Okay, you better strap yourself in for this one, because I’ve got one hell of a story for you! And for this one, we’re going to need to go all the way back to the 90s, when yours truly was but a mere child. You might be thinking that this unnatural attraction for weird and unusual stories I’ve been experiencing has at least had the common decency to start after I was already mature enough to appreciate them, but nope – I’ve been in the middle of these kinds of shenanigans ever since I could remember. Now, when this story happened, I was about 8 or 9 years old, so my memories are a bit vague, so excuse me if I can’t quite remember something that happened at the time, or if I’m losing some detail that makes the story make a bit more sense. So let’s not waste any more time and get right into it!
The thing is, I don’t really consider myself to have been a weird kid. I was a bit quiet, especially when compared to my friends, I didn’t cry or laugh a whole lot, and I was often awkward around other people, but that was 90% because I was a little bit shy. I really opened up socially when I became a teen and started going to parties, where I basically went “Holy shit, talking to other people is AWESOME!” But as a little one living in Leicester, I was pretty introverted. My best friend in the whole world was Mark, who was a bit more outgoing than me (it comes with the territory, as he played a whole ton of sports while I preferred videogames), but we also shared a bunch of interests. The two of us were basically inseparable. And then there’s Lexi – her full name was Alexis, but she hated being called that, so we all just called her Lexi. During a time when boys and girls find each other so utterly icky, Lexi was the only girl cool enough to deserve to hang out with me and Mark. She liked comic books, she was great at games, she was just the biggest tomboy you could imagine. Honestly, if it wasn’t for her long hair, you probably wouldn’t have even been able to guess she was a girl.
It was always the three of us – Liam, Mark and Lexi. Wherever one went, we all went. And most interestingly, Lexi’s father was a photographer (as in, the professional type that actually went to take pictures and then sell them professionally), so I’ve actually got a whole ton of our pictures together. It was good fun! So at this point, you might be saying to yourself “This guy just spent 500 words talking about his friends, and he hasn’t even gotten to the story yet!” And yeah, that’s true, but I needed the set-up. Let’s fast-forward a couple of years, to the early 2000s. I’m in high school, Mark is no longer around, and my relationship with Lexi isn’t quite what it used to be (we kind of went in different directions in life after this and joined different crowds that weren’t really compatible with each other). One afternoon, I was returning from school when I saw a brand new billboard on the street. It was one of those PSA ads that are meant to warn people against childhood obesity, or racism, or cancer or something like that, kind of like this hilariously misguided one. The billboard I saw was about autism, featuring three cute, little kids – two of which were grinning widely while the third was sitting there awkwardly, with the caption above their heads stating something along the lines of “It’s easy to spot the symptoms of an autistic child if you know how to look” – I don’t recall the exact wording, but that was basically the meaning behind it.
And yes, you guessed it – the children were me, Mark and Lexi, and guess who was supposed to be the autistic child?
Now, a few things. First of all, I’m not autistic – no disrespect to the people who are, I don’t consider it an insult, I’m simply not on the spectrum, it’s a fact. Second of all, neither I nor my family were ever informed that my picture would be used at all, let alone in this manner. If we had known, I’m pretty sure my parents would’ve never allowed the town to associate me with “the autistic kid from the billboard”. So, how did this happen? I’ve got nothing but conjecture and speculation, but like I mentioned earlier, Lexi’s dad was a photographer. My best guess is that he uploaded some of our childhood photos (which, keep in mind, were taken with a rather professional camera – they could easily be of a high enough resolution for a billboard despite being taken half a decade ago) to one of those stock photo sites that were popping up around that time. The company seeking to do the ads liked it, bought it and then used it, and us models weren’t even told about it. Ah well! I guess I got lucky – not a soul in Leicester recognized my face, so nobody asked why the hell I was, quite literally, the poster boy for autism when I didn’t even have the condition. So remember – no matter how bad you had it as a kid, at least a marketing company didn’t decide to call you autistic just because you looked shy in one photo!