“I am different, not less” – Temple Grandin

For Pia Bradshaw, society and its rules has always proved a mysterious place.  As a child she struggled to make friends. Frustrated by conformity and convention, she was labelled a problem child and relentlessly bullied.

“I remember people always questioning why I wasn’t like all the other little girls.”

She certainly followed her own beat; at lunchtime, she would run 12km for the school cross-country club while singing Aladdin songs; her own company made far more sense than the confusing social rules of the world around her.

“Honestly, I thought I was pretty normal and that it was everyone else that was weird, illogical or irrational.”

 

Julianne Higgins knows this feeling of being profoundly out of step with the world. From the age of three, she felt different, she says. Raised in suburban Melbourne, she always felt like a misfit – unable, like Bradshaw, to decipher the social rules and conventions. She was made to feel stupid, blank. Like Bradshaw, she turned inwards to her own passions: nature, history, psychology, painting, philosophy, dance; physical expression provided freedom that words couldn’t, as she captures in a 1996 poem: “feel that gap between/Footfall and the ground/and remain quivering/In the dance.”

The world continued to prove profoundly difficult to navigate as an adult. She would experience bullying, isolation and abuse, including domestic violence as a young married woman.

Despite their challenges, both Higgins and Bradshaw would go on to lead rich, fruitful lives. Bradshaw has forged a stellar academic career and is currently completing a PhD. Higgins, now 71, has taught for over 25 years, including in Singapore, and has notched up several lifetimes of travel.

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