL, one of the first things I did was to start to learn Japanese. My intention was to move on to Cantonese and Mandarin, then – possibly – move to China or Japan at some point of my career. Eventually I also wanted to learn Spanish because of its usefulness in some parts of America, and South America as well. So I always had things I did to move my plans along.

As an introvert, you’re always looking at detail. You’re not just seeing the overall structure but also the granularity of things – the little subtexts, the little sub-details in things. Take animé films. There’s a similarity between animation and programming, which used to be my job, because they are both static elements that have dynamism at the very end of them. A lot of people go to watch a film and, well, “it wasn’t interesting”, they will say. I believe if you watch closely there’s a lot more going on besides the actual story itself.

As a human being, it’s difficult. We feel that we’re very conscious of the things that we do – but the level of self-consciousness and self-awareness that we have is actually quite thin. You know, the things we do without actually thinking about them account for probably seventy per cent of what goes on in the brain. Your reaction to someone else’s misfortune? You can never actually tell, unless you’ve been there.

As humans, we’re concerned about our emotions and the emotions that other people have about us. And we sometimes fail to look at other people’s experiences and what they might add to their emotions; we just concern ourselves with the emotions we get from other people. We carry a lot of emotional baggage and preconceptions with us, formed from various things that we might be conscious of or not conscious of, and they stem from very little things. And that often forms opinion. And that goes back to the granular detail of people’s lives.

I think I’ve had this perspective from a very young age but it’s become more pertinent now, since my brain injury – because now I’m a lot more in touch with the way I feel about myself. Before my head injury I dismissed the way I felt, or I did not pay too much attention to it. I had ways of dealing with life: I had my job, and I had the things I wanted to do. But now I have a lot more time to pay attention to it.