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.
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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