Dan Foster, a successful photographer with a university degree and autism, tells us about his early life and the effect autism had on his life experience as a young child.
Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to my first write up. Over the course of time, I hope to give you more of an insight into my life with Autism and how it has shaped and evolved me into the person I am today. Starters for ten. My name is Dan Foster, and I just turned 27 years old in September 2024.
Autism is something of which I was first diagnosed with during my time at primary school. It was often overlooked and was a long, and at times, painful process in waiting for the ‘official diagnosis’ often portraying me to be ‘the person who is misbehaving in order to fit in / get attention.’
To take you right back to the start, I was born on September 7th 1997, at Kettering general hospital. I forget the time but I think it was something like 4.25am. I lived with my birth family, and In all honesty from what I’ve been told, the family in question were on low income and not the best of people and they could not look after me properly. They could not provide basic necessities from what I am told. I remember watching a video one time and you can hear them saying “He loves his food”, but I think that it was not the correct types of food as I honestly resembled Bruce from ‘Matilda’ in the footage and I was eating a great big chocolate cake!
I was adopted at a young age I think I was aged 2, and it was all unusual and somewhat scary moving in with these strangers who I had never met before in my life. When you are young it is all scary well, it is at any age in all honesty, but it is weird and somewhat sad that I have no contact with my birth family nowadays, they do not even send birthday cards anymore. but to be honest, in some aspects, I guess it’s nice to forget about them as it’s quite sad in a way. This is one of the reasons I had my Facebook name set to Daniel 🙂🙂 for quite some time and only about a year ago I put it as Dan Foster (the surname of my adoptive parents). I must admit having the surname ‘Foster’ is not easy at times, especially being adopted it meant lots of teasing and some people found it Hilarious that I was adopted. I used to get into fights when people would say horrible things like ‘you’re so unwanted your parents put you up for adoption.’
At Nursery I was often the quiet one who would sit and play with toy trains in the corner and make loud noises. I still do make noises to be honest, and that is part of my autism, certain sounds and sayings trigger me and make me laugh. For example, a whistle reminds me of the circus and makes me happy or someone whistling a tune makes me laugh. 😂👌🏻👌🏻 Then there are phrases and sayings like ‘Put that bloody phone down now!’ or ‘Polly Pocket’ etc. that make me burst out laughing.
Primary school was really tricky, and I even got a week’s exclusion – the teachers were awful and could not understand me. They saw me as different and abnormal with severe behavioural issues and I spent more time in the headmaster’s office than I did in class. I was never naughty as such, I guess I was different I won’t deny it, I had my moments. I can remember getting told off for wetting paper towels and throwing them up at the ceiling and I used to have a thing about slamming doors. I still do to be honest, again I do not mean it to cause damage and disruption it’s just me.
At Secondary school I remember I used to struggle with getting changed, as my mum used to lay my clothes out for me in the mornings. P.E. I used to dread, more so in recent years, as the weight piled on which I shall discuss later on. It was a Monday morning, if I was to guess it was probably 2004 or something, and I still remember it was a teacher called, well I had better not mention her name here! She refused to help me get changed, which was stupid as I was young and she used to say things like ‘I’m not your mum, do it yourself.’ I remember getting really angry I actually stomped on her toe and started punching the wall. I got in deep shit for it and was excluded for a week. My parents were angry at the school and understood why I did it, but I then had support in school to help me control my anger, I was often bullied and taken the piss out of, and that’s where the food came in. I found a love and passion for eating and I developed emotional eating disorder, so God knows how many calories I would consume in a day, but I can tell you it was too many. It got to the point where the head teacher actually got my parents in and sat them down and said, ‘What are you feeding your son? I am concerned about his weight.’ And I can remember being totally mortified and I just wanted to die, I felt so bad. It gets worse, I remember I would then be refused school dinners so I would bring packed lunch and people used to hide my lunch box so I could not eat. 😭
You can follow Dan on Instagram @fozzy_vlogs07