When Sonia thinks back on all the doctors who examined her as she was growing up, she sees a recurring image: a man looking down and scrunching his eyebrows. None of them could say exactly what was wrong, except to observe the obvious, that she had problems with coordination and learning. Medical bewilderment can bring out the worst in professionals who rely on neat diagnoses. When Sonia was two, a baffled doctor turned to her mother and said: "She's just a clumsy, badly put-together baby."
Most likely, Sonia's disabilities originated at her birth, in 1975. Stuck in the posterior position during a dangerously protracted labour, amid chaos on the ward, no anaesthetist could be found. Finally, without painkillers, forceps were inserted and, through her mother's tearing agony, Sonia was gripped by the head, rotated and extracted. The umbilical cord ripped. She came out floppy and glycaemic, her blood sugar low. Over the next 24 hours, she twice turned blue.
Yet it is further down the developmental line that families look back for the causes of problems that fully manifest themselves only psychologically or socially. While still a baby, a programme of physiotherapy tackled some of Sonia's coordination difficulties, offering the hope that her condition might simply be physical. It was at school that other children, particularly the girls, began to set her apart mentally. They told her that she was thick, or handicapped, or a "spastic".
And it wasn't just the children. When she couldn't do things properly, or froze in panic, teachers would sometimes shout at her, she says, "till I shook in my shoes".
At secondary school the bullying got worse and she developed an alternative, imaginary life. She would tell other girls about famous friends she had, trendy clubs she went to, members of pop bands who kissed her when she went to their gigs. The wilder the stories, the crueller the mockery. Once, crying to her mum, she said: "I feel like I'm an island and you're out in the mist, and I can't reach you."
The course of Sonia's difficulties took a turn for the worse when she was 14, after what her mother describes as some kind of neurological "event". She was standing in assembly when she found herself shuffling around uncontrollably, stricken with dizziness, and was sent out for creating a disturbance. "It was like a shot had gone through my whole body; it took my breath away," she says. Thereafter, she found it difficult to move in open spaces, through doorways, or across bridges.
Sonia's experience of adult life has been one of not quite finding a place: reliant on family, caught in a social, employment, therapeutic and diagnostic limbo. This is the realm of most people living under the nebulous category of "learning disability". They are told that maybe it's neurological, maybe developmental, perhaps genetic, or possibly the result of trauma. Generally, other people aren't quite sure who they are.
Sonia's mother found that the simplest way to explain her daughter's eccentricities to the unsympathetic was to say that she was "mildly autistic". During the 1990s, the idea of autism had become publicly understood and even - in the case of high-functioning Asperger cases - respected. And Sonia does display some characteristics that would feature on the autistic spectrum. She has rigid routines by which she has to dress, leave her flat, catch a bus; if these are broken she can panic, or fly into a fit. She also has a slight trace of what autism specialists call "mind-blindness" - a difficulty conceiving what other people might be thinking.
Yet she also has talents that would contradict any reading of Asperger's. She is bad at technical thinking, but good at expressive language. Where she is "high-functioning", it is in the distinctly non-autistic area of emotional articulation and imaginative storytelling. Last year, despite her mother's anxiety that she might be risking too much, she began to work on a play built around poems she had written describing what she calls "the journey from childhood till now". When she put on the 20-minute, one-woman show, in a small theatre on an Edinburgh housing estate, members of the audience cried. She later got a venue on the Edinburgh fringe, and the Scotsman reviewed her play. The paper gave it three stars.
Sonia says she was more afraid of forgetting her lines, or getting agoraphobic in an open space, than of what people might think of her. "Of course I was scared of performing in front of other people. I didn't want them to pity me. I've had a bad life, but I've lived through it, and that's what I wanted to show. I feel quite proud of taking this on. It hasn't changed my life or anything. It was like a chapter. Maybe I could do another chapter."
· Names and details have been changed.
