I talk about my experience with getting proof of my existence through identity and how my Autism played into it.

1. February 3,
2020
Me and Identity
theweeklyrambler.com/me-and-identity/
Welcome to my new “Me and…” series where I talk about my experiences on a vast and
wide range of topics, which will be a new series to liven up my Lifestyle blogs as I feel
they are quite lacking. I mostly plan on doing it for entertainment and just something for
people to read, but maybe people can also be helped by it in some way, perhaps some of
my experiences can also enable people to feel they aren’t also alone in certain things.
First of all, we are going to be talking about identity. That’s right, we all have numerous
documents, pieces of plastic cards and various numbers that give us an identity and
prove that we exist. Somehow without them we apparently don’t exist as far as authority
and government is concerned and it is very difficult to do much with your life.
One of the most common pieces of identity is the Driver’s License, either as a Provisional
or a full Driver’s License. You can use it to pretty much instantly prove who you are in
many countries; this is especially the case in the United Kingdom and the USA.
But getting to that point can be hard if you start late like I did. For example, to open up a
bank account, many banks require extensive identity to be able to prove who you are,
easier said than done with a Driver’s License or if you are under 18 and only require a
simple piece of identification. But when it came to me finally wanting to open up a bank
account, I was 21-years-old.
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2. In this case I needed two solid pieces of identification since I didn’t have a Driver’s
License. A birth certificate doesn’t cut it annoyingly. And since I never had my name put
to any bills or had never had a job, all due to my Autism holding me back, I had almost
no way to prove who I was, this went on for almost a year as my sister attempted to find
a way for me to exist.
I found it all very annoying and depressing. Getting a Provisional itself required poof of
identity. Again, a birth certificate by itself wasn’t enough and we had to scramble to
finally find a payment of benefits that finally had my name on it along with other
identifying information such as my national insurance number. The next big problem
though is that I needed a photo that was countersigned by someone saying they knew I
existed.
Que the point where I have no friends and pretty much nobody I know. My sister and
family were unable to sign it as it has to instead be someone I knew outside of the family.
It was all very frustrating, but in the end my sister’s boss countersigned it, luckily. We
FINALLY sent off all that information and thankfully it was accepted and I got my
provisional.
Only to find out that the bank I wanted and all my family uses didn’t accept me anyway
because I didn’t meet their terms and conditions. Excellent! But I didn’t care anyway as
now I have my provisional I can one day learn how to drive and I have proper identity for
everything else. Also, I opened up a bank account with another bank who required far
less identification, honestly, I could have just gone with them originally and they would
have straight up accepted me, most likely without needing the information we had to
scramble for.
Anyway, that was my battle with identity and opening up a bank account. All a big
bureaucratic hassle. I can now look forward to learning to drive and being able to do
what I want with my identity and no longer feel like a ghost.
Do yourself a favour and get your identity sorted before progressing past the age of 18, it
is so much easier. I wonder if any other people with Autism could potentially identify
with this? (see what I did there). But I think many of us can have this problem as often we
don’t progress through life as fast or as stable as the usual person does, although again,
not the case for each and every person with Autism or some other learning disability, but
I do think it can affect us proportionally more.
Wow! What to do next? Animals? Geography? Fruits? Pretty much anything can fit into
this series. It doesn’t always have to be serious!
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